Tommy’s Margarita

Wayfinder

The Tommy’s Margarita was born at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, where Julio Bermejo, working his family’s floor from the early 1990s, made two changes to the house margarita that became modern doctrine: out went the triple sec, in came agave syrup, and the well tequila became 100 per cent agave or nothing. The result carries his family’s restaurant name into every serious bar on earth. The logic is like-with-like. Orange liqueur, the classic margarita’s sweetener, brings its own flavour to the party; agave syrup brings only sweetness with the plant’s own accent, which lets the tequila stand at the front of its own drink. Three ingredients, and the spirit finally audible: the Tommy’s is less a variation than an argument about what a margarita is for. It is also the drink that taught a generation to read tequila labels. Bermejo evangelised 100 per cent agave bottlings from behind his bar decades before the category boomed, and the Tommy’s remains the fastest way to taste why the words on the label matter.

ShakenClassicSpirit-Forward

Glassware: Rocks Glass

Garnish: Lime Wheel and Salt Rim optional

Ingredients

Serves

Blanco Tequila

60ml

The reason the drink exists: 100 per cent agave blanco with pepper and green character, finally audible in its own margarita. Mixto returns the drink to the anonymity it was invented against.

Fresh Lime Juice

30ml

The sour frame, at full margarita strength and fresh or nothing. Thirty millilitres against sixty of tequila is the classic sour ratio, and there is no orange liqueur here to soften a bottled substitute.

Agave Syrup

30ml

The Bermejo substitution: sweetness from the tequila’s own plant, with no orange liqueur editorialising over the spirit. Diluted one to one so it pours clean.

Instructions

Add the tequila, lime juice and agave syrup to a shaker with ice.

Shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds.

Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice, salt rim optional.

Garnish with the lime wheel.

Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.

Expert Tip

The tequila is the recipe: 100 per cent agave blanco, with real pepper and green-vegetal character. This drink was invented to make that sentence necessary, and mixto tequila, the cheaper blend that need only be 51 per cent agave, returns the margarita to the anonymity Bermejo rescued it from. Dilute the agave syrup one to one with water before you use it. Neat agave nectar is thick and slow to integrate, and it will sit at the bottom of the shaker while everything else gets cold around it. Salt is optional and the house default is without. The drink is dry enough not to need the correction, and a half rim is the sensible compromise if you want the contrast available sip by sip.

Flavour Profile

AgaveLimeCleanBright

The Origin

Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant opened in San Francisco’s Richmond district in 1965, and the son of the house, Julio Bermejo, took over the bar in the early 1990s with a mission: real tequila, treated with the respect single malt got. His margarita dropped the triple sec for agave syrup and insisted on 100 per cent agave spirit, and the spec travelled bartender to bartender until the IBA itself listed it. Few drinks this simple have one address so firmly on the label.

Why No Triple Sec

The classic margarita is a sour sweetened by orange liqueur, and the orange has opinions: it perfumes and pads the tequila in equal measure. Agave syrup sweetens without editorialising, and the drink dries out and clarifies around the spirit. Set the two margaritas side by side and the difference is a lesson in what sweeteners actually do.

Tequila Selection

This is the drink that reads the label out loud: a 100 per cent agave blanco with genuine pepper and green-vegetal character is the entire point, and mixto tequila, the cheaper blend the drink was invented against, returns the margarita to the anonymity Bermejo rescued it from. A characterful reposado makes a rounder, oakier reading worth trying second.

How to Serve It

Over fresh ice in a rocks glass, salt at the drinker’s discretion: Bermejo serves it without unless asked, and the drink is dry enough not to need it. It batches cleanly for a crowd, the syrup pre-diluted, and it remains the fastest way to find out whether a bottle of tequila was worth its price.

The Agave Syrup Argument

Sweetener choice is usually treated as a minor decision, and this drink is the clearest demonstration that it is not.

Orange liqueur does two things in a classic margarita: it sweetens, and it adds orange. The second part is not neutral. Orange perfume sits over the tequila and pads it, which is flattering to a mediocre spirit and obstructive to a good one.

Agave syrup sweetens and adds almost nothing else, beyond a faint vegetal note that comes from the same plant as the tequila. The drink dries out and clarifies around the spirit, and what you taste is the bottle you actually bought.

Set the two margaritas side by side once. It is the most useful ten minutes available on the subject of what sweeteners really do.

Reading the Label

Tequila labelled 100 per cent agave is made entirely from the blue agave plant. Everything else, sold as mixto though the word rarely appears on the bottle, need only be 51 per cent agave, with the balance made up from other sugars.

The difference is audible in a drink this simple. Mixto is thinner, sweeter and carries a characteristic hot finish, and the pepper and green vegetal notes the Tommy's is built to show are largely absent from it.

Bermejo evangelised the distinction from behind his bar for decades before the category boomed, and this drink remains the fastest way to taste why the words on the label matter.

The Spirit

Tequila

Read the label before the price. Tequila only has to be 51% agave sugars, and no bottle is ever labelled mixto, so the words 100% agave are the only thing separating a spirit made from the plant from one made half from cane or corn.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes a Tommy’s Margarita different?

No orange liqueur. Agave syrup does the sweetening instead, and the tequila must be 100 per cent agave. The result is drier, cleaner and considerably more spirit-forward than the classic, because nothing is sitting over the tequila and padding it.

Who invented it?

Julio Bermejo at his family’s Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, in the early 1990s, as part of his campaign for real agave tequila. The spec now appears on bar lists worldwide under the restaurant’s name.

Does it take a salt rim?

Optional, and the house default at Tommy's is without, because the drink's dryness does not need the correction. Half-rim it if you want the contrast available sip by sip, as with the Paloma, and skip it entirely if the tequila is worth tasting clean.

Master the Techniques

Garnishing Like a Pro: The Complete Guide to Cocktail Presentation

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Margarita

The Margarita is the most ordered cocktail in the United States, and that status has done to it what it did to the Mojito: margarita mix, bottled lime and the frozen resort serve have created a whole category of drink that carries the name without the substance. Made properly it is three ingredients: blanco tequila, fresh lime juice and orange liqueur, shaken cold with a salt rim. That is a sour at its most direct, and in a build this bare the quality of everything is immediately apparent. There is nowhere to hide a neutral tequila, a bottled lime or a cheap triple sec. The choice that matters most is not up versus rocks, which is a matter of preference. It is blanco versus reposado. Blanco is cleaner and more agave-forward and the lime meets the tequila directly; reposado is rounder, its oak putting vanilla and caramel against the lime in a different register. Both are correct, and blanco is the more coherent with fresh lime.

Spicy Margarita

The Spicy Margarita is the twenty-first century’s favourite margarita and a rare modern standard with no inventor to credit. Chilli-spiked tequila drinks are as old as Mexico, and the muddled-jalapeño margarita simply condensed out of the 2000s agave boom until every bar had a version. By the 2020s it was among the most ordered cocktails on earth. The build is a Tommy’s Margarita with the heat folded in: fresh jalapeño muddled into the shake, agave syrup smoothing the burn, lime holding the frame. Capsaicin and agave are natural partners, the pepper’s green vegetal side speaking the tequila’s own language, and the drink reads bright first and warm second. The dial is yours: seeds out for warmth, seeds in for fire, or the bottle-infusion route for a party’s worth of consistency. However it arrives, the chilli margarita is that rarest thing, a fashion that genuinely improved the classic it borrowed from.

Paloma

The Paloma is Mexico’s most popular cocktail by volume, considerably outselling the Margarita in the country that produces the tequila both are built on. Outside Mexico its profile is lower, partly because the defining grapefruit soda is less universally available than lime and triple sec. The name means dove, and the origin is most often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, though the precise date and the accuracy of that attribution are not clearly established anywhere. What is established is that tequila and grapefruit have been a fixture of Mexican drinking long enough to become the country’s default tequila serve, which is a more meaningful endorsement than any bar guide. The salt rim is the element most often omitted by versions that miss what the drink is doing. Salt suppresses bitterness, which makes it a structural decision rather than a flavouring one.