|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
RESTAURATEUR MARIANO MARTINEZ INVENTED THE FROZEN-MARGARITA MACHINE THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS MONTH. !SALUD!
THIRTY YEARS AGO THIS MONTH--ON MAY 11, 1971, TO be exact--Dallas restaurateur Mariano Martinez, Jr., opened the spigot of a converted soft-serve ice cream machine and filled a glass with a history-making pale green slush--the world's first mass-produced frozen margarita. Do not misunderstand: The beverage that emerged from the device was not the first frozen margarita ever; the drink had been around since the blender was introduced in the late thirties. No, this naughty cocktail was much more important. This was the party in a tank that fueled the disco era in Texas, jump-started the national Mexican food craze, and raised the status of tequila from a pariah to a prince among alcoholic beverages. Three decades later the stainless-steel appliance that launched a zillion hangovers sits just inside the front door of Mariano's Mexican Cuisine on Greenville Avenue in North Dallas. It may have all the glamour of an iced-tea dispenser, but this is the machine that created the national drink of Texas.
It is hard to imagine today, but in the late fifties, when Martinez was a teenager waiting tables at El Charro, his father's Mexican restaurant in Dallas, tequila was unknown to most people in the United States and considered weird by the rest. Flipping through a scrapbook recently in his home office in the city's affluent Lakewood neighborhood, Martinez remembers those long-ago days:...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
