After all, it was during the 1990s that the illustrious Julio Bermejo took over the bar program at his family’s Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, where he conceived of the Tommy’s Margarita. Of course, not all Margaritas fell victim to the sickly mediocrity that the Skinny Margarita emerged in response to. “My first job ever, actually, was working at an Acapulco restaurant, and we used to have Margarita Mondays,” she recalls. Long before Karla Flores-Mercado opened Bar Flores, a vibrant cocktail bar in Los Angeles’ Echo Park beloved for its house Margarita, she served the cocktail at a chain restaurant, a breed of establishment that was instrumental in accelerating the sweet Margarita’s ascent. Expelled through frozen machines and soda guns, the version ubiquitous during this time was a cloying slurry, loaded with viscous sour mix and served in a goblet. In the aughts, when the Skinny took off, the Margarita wasn’t in its proudest phase. Since then-as restaurateurs have devised ingenious ways to freeze the blend, new spirits have entered the market and taste preferences have emerged -the malleable Margarita has undergone numerous transformations.
When the south-of-the-border cocktail embedded itself in American culture in the mid-1900s, it essentially was a Skinny Margarita: a harmonious blend of tequila, lime and orange liqueur. While classic cocktails have been known to shape-shift with the times, few have so conspicuously and frequently as America’s favorite drink. Whether Frankel was the first person to conceive of a lower-sugar Margarita is ultimately irrelevant-its advent was inevitable. “Even as notions of dieting and the surrounding rhetoric have aged, the drink persists. And yet, even as notions of dieting and the surrounding rhetoric have aged, the drink persists. It is a drink that embodies “guilt-free” indulgence, and has inspired sexist ire unmatched by any other cocktail only the vodka-soda may come close. Only someone woefully vain and shallow, an uncharitable line of thought might go, would order such a cocktail. Whereas a “light” or “lean” Margarita could indicate a simple taste preference, “skinny” evokes visceral memories of the noxious diet culture that has targeted women for decades. But the broader resentment arguably stems from its loaded name. Some of the disapproval is based on principle many craft bartenders, for instance, find the drink to be off-kilter and annoying. While it’s not uncommon for a popular ersatz cocktail to elicit mockery, f ew are as divisive as the ungovernable reduced-calorie Margarita. Favre, not a fan of the cocktail, isn’t so forgiving: “The Skinny Margarita is a misnomer and an unbalanced drink.” “The name, I always thought to be silly,” says Amy Breen, who was bartending in Nashville in the early 2010s. Even if someone has never dragged their forefinger down a chain restaurant’s drinks menu and landed on the Skinny Margarita, they likely feel some sort of way about the cocktail. In place of Cointreau or triple sec, some recipes use fresh orange juice to impart a similar flavor bleaker riffs rely on Splenda simple syrup for sweetness. But across personal blogs and sprawling recipe hubs, where riffs on the Skinny Margarita abound, the formula gets increasingly convoluted. While all bartenders have their own way of preparing the cocktail, the typical move is to follow their specs for a classic Margarita and either decrease or omit the sweetener, such as simple syrup or agave nectar, or the orange liqueur.
So began the astronomical rise of the Skinny Margarita, a drink that wedged itself so resolutely into pop culture that it has attained call-drink status. And while the Skinny Margarita reigned supreme, no drink was immune to Frankel’s influence: By 2013, more than a third of chain restaurants with liquor licenses had “skinny” cocktails on their menu. “You started hearing it at the bar all of a sudden,” recalls Leanne Favre, the bar manager at Leyenda in Brooklyn, who in the early 2010s was working at the since-shuttered agave bar Mayahuel. Meanwhile, Frankel’s savvy concept had infiltrated nearly every genre of food and drink establishment, where customers began placing what would’ve been an inscrutable order just a few years earlier.
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