Problem solved.Ī post shared by La Hacienda Ranch frozen margarita machine made Mariano famous, but the fact that he managed to get the restaurant off the ground was a small miracle in itself. He ended up buying a used soft-serve machine and tinkering around until it poured big batches of his father’s frozen cocktail recipe. What if he could use a Slurpee machine for his margaritas? “I feel like the idea came from God,” Mariano tells me. Mariano was desperate to find a solution.Ĭut to a quick stop at the 7-Eleven (another homegrown Dallas invention, by the way), where Mariano spotted a kid pulling a frozen drink from the Slurpee machine-the moment of inspiration. A customer complained about the inconsistent cocktails. The bartender’s hands were cramping from squeezing lime after lime. Here’s where the myth comes in: During a crushing service, the bartender couldn’t keep up with the frozen margarita orders. He remembers, “They’d say, Mariano, we just got off of a jet airplane from Alcapulco and we're coming to get some real Mexican food and some real margaritas.” Some customers started to believe Mariano’s was more Mexican than actual Mexican food. Instead, they marketed their food as “Spanish” or “Sonora-style.” But with his restaurant, Martinez embraced it. According to Texas food historian Robb Walsh’s The Tex Mex Cookbook, the term didn’t appear until the 1970s.Īs Mariano tells it, many American restaurateurs wanted to distance themselves from the Mexican label altogether, projecting onto it a negative connotation. Mariano’s was serving top-notch Tex-Mex staples before the term “Tex-Mex” really existed. And I bought a certain kind of beef, 80 percent lean and 20 percent fat, with a special grind for chili.” For example, the cheese-instead of just buying whatever cheese was the cheapest, I would buy Wisconsin cheddar in 40-pound blocks that had to be aged from 30 to 90 days. “I established a higher quality of everything. Instead of catering to Anglo tastes, Mariano doubled down on his family’s recipes-like sopa de albóndigas, carne asada tampiqueña, and enchiladas suizas-but adding his own special twist. Mariano explains, “I’m the fourth generation in my family to be in the Mexican restaurant business, and back in my parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ day, they had to serve spaghetti and meatballs and fried chicken and chicken fried steak to survive.” “Potent but polite,” in Mariano’s words, and I have to agree. It’s icy cold, the perfect balance of tart and barely sweet, and the tequila is present but not aggressively so. My machine-poured margarita is served in a tall, slender cocktail glass. While we wait for our table, we order a round of margaritas and I notice the hat-tips to Martinez’s invention-a golden margarita statue, plaques sharing the mythology: “The World’s First Frozen Margarita…” Beaming customers stop to take pictures alongside. It’s spaghetti Western elegant, or as Google describes it, “caballero-chic.” Front and center is the horseshoe bar and the prized frozen margarita machines. The interior looks like a cavernous hunting lodge with log walls, wagon wheel chandeliers, and a small ecosystem of taxidermied animals mounted in the dining room. Like the pick-up trucks and the ten-gallon hats, the sheer size reminds you you’re in Texas. The Dallas location, now called Mariano’s Hacienda Ranch, has since moved to nearby Northeast Dallas and is one of five locations. On a sweltering Texas evening on the cusp of August, I visit Mariano’s restaurant. With time, the restaurant would become a Dallas institution-the invention of the frozen margarita machine only added to the legend. As Mariano explains on a recent phone call, people would order a “setup,” like Coke over ice with a lime, and pour their liquor of choice-usually whiskey or rum-into the mix. Prior to that, it was a “brown bag state,” meaning customers could bring a bottle of alcohol to a restaurant as long as they kept it in the bag, off the table. It was 1971-the same year that a coffeehouse called Starbucks opened its doors in Seattle and just a year after Texas passed a constitutional amendment making liquor by the drink legal. The floor was covered with inexpensive shag carpeting, and at the end of service, employees used yard rakes to clean up fallen tortilla chips. Sorority sisters wearing skirts and gaucho hats worked as greeters. Inside, Mexican music piped through the dining room and blue lighting simulated moonlight. Then called Mariano’s Mexican Cuisine, the original was located in Dallas’ Old Town shopping center, a 5-minute ride from Southern Methodist University. From the outset, Mariano Martinez’s restaurant, the place that put frozen margaritas on the map, was an experience.
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