The frozen margarita was invented in Dallas. The machine that made it is in the Smithsonian, sitting next to Julia Child’s kitchen and the first Tupperware. And somehow, fifty-five years later, this is still not the first thing Dallas tells people about itself.
May 11, 1971. Mariano Martinez, 25 years old, four days into running his first restaurant near SMU, had a bartender threatening to quit and 200 margarita orders a night coming into a kitchen with one blender. The drinks were inconsistent, sometimes warm, never the same twice. He stopped at a 7-Eleven, watched a kid drink a Slurpee — itself a Dallas invention — and understood immediately what he needed to do. He found a secondhand soft-serve ice cream machine, spent weeks tinkering with his father’s recipe until the sugar content produced a uniform slush, moved the machine to the bar, and pulled the lever. It worked the first time and every time after that.
He never patented it. Within a few years, versions of the machine spread to bars in 46 countries. By the end of the decade, the margarita had surpassed the martini as America’s most popular cocktail. Martinez donated the original machine to the Smithsonian in 2005. Bob Hope had already done the math: “I won’t say how big the glass was,” he joked after ordering one at Mariano’s in the ’70s, “but it had a diving board on it.”
The machine is in Washington. The margaritas are still in Dallas. Here’s where to get one…