The Uniquely Texas Invention of the Frozen Margarita (July 28, 2026)

by Scott Sosebee

My wife and I took the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to take in a baseball game in Arlington and enjoy some of the fine summertime activities the Dallas-Fort Worth area allows. I noticed that there was a location of the area Tex-Mex food chain Mariano’s in Arlington and, having eaten at the original outlet of the establishment in East Dallas many years ago, we decided that we had to make a stop. While there I was reminded that Mariano’s Tex-Mex has a unique place in American culinary history as the “inventor” of the frozen margarita. Who doesn’t love a frozen margarita? It’s a great compliment to the distinctive Texas form of Mexican cuisine that is known as Tex-Mex, that impeccable combination of Native American, Spanish, and northern Mexican foods that came together to create a distinctly different cuisine. It’s not fully Mexican—don’t make that mistake—it’s Tex-Mex, which has at its core yellow cheese (not Mexican crema), cumin and chili powder which form the essential element of its sauce on things like enchiladas, beef, and corn tortillas (although after it fully crossed the border flour tortillas became a co-partner).

Tex-Mex became a force in Texas as many migrants from northern Mexico came to Texas’ cities and opened restaurants. It was a food that was simple, cheap, and filling, a perfect food for a state was growing and needed such staples to feed its increasingly urban, working- and middle-class population. One of those entrepreneurs was Mariano Martinez, who was born in the “Little Mexico” neighborhood of Dallas in 1944. His father—a restaurateur also—had grown up in San Antonio, which is probably “ground-zero” for the food that would eventually be called Tex-Mex, but his mother’s family was from East Texas. Martinez has often said that his creations are a combination of San Antonio and East Texas food-styles. When Mariano Martinez was in his twenties he decided to follow his father’s example and enter the restaurant business, and he knew what kind of operation he wanted to open—one that served that growing unique regional style of food that he had grown up with in Dallas and that he had eaten at eateries such as El Fenix, which had opened in 1918 in “Little Mexico” in Dallas.

Martinez wrote a business plan in 1970 that called for the creation of a restaurant that was more “upscale” than most of the small café-type places that had been the staple of early Tex-Mex places, but one that still was within the means of the majority of the population. He applied for a Small Business Administration loan more than once and was not approved. He approached eleven different banks and they each turned him down. Each of them seemed to imply that a Mexican food restaurant—especially one helmed by an actual Mexican-American—was not worth the risk. Finally, in early 1971 he received a $10,000 SBA-backed loan. He supplemented that with the $500 had in savings, rented a small space in a new strip shopping mall, and opened Mariano’s Mexican Cuisine. He intentionally marketed his new business to attract the burgeoning number of young singles who were moving to Dallas in droves during that time. His goal was to take those Tex-Mex recipes he grew up with to a bigger audience.

It was a good business plan, but soon after opening he faced an operational problem. One of the features of his new restaurant was that it became a place these young professionals liked to frequent when they left work, which meant what they wanted was “adult beverages.” One of the most frequent orders, naturally given his food, was the margarita. The margarita, a cocktail that contains tequila, lime juice, and triple sec in its simplest form, has many origin stories all placing its invention in the 1940s, but by 1971 it was a popular drink in the U.S. The margarita can be a complicated drink for a bartender to put together, and that time commitment can become acute when you have scores of orders at once for thirsty diners. Martinez needed a solution, and he found one when he stopped for a Slurpee at a local 7-11. Like a lightbulb figuratively going off in his head, he deduced if he could adapt a machine like a Slurpee was made into produce a margarita, then he could cut the time his bartenders spent on drinks by a large margin. So, he bought a used soft-serve ice cream machine and commissioned his friend Frank Adams to tinker with the machine and chemist John Hogan to find a recipe for a margarita that would work with his new contraption. It took the trio more than a month to hit on an exact combination and formula, but it was ready to debut.

Mariano Martinez rolled out his frozen margarita machine on May 11, 1971. It was an absolute hit. His diners loved not just the novelty of the drink, but how it looked and how it tasted. His bartenders loved that they could mix a large batch of margarita’s using Martinez’s recipe as modified by John Hogan, place it in the machine and then just deliver a cocktail with the simple pull of a lever. Martinez likely should have patented his machine, but he did not, and so scores of variations began to appear through the decade as more restaurant owners saw the efficacy of Martinez’s invention. Today, industry data shows that Americans consume almost three million frozen margaritas each year (over 4 million total margaritas in all forms are sold in the U.S. each year). The margarita is the most popular cocktail served in the United States, and a majority of that total owes its existence to Texan Mariano Martinez, who is still active in his restaurant operation. And that original machine? It rests in Washington D.C in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Perhaps May 11 should become a Texas holiday!

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.