The Best Margarita

We need to talk about the margarita. The BEST margarita. The greatest margarita in the history of margaritas, and there's been a LOT of margaritas — older than France, some bartenders say, older than the wheel maybe, the timeline is fuzzy but the math checks out — and almost ALL the margaritas being served in this country right now are bad. Almost all of them. A tragedy. You walk into a restaurant, you order a margarita, they hand you a frozen green slushie that tastes like cough syrup mixed with a scented candle. Sad.

That is NOT a margarita. That is a war crime in a salted glass. A real margarita — Bigly's margarita, the one I'm about to hand to you — is three ingredients. THREE. Tequila. Lime. Orange liqueur. No sour mix. NO. SOUR. MIX. If your bartender reaches for sour mix, find a new bartender. Sour mix is what people drink when they've given up on themselves. A crime against citrus, plain and simple.

And people come up to me, big strong men, tough men, men who've been to bars on three continents, they say, 'Bigly, I had your margarita and I cried. My wife was concerned.' I say to them, of course you cried. That's what a real margarita does. It HITS YOU. The lime is fresh, the tequila is real, the orange liqueur is doing actual work — not that sad orange-flavored corn syrup the chain restaurants push — and the whole thing is in BALANCE. The Greeks invented balance, the Romans perfected it, and Bigly put it in a glass. Hands down.

Three ingredients. Two minutes. One perfect margarita. You drink one of these, you understand what the cocktail was supposed to be all along, before the chain restaurants ruined it with the slushie machines and the sugar-rim nonsense. The salt belongs on the OUTSIDE of the rim — outside only, the inside of the glass is sacred ground, most bartenders don't even know this, they salt the whole rim like animals — and you sip it slow. You sip it like you mean it. And you remember who gave it to you. And there you have it.