What Is a Mexican American Cocktail? These Bars Have Answers.

From afar, business at Aldama must have seemed pretty good. The Mexican restaurant opened toward the end of the pandemic, right as New Yorkers were emerging from pandemic-driven isolation, and the early reviews were encouraging. “It was crazy seven days a week,” says Christopher Reyes, an owner. “We couldn’t keep up.”

This summer, Reyes announced that his James Beard–nominated restaurant would be shutting down due to slow business. But instead of permanently closing, he and his partner, Gerardo Alcaraz, are turning the restaurant into a bar. They believe modern Mexican cocktails will have more appeal. “It makes way more sense,” Reyes says.

When Aldama reopens next year, it will join a growing number of Mexican American cocktail bars across the country. The businesses combine ancestral Mexican traditions with modern trends. 

It’s simple in theory, but Mexican American identity has never been easy to define. “A Mexican cocktail bar can be a million different things,” says Reyes, who previously worked at Employees Only and Maison Premiere.

And while describing Mexican American bars can be tricky, knowing when you’re in one has never been easier. “It’s the hospitality, the ambiance, the music and the food,” Reyes says.

On a recent weekend, the lights were once again swinging at Superbueno in Manhattan. Customers were chasing shots of raicilla, an agave spirit, with beef broth, and the bouncer had some bad news. “No reservation? It’s going to be a two-hour wait.”

Last year, Superbueno became one of the first cocktail bars to call itself “Mexican American,” although it almost didn’t happen that way. A month before the opening, owner Ignacio “Nacho” Jimenez had figured out his cocktail list, bar name and interior design—but he still had no idea how to describe his bar.

“It wasn’t a mezcal or tequila bar,” says Jimenez, because he wanted to serve more than mezcal and tequila. But it also wasn’t a Mexican restaurant or cantina. When he called Superbueno a Mexican American cocktail bar—something few, if any bars, had done in New York—he felt free. “I wanted everyone to think outside of the ways we see Mexican culture,” he says.

In Los Angeles, beverage director Max Reis is on a similar mission at Mírate. He uses contemporary bartending techniques, like clarification and force carbonation, to make cocktails that spotlight traditional Mexican beverages. “We’re going for the juxtaposition of modern and ancestral,” he says. “The oldest possible way to do things and the newest.”

Mírate’s Paloma, for example, takes three days to prepare. Reis starts with homemade grapefruit soda—it’s clarified in a centrifuge—then mixes it with pulque, a pre-Hispanic fermented beverage. The drink is served in a yellow can with a barcode that links to a mobile video game. (To win, users shoot down bottles of celebrity tequila.)

“It’s a very friendly format,” Reis says. “We use that as a tool to gain people’s confidence in areas they might not normally have confidence to try new things.”

So far, it’s working. Earlier this year, Mírate ranked No. 46 on the list of North America’s 50 Best Bars, something Reis never thought would happen. When he was opening the bar in 2022, he warned his staff: “We will never win 50 Best.” The bar served ancestral Mexican beverages, he reasoned—not Bacardí, a major sponsor of the awards.

“This is going to show our industry that you can accomplish these benchmarks without playing the game,” he says of the recognition. 

For much of the modern cocktail revival in the U.S., agave spirits, such as tequila and mezcal, have served as the primary lens into Mexican drinking culture, says Emma Janzen, the author of Mezcal: The History, Craft & Cocktails of the World’s Ultimate Artisanal Spirit. Before that, it was Margaritas made in family restaurants. “That was the closest thing we had to Mexican flavors being presented in a bar setting,” she says.

The next chapter is about heritage and pride. More bar directors are Mexican American, Janzen notes, and they’re using cocktails to explore their roots.

Giovanni Maya is the head bartender of the Jajaja Mexicana restaurant chain. For years, he’s made Mexican drinks for the masses, like frozen Margaritas and Espresso Martinis with mezcal. Last year, he had the chance to do something more personal at Bar Nena in Manhattan.

“All of the cocktails are based on childhood memories,” he says. His carajillo, an espresso-based drink, is made with cinnamon and cane sugar in the style of café de olla, the spiced coffee his mother brewed each morning. Another cocktail, the Tamal, is based on a memory of working with his family at farmers markets. Afterward, they would eat tamales.

Mark Murphy, the director of bar operations for Starr Restaurants, isn’t Mexican—he’s a self-described “white guy from Pennsylvania.” When he was tasked with creating a drink menu for El Presidente, a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., he wanted to present Mexican drinking culture as more than Margaritas. 

He ran his work by Andres Padilla, a chef for Starr Restaurants, and ended up with a menu that feels in step with other Mexican American bars. Classic cocktails feature guava, guajillo, and prickly pear, and the Michelada is prepared tableside, a nod to Mi Compa Chava in Mexico City. Murphy wanted “to break away from what standard expectations would be of ‘Mexican,’” he says.

Broadening the menu to incorporate more flavors from Mexican culture, bartenders say, changes what people order at the bar. Earlier this year, Jimenez analyzed drink sales at Superbueno and found something unexpected. While his customers were ordering lots of Green Mango Martinis and mole Negronis, the Margarita had become one of his worst-selling drinks. “It was lower than some of the beer,” he said.

He took that as a good thing. Two decades ago, “the number one–selling cocktail would probably be the Margarita,” he said. “I was proud people were trying something else.”