Cocktail · Medium strength

Paloma

Tequila and grapefruit soda — the margarita's cooler, more casual cousin.

How to order it: Fresh grapefruit if you can, pinch of salt, tall glass.

The story

Mexico's actual favorite tequila drink — the Margarita is for export — has an origin nobody can pin down. Legend gravitates to Don Javier Delgado Corona, the late, beloved barman of La Capilla in the town of Tequila itself, but no hard evidence confirms it, and the simpler story is more likely: grapefruit sodas like Squirt arrived in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century, someone poured tequila into one, and the country quietly agreed never to stop. Even the name — 'dove' in Spanish — has no settled explanation. The Paloma endures precisely because it never needed a myth: salt, agave, grapefruit, and bubbles, doing effortlessly what other drinks strain for.

Adjacent pours