“What we wanted to do with this [drink] was to create a very solid, everyday Margarita,” says Bobby Heugel, who began workshopping the cocktail with Alba Huerta prior to opening their mezcaleria, The Pastry War, back in 2013. At the time, Heugel—who also owns Anvil and the recently opened Tongue-Cut Sparrow, among others—was in the process of building a tightly curated list of agave spirits. So it was only natural that, for his own version of the drink, he’d build on the spirit-forward template of Julio Bermejo’s original Tommy’s Margarita, which the San Francisco bartender invented back in the 1990s.
Heugel’s version calls on blanco tequila, plus a combination of both Key and Persian lime juices, and employs a “shake and dump” technique, in which the cocktail is shaken and poured—ice and all—into a salt-rimmed glass.