“The word ‘Margarita’ will get most people to at least take a look at it,” says David Mor, one of the owners of Truce, a café and cocktail bar in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. The Margarita in question is what Mor and his team have dubbed the “World’s Best Bonsai Margarita Riff,” which features tea-infused tequila, fresh cantaloupe and a French melon liqueur. 

Riffs are the stock-in-trade of cocktail menus. Thanks to centuries of creativity, bars have at their disposal a back catalog of hundreds, if not thousands, of cocktails that the drinking public might be familiar with and upon which to apply an added layer of creativity. This is how we got drinks like the Final Ward, Naked & Famous and Paper Plane—each some permutation of a Last Word.

Truce’s riff is actually a riff on a riff, a natural meta-extension of the practice. When assembling the menu, Mor and his partners, including Matthew Hunnel, wanted to “start from a place of just humor with cocktails and write menus that are engaging.” Hunnel, also Mor’s fiancé, remembered a Bonsai Margarita from a previous bar program he oversaw, but neither he nor Mor can pinpoint the exact circumstances of their first encounter with the drink; they venture a guess that it bubbled up into their awareness from clubs and queer spaces.

The original Bonsai Margarita adds Midori to the traditional Margarita template, either alongside or instead of orange liqueur. Cocktail historian David Wondrich was able to produce a Midori print advertisement from 1980 encouraging readers to write in for a free recipe book featuring 39 “intriguing drinks,” including the Melon Margarita: tequila, Midori and sweet-and-sour mix. “In 1981 someone wised up and changed what they were calling it in their standard ad to ‘Midori Margarita,’ which people had been calling it anyway,” he says. The first mention Wondrich is able to find of the drink appearing as “Bonsai Margarita” is in Mittie Hellmich’s Ultimate Bar Book, which was published in the mid-2000s.

“We were just having fun with the idea of reviving the Bonsai Margarita because it is so unknown,” says Mor, before explaining the liberties Truce has taken with its version. For starters, the team decided to reimagine the drink with fresh cantaloupe and a French melon aperitif produced by Aelred instead of Midori. Midori is made from Japanese muskmelon, which refers to the broader category of sweet melons of which the cantaloupe is a member, so the Truce version retains much of the melon-forward character of the original, just with added freshness. Mor also infuses chamomile and snow chrysanthemum teas—used in the bar’s iced tea program—into the tequila base. “The chamomile and cantaloupe go so beautifully together,” explains Mor. 

As for the name? “When people read it, [there’s] immediate joy on the face,” says Mor, who notes that “World’s Best Bonsai Margarita Riff” was chosen deliberately for its hyperbolic absurdity. According to Mor, it also playfully nods to the prior tenant of the Truce space, which had a sign outside touting its Margarita as the “world’s best,” despite the owners needing to call on a representative from a liquor distributor to teach them how to make one.

Truce’s version of the drink, down to its name, is emblematic of how a lighthearted recontextualization can breathe new life into recipes that might once have been too obscure to be forgotten in the first place. Even more so, it demonstrates something that doesn’t always end up on cocktail menus: a sense of humor.