National Margarita Day: Top El Paso Restaurants to Celebrate

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to waste away in Margaritaville, I’ll give you two: National Margarita Day is February 22, and it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Whether you like yours on the rocks or in its slushier form, I find margaritas are best when paired with Mexican food. So, I did some research, and below you'll find a list of restaurants known for their delicious Mexican food that the local margarita-loving Yelp community has given the most enthusiastic thumbs up to.

Mostly, it seems, because they serve them in giant glasses.

But honestly you don’t need a tequila-based “faux day” to have a margarita or two. Just don’t get too carried away. Margaritas, it turns out, is the number one reason you end searching for your lost shaker of salt. Or at least that’s what Jimmy Buffet has been singing for decades.

The Margarita was Invented in Juarez. Or Was It?

How the Margarita came about is still a mystery and stories of its origin are varied. Depending on which link you click it on, it was either invented in 1938 in Tijuana at Rancho La Gloria for Marjorie King, a famous Ziegfield dancer at the time, or in the 1940’s at The Foreign Club in Tijuana in honor of Margarita Carmen Cansino who worked as part of a dance act. That Margarita went on to become famous screen goddess and movie legend Rita Hayworth

Another tale – the one I choose to believe – claims it was the creation of Francisco “Pancho” Morales in 1942 when he as a bartender at Tommy’s Bar in our sister city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Morales emigrated to El Paso not long after that and drove a truck for Price’s Creameries for 18 years. Texas Monthly wrote about Morales in 1974 and details his account of how he invented the drink.

Spoiler Alert: it was named after a flower, not a woman.

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