Matador
Tequila gatecrashes the tiki bar
- Method
- Shaken
- Style
- Tropical
- Glass
- Rocks glass
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 45mlTequilaa 100% agave blanco
No Tequila? Mezcal — adds an earthy smokiness — it changes the character of the drink rather than sitting quietly in it
- 60mlPineapple Juice
No Pineapple Juice? Acid Adjusted Pineapple Juice — leave out any other citrus in the drink. It lands more like a sour, so you may need to balance the sweetness, but you could be onto a winner
- 15mlLime Juicefreshly squeezed
- Garnish
- Pineapple wedge
Make it well
Shaken, properly.
Add the tequila, pineapple juice and lime juice to your .
Add ice and for 10-12 seconds. Pineapple juice needs a proper shake to get any foam out of it, and the foam is most of what makes this look worth drinking.
Strain over fresh in a rocks glass.
Add a pineapple .
On the palate
On the nose it's pineapple and then a green, peppery note off the tequila cutting through it. On tasting the pineapple leads and it's sweeter than the ingredient list suggests, then the lime pulls it back and the agave comes through at the end, vegetal and slightly savoury against all that fruit. Pineapple and tequila is a better pairing than it sounds, they're both a bit green and grassy underneath. Use tinned juice if you must, but fresh is a different drink entirely and this one has nowhere to hide.
Where it came from
There are two Matadors and they are not the same drink. The first is in William J. Tarling's Café Royal Cocktail Book in 1937: tequila, dry vermouth and orange curaçao. Stirred, spirit-forward, nothing tropical about it. The one everybody makes now is tequila, pineapple and lime, and that turns up in print in Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide in 1972. The pineapple version was around well before Trader Vic wrote it down. It appears in Jose Cuervo promotional booklets circulating from about 1962, which is the kind of source that tells you a drink existed without telling you who made it. Cuervo had an obvious interest in getting tequila into American glasses, and a tiki-adjacent fruit drink was a sensible way to do it in a market that had decided rum owned the category. So: same name, two drinks, thirty-five years apart, and the one that survived is the one a brand was pushing. Tarling's original is still in the book if you fancy it.
Keep pouring
If you like the Matador, try these
The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.