[G&G] For the opening party of Mariano’s Mexican Cuisine in Dallas, Mariano Martinez sent out invitations printed on corn tortillas. He ordered a dozen cabrito to roast and, short on cash, convinced a local distributor to donate a few cases of Champagne. Martinez’s restaurant opened on fumes for finances. He had been turned down by eleven banks, sold everything he owned, and secured a small SBA loan and funds from family and friends. But he had flair, and plenty of it.
For his newspaper portrait, Martinez grew his hair long and sported a black mustache and goatee. "I put on a Mexican sombrero like Emiliano Zapata, with a bullet belt across my chest," recalls Martinez, a Mexican American whose height and fighting weight at the time were five feet, six inches, and 120 pounds, respectively. "I dressed like a Mexican revolutionary hero. I felt like I was revolutionizing Mexican cuisine."
Martinez wasn’t too far off the mark. On May 11, 1971, shortly after opening, he would change the course of global cocktail culture with the world’s first frozen margarita machine.
When Martinez was growing up, his father worked eighty hours a week in his Dallas restaurant, El Charro. "That wasn’t the life I wanted for myself," says Martinez, who dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to pursue music and golf. He had above-average but not-quite-star-quality talent, and in the following years, Martinez watched from the sidelines as peers like singer Trinidad López and golfer Lee Trevino made it big. He returned to school for his GED and then earned a two-year degree from El Centro College, where an interests assessment directed him toward entrepreneurship. "This was during the Nixon era, at the time of the Vietnam War, when young people were burning the flag, burning their draft cards, and refusing to go to war," Martinez says. "While hippies were calling everyone capitalist pigs, I wanted to go into business."