Mexican Martini

Tequila, orange liqueur, lime, and olive brine — Trudy's in Austin has served this tableside-shaken Dirty Margarita in a Martini glass since the 1980s.

The Mexican Martini is an Austin, Texas regional specialty that has been served at Trudy's Texas Star restaurant — now simply Trudy's, with multiple Austin locations — since the 1980s, where it became the definitive cocktail of Austin's dining and drinking culture. The preparation is structurally a Dirty Margarita: blanco tequila with orange liqueur, fresh lime juice, and a measure of olive brine, served in a salt-rimmed Martini glass with olives as garnish. The olive brine introduction is the critical element that distinguishes the Mexican Martini from a standard Margarita — the brine's sodium and fermented olive flavor providing a savory dimension that mirrors the Dirty Martini's relationship to the standard Martini. Trudy's service ritual became legendary: the Martini was shaken tableside and the remainder poured into a small carafe on ice alongside the glass, allowing the drinker to refill their glass from the carafe and maintain the chill. The cocktail is credited with Austin's broader reputation as a cocktail-serious city, and it remains one of the most specifically regional American cocktails with clear documentary evidence of its origin restaurant and decade. Austin's culture of proud localism and its identity as a cosmopolitan city within Texas culture made the Mexican Martini a natural flagship cocktail.