There is a bell curve with things such as the picante. It starts in obscurity, a local favourite among a few, an “if you know, you know”. Then, suddenly, it’s everywhere; it demands to be seen. And then, it slinks off into consistency. You don’t need to think about it being anywhere anymore, it just is. Now, you don’t need to explain to even the regional gastropub what a picante is when you go home for Christmas. (If, however, this drink is not where you are, I’m talking about a spicy margarita.) It’s achieved the thing that so few modern things can do quickly: achieved icon status. The first time I got Botox, my aesthetician warned me it might feel “spicy, like a picante”. I cannot overemphasise how everywhere this drink is.
The modern success of the picante – a success that only happened in the last decade or so – is one born from an emerging social class. Soho House – I think we can all agree it’s the route to many people discovering the picante – is a private members club that increasingly targets young people and the creative class, it’s not somewhere just anyone can rock up to. As a result, things associated with it become symbols of exclusivity, something like a picante becomes a taste indicator (“Oh, you get a regular margarita? That’s cute…”) of the city classes. And ordering one elsewhere? It’s cultural shorthand for “getting it”.
The now defunct “Soho House Memes” – an Instagram account dedicated to poking fun at members of the creative-class membership focus – had the picante as a repetitive punchline. It carried over to Instagram pages such as Sock’s House Meeting and Real Housewives of Clapton in what I shall attempt to coin as the 2023 London Meme Boom. It featured in collages of “starter packs” alongside Alaïa ballet flats and Bottega Veneta bags. Online comedian Henry Rowley orders picantes in his online sketches about Soho House members.
Soho House, of course, did not invent the spicy marg, they simply played an important part in popularising it around the world. I’m told by Cyril Françoise, the group’s head of bars for UK, Europe and Asia, that the picante first came to life in this specific guise in 2012 via Chris Odeja at Soho House West Hollywood, after an annual cocktail summit. Bartenders from Miami – where there is enormous Latina influence on food and flavour – had noted the popularity of what they called the margarita picante but also how complex it was to make quickly, especially behind a busy bar. “Chris came up with a way to cut down the ingredients to make it simple and easy to [keep] consistent around the world.”
So ubiquitous is the picante, so loaded with semantics, that it can be abstracted into areas that don’t involve food and drink at all. In 2021, a fashion and lifestyle label was founded by Burberry alumni Jude Taylor and Saam Zonoozi called – you guessed it – PICANTE (stylised all upper case, obviously). Speaking to Jude, it turns out they were the anonymous force behind Soho House Memes, and knew they wanted to create a label inspired by the bootleg merch they saw and loved on trips to LA. So they put the word “picante” on a hoodie, and straight away Cara Delevingne was papped wearing one. Today, they’re producing less stuff that directly references a member’s club, but the word continues to carry a sense of metropolitan cool, wherever you are in the world.
Prop styling by Alexander Breeze; drink styling by Tara Garnell
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