Only someone woefully vain and shallow, an uncharitable line of thought might go, would order such a cocktail. Whereas a “light” or “lean” Margarita could indicate a simple taste preference, “skinny” evokes visceral memories of the noxious diet culture that has targeted women for decades.

But the broader resentment arguably stems from its loaded name.

Some of the disapproval is based on principle many craft bartenders, for instance, find the drink to be off-kilter and annoying. While it’s not uncommon for a popular ersatz cocktail to elicit mockery, f ew are as divisive as the ungovernable reduced-calorie Margarita. Favre, not a fan of the cocktail, isn’t so forgiving: “The Skinny Margarita is a misnomer and an unbalanced drink.” “The name, I always thought to be silly,” says Amy Breen, who was bartending in Nashville in the early 2010s. Even if someone has never dragged their forefinger down a chain restaurant’s drinks menu and landed on the Skinny Margarita, they likely feel some sort of way about the cocktail. In place of Cointreau or triple sec, some recipes use fresh orange juice to impart a similar flavor bleaker riffs rely on Splenda simple syrup for sweetness. But across personal blogs and sprawling recipe hubs, where riffs on the Skinny Margarita abound, the formula gets increasingly convoluted. While all bartenders have their own way of preparing the cocktail, the typical move is to follow their specs for a classic Margarita and either decrease or omit the sweetener, such as simple syrup or agave nectar, or the orange liqueur. So began the astronomical rise of the Skinny Margarita, a drink that wedged itself so resolutely into pop culture that it has attained call-drink status. And while the Skinny Margarita reigned supreme, no drink was immune to Frankel’s influence: By 2013, more than a third of chain restaurants with liquor licenses had “skinny” cocktails on their menu. “You started hearing it at the bar all of a sudden,” recalls Leanne Favre, the bar manager at Leyenda in Brooklyn, who in the early 2010s was working at the since-shuttered agave bar Mayahuel. Meanwhile, Frankel’s savvy concept had infiltrated nearly every genre of food and drink establishment, where customers began placing what would’ve been an inscrutable order just a few years earlier.

Skinny margarita bottle