M&M Cocktail Recipe | Wine Enthusiast

There’s a highball at NYC’s Lola’s, the latest restaurant from celebrated chef Suzanne Cupps, that might have you scratching your head: It’s listed as an M&M. But, no, don’t expect it to taste like a chocolate bolus. In fact, an M&M is currently a trending cocktail style, and what is in it couldn’t be more straight-forward: In its simplest iteration, it’s the combination of Montenegro, a heritage amaro that hails from Bologna, and mezcal. At Lola’s they pour in a bit of soda water to create a highball. What’s less simple, however, is how it came to be.

According to Tad Carducci, the director of outreach and engagement for Gruppo Montenegro, there are countless founding lores swirling around the M&M. “It’s a fabled creation,” he says, adding that “the origin of the drink seems nebulous and a bit of a mystery,” but bartenders in big cities around the United States were already pouring a shot of amaro and mezcal in the aughts and early 2010s.

A quick Google of the history of the M&M yields intel that Marco Montefiori, a sales director at Montenegro, could have been among the first to roll it out to industry contacts around that time.

But one possible figure who may have put the M&M to a wider audience is Robert Krueger, then of both Employees Only and Extra Fancy in Brooklyn, who was serving 50-50 shooters of Montenegro and other spirits in 2013 when he was part of Montenegro’s “B team,” a band of top New York bartenders who were promoting the use of the amaro in various drinks.

“The group was torn between Montenegro and rye and Montenegro and mezcal. Both were popular trending spirit categories and also trade favorites,” Carducci recalls. “The exciting and intensely-flavored combo of the M&M won the day, and Robert posted about it on social media as early as 2014.”

Image Courtesy of Nick Salinger

This is only one possible provenance. Carducci says that you can find stories of other bartenders from sea to shining sea claiming to be the original M&M, including a well-known mixologist “who is pretty canceled so not worth mentioning.”

But regardless of how it got its start, the M&M then simmered around the industry as a shot before becoming a cocktail menu fixture thanks to the depth of flavor you can get with just two ingredients. Montenegro’s secret blend of 40 herbs, spices and flowers—including orange peels, cinnamon and eucalyptus—plus mezcal’s smokiness proved to be a thrilling playground for anyone with a jigger.

And the choice of mezcal can really transform the profile of the finished drink. Nick Salinger, general manager and partner at Lola’s, says, “that complexity can be hard to achieve with just a few ingredients and simple preparation.”

Ernesto Coronado, area director of food and beverage at Freehand Miami, where they serve a take on the M&M called Maitre D at Broken Shaker, says bartenders love the balanced interplay between the smokiness of the mezcal and the slightly rich bitterness of the amaro.

“It’s not only the perfect combination,” he says, “but there are countless variations as well!” For the Maitre D cocktail, Coronado wanted to add layers of flavor without taking anything from the base of the M&M. Blood orange cordial adds a bit of floral sweetness while the nuanced earthiness of saffron bitters continue to add to the complexity that M&Ms are known for.

And Carducci agrees. “It’s a veritable kitchen sink of flavor profiles; sweet, smoky, briny, citrusy, spicy, herbaceous, bitter: it hits all the notes,” he says. And it’s this wild medley that makes it an exciting starting point for anyone trying to build a drink. “You can play off any of these elements,” Carducci adds. He even crafted an M&M version of the Mule back in 2018 by adding “ginger beer, some citrus and a pinch of chili.”

Given the limitlessness of what drinks can come from combining mezcal and Montenegro, you’ve probably already had an M&M before and just didn’t know it. After all, most beverage menus don’t list the cocktail quite as explicitly as they do at Lola’s. But Salinger explains that it’s one of the most asked-about drinks on the list—and that curiosity usually leads guests to try it. “And when they do,” Salinger says, “the most common reaction I have seen is ‘how have I not tried these two things together?’”