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welcome to the pour – our monthly round-up of the three things worth your time this month. one drink, one idea, one person shaping how we all pour at El Siete.
the batanga comes from la capilla, the oldest cantina in the town of tequila, and it is one of the great examples of a drink built entirely from what’s within reach.
tequila, fresh lime, a healthy pinch of salt, coke. that’s the whole spec. the traditional pour is el tequileño, because the distillery is just down the road from the cantina and it would have been strange to use anything else.
the detail everyone remembers is the stir. don javier delgado corona, who ran la capilla, stirred the drink with a wooden-handled steak knife, and if that knife had recently been through limes, chillies or avocado, all the better. the residue went into the glass and gave the drink a faint savoury edge. it was never an affectation. it was the knife that was already on the bar.
he created it in 1961 and named it after a regular. batanga, roughly, means thick around the middle. the guest apparently took it well.
you’ll find our version in the 7 agaves section of the menu.
mexican independence day starts the night before.
on the 15th of september, noche de independencia, friends and families gather and public spaces fill with the colours of the flag. there’s food, music, dancing and fireworks. then at around 11pm the president appears on the balcony of the national palace in mexico city and rings the bell associated with miguel hidalgo.
what follows is el grito. the president calls ¡viva méxico!, then the names of the heroes of the independence movement one by one, and the crowd answers each with ¡viva! it’s a recreation of hidalgo’s call to arms in 1810, the moment the independence movement began, and it happens simultaneously in town squares across the country and in mexican communities around the world.
the 16th is the national holiday itself, with military parades and celebrations that run all day. food does a lot of the work, as it tends to. families cook, eat, and keep going.
it’s our favourite kind of celebration: loud, communal, built around a table, and fundamentally about people answering each other back.
jenny camarena is the youngest child of the camarena family and the third generation of it to work in tequila. she grew up around the distilleries and knew all the jimadors by name, which is exactly the kind of childhood that makes a person want to do something else entirely. so she left jalisco to study architecture, and built a career in it. tequila, she assumed, was her family’s calling rather than hers.
ten years ago she moved back.
jenny is now master distiller at la alteña, the distillery behind tapatio and el tesoro, and the first woman to hold the role. she’s spent her time there honouring what was already working and pushing at what wasn’t, including a significant rebrand and new packaging designed to get people to pick up the bottle and find out what’s actually inside it. anyone who has tasted tapatio knows that’s a worthwhile mission.
a couple of our team were lucky enough to meet her when she was last in london. she was extraordinarily generous with her time and with the story of her family, which tells you most of what you need to know.
come find us
el siete 66-70 brewer street, soho, london W1F 9UP
open 5pm-1am, monday to sunday
sips ’til siete runs daily, 5-7pm
