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
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
