24 June 2026
Share
To understand the flavor profiles and compatibility of some of Mexico’s most under-the-radar spirits, Evan Williams of Maria Isabel in San Francisco engaged in some serious research and development.
He rifled through a few hundred years of recipes, interviewed market vendors, hand-roasted some ingredients and spun others in a centrifuge “in order to find a transliteration where we could contextualize ingredient, method and culture in a way that our guests could pick up what we were putting down effortlessly,” he says.
The result is a beverage menu that wowed MICHELIN Guide Inspectors in California like no other this year. On June 24, Williams was named the MICHELIN Guide California 2026 Exceptional Cocktails Award winner at a ceremony in San Diego.
In a lightly edited interview below, learn about Williams’s teenage fascination with esoteric spirits, how he helped build the restaurant’s cacao ceremony program and take home a simplified recipe for a tart gin crowd-pleaser.
How did you design the cocktail menu at Maria Isabel? What kind of R&D went into developing the drinks?
We started by defining the story we wanted to tell with the bar program. For us that was a holistic view of Mexican drinking culture through the lens of modern technique. We didn’t want to just tell the story of tequila and mezcal. We wanted to tell the story of all of the traditional regional distillates and beverage cultures that don’t get as much love abroad, but are deeply tied to the culture of their home regions.
We wanted to tell the story of modern Mexican distilling as well. Mexican gins, liqueurs, amari and whiskeys are some of the most compelling in the world and to me are as Mexican as anything else being produced in the country, and deserve to be spotlighted with the same respect we give to agave.
We also wanted to highlight the narrative through lines from the pre-contact cacao drinks and ferments through the hypermodern cocktails being produced at the world class bar programs popping up all over Mexico.
I went through a few hundred years of recipes, looking at key concepts and regional flavor archetypes and figured out how we could apply them to our vantage point. We were calling friends of friends who were still preparing pozol in the markets of Oaxaca City. We were hand-roasting and grinding some things, centrifuging others in order to find a transliteration where we could contextualize ingredient, method and culture in a way that our guests could pick up what we were putting down effortlessly.
Also, there was a lot of drinking. A solid six months of getting ahold of every obscure regional Mexican spirit we could, taking notes, building out the list before we even started talking about cocktails. Once we started on the cocktails it was a lot of trial and error, a lot of these ingredients are on paper very straightforward but for whatever reason were refusing to translate in a scalable way. A whole lot of false starts and pivots. And frankly, I think that’s where we still are. To the annoyance of my bar team I still probably change at least one thing every week as things occur to me that we could further refine.
There are some very interesting, very Mexican ingredients in these drinks. What are some of these more under-the-radar spirits and why do you like working with them?
To me, Mexican spirit production is easily the most terroir-driven in the world. And in a country with as much regional diversity as Mexico this means there are hundreds of distinct micro-regions each producing compelling spirits from what is on hand. Things like pox, a corn/wheat/sugar cane distillate being produced by the Tzotzil Mayans in Chiapas is a great example. Hyperregional, culturally important, very little known.
I’m also a big fan of sotol, made from the Desert Spoon (shrub). It’s a deep, powerful spirit that really speaks to the regions it is produced in. We also really like using singular Mexican ingredients like chilihuacle from Oaxaca (a chili), single origin heritage cacao from Chiapas, heirloom corns from all over. They all have a story to tell. It’s our job to translate that respectfully to people who haven’t been lucky enough to get to experience it yet.
What is the idea behind the chocolate program?
I am involved with it, though, Chef Laura has to be credited with the idea and conceptualization of it as the “ceremony of cacao.” The chocolate program was hands down the hardest part of this program to design. Mexico has a famously long history of chocolate drinks whose origins trace back to religious rituals and there is a lot of regional variation to be found. We landed on four different regional styles to start with. Pozol from Oaxaca, tascalate from Chiapas, chilate from Guerrero and hot chocolate, which in our case is a relatively modern recipe.
This was all about sourcing. We found an absolutely beautiful heirloom chocolate being produced in Chiapas, and paired it with a few different types of heirloom corns we nixtamalize and grind in-house (I use the leftover masa from our tortilla program because it stays in line with tradition, reduces waste and I like the texture and flavor after it’s been drying in the walk-in [refrigerator] for about a week).
When we serve the drinks, we serve them on a little tray with a cacao bean and a bit of dark chocolate made from the same cacao varietal we use in the drink. I want our guests to smell the cacao bean, feel it in their hands, taste the chocolate on its own and try the drink. Without standing on a soapbox, I want people to maybe subconsciously grasp that what they are drinking is really special, culturally important as well as being delicious.
What’s a cocktail on the menu that reflects your personal style?
Well, there is what I would say, and there is what people who know me would say. For the sake of brevity, the Ser Un Sol. On its surface an easy sipper. Pox infused with whole, pan-roasted cacao beans, clarified guava, feijoa (an exotic fruit) distillate, guava leaf tincture and Xtabentun (a Mayan anise liqueur). All of it is clarified with a centrifuge, carbonated and has a really complex acid adjustment, but on its surface it feels effortless, bright, bubbly, with enough depth to keep you coming back for another sip. Take a deeper look and we are telling a story of a hyperregional flavor using ingredients with deep ties to the communities they are produced.
How did you get your start in cocktails?
I have always had a fascination with esoteric spirits. I got popped in customs coming back to the U.S. from Estonia with a bottle of absinthe pre-ban lift as a sophomore in high school. I moved to Russia for university two weeks after I turned 18 and got a job slinging Long Islands in a techno club in Moscow six months later. I loved it. Came back to the U.S. and got a job behind a bar as soon as I was legal to do so and never left. Somewhere along the way people started letting me design a drink here or there, then entire bar programs and now here I am.
Recipe: Maria Isabel’s Claro Que Si
A simpler take on the Claro Que Si without the clarifying and acid adjustment and tinctures.Ingredients:
- 1 part mezcal
- .5 part Mexican gin (something floral)
- 1.75 part soursop shrub*
- 1 part unsweetened coconut water
- 1 d lavender bitters
Method:
Combine ingredients and refrigerate. The dilution is being provided by the coconut water, and the texture makes the drink, so you don’t want to dilute it further with ice.
*To make the soursop shrub, combine:
- 1500 ml unsweetened soursop juice
- 750 ml 1:1 simple syrup
- 350 ml Champagne vinegar
- 50 ml fresh lime juice (fine strained)
Related Articles:
Hero image: MICHELIN Guide Cocktail Award winner Evan Williams from Maria Isabel. © Maria Isabel
