The New Cocktailians

I think I first realized that Los Angeles again had become a cocktail town last year when Campanile chef Mark Peel insisted I taste something he’d been working on, a discovery so important that he was planning to build a new restaurant around it, and he sent over neither a perfect spiral of Chino Ranch Romanesco nor a bit of sustainable sweetfish, neither a 100-point Grenache fashioned by his friend Manfred Krankl nor a kumquat of surpassing elegance, no Umbrian olive oil nor smidge of miracle fruit. What he set down was a tumbler of sweet pink liquid, fruity and acidic, with a pleasant high note of what might have been fresh peach. I didn’t mention it at the time, but the drink reminded me a little of an alcoholic Hi-C.

I’ve known Peel since I was a teenager, when he was a surly young line chef married to the performance-artist sister of the guitarist of a punk-rock band I was in, and I have never known his culinary enthusiasms to be anything but pristine. He was the guy who was always figuring out new ways to raise Sonoma lamb, always conspiring to bring in a better grade of chicken. He was first around here on live sea urchin, grilled tuna niçoise, salsa verde, $50 glasses of eaux de vie, white Alaskan salmon and Kobe-style beef. When he and Nancy Silverton started Campanile, he used to drive 100 miles to Chino Ranch a couple of times a week to pick up the fruits and vegetables for the restaurant, and there were years when it was easier to track the changing of the seasons by the produce that showed up on his grilled-vegetable plate than it was by looking at the weather outside. And now what was he excited about? A 19th-century concoction known as the Fish House Punch, given a perfect Cocktail Moment twist of fresh, organic peach.

Anne Fishbein

Strong enough for a man, but made for a Korean taco: The Sesame Song at the Doheny

Anne Fishbein

Bottled rage: Seven Grand

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The Hungry Cat

1535 N. Vine St.
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Hollywood

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Musso & Frank Grill

6667 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Hollywood

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There are some theories about the Cocktail Moment, and some of them ring true. For a certain kind of modern chef, cocktails are ideal companions for food — their effects can be controlled and modulated with far more precision than a mere glass of wine, whose broad levels of flavor and varying acids can seem almost crude in comparison. You’ve seen this sort of logic before — it’s why the old-school deconstructionist literary critics preferred comic books and pulp novels to actual fiction: It was easier to make their own ideas fit. At Bazaar, Jose Andres’ palace of molecular gastronomy in the new SLS Hotel, the most spectacular effects are actually manifested more in the cocktails than they are in the food, as with the mojito poured over a fluffy cloud of cotton candy or the dirty martini garnished with gelatinized globes of puréed olives, the caipirinha turned to slush with liquid nitrogen or the margarita topped with evanescent salty foam — all elements that introduce the ingredient of elapsing time into the recipe book.

The nostalgia angle is also important to the Cocktail Moment, of course — it can feel almost subversive to mix a cocktail that your great-grandmother might have enjoyed, to sidestep the pop-culture battles by adopting a kind of steam-punk groove, and to a generation of drinkers raised. For the first time since Repeal, the proper materials are available — last year was the first time in 90 years, for example, that a bartender could make a Sazerac with real absinthe — and there has been a resurgence in things like small-batch artisanal rye. The Cocktail Moment brings drinking from its Mannerist period, home to Jell-O shots and Slippery Nipples, sickly sweet cosmopolitans and chocolatinis, to a crisp neoclassic period, prepared by bartenders who revere old manuals by Harry Craddock, Jerry Thomas and David Embury; who prepare punches and shrubs and fizzes; who strive to caress the taste of the rare and artisanal rye whiskies and aromatic gins and old rums they adore rather than disguise them with sticky fruit.

Some of the credit for this moment belongs to Cedd Moses, who owns a lot of the downtown bars that could be called glamorous at the moment, including Broadway Bar, Casey’s and the Golden Gopher. He had his moment of conversion when he visited the Kentucky house of Booker Noe for a “Bourbon-Q’’ a few years ago, and tasted the 125-proof cask-strength whiskey the Jim Beam distiller served with his caramelized pork chops, which had also been soaking in the spirit. Moses, the son of brilliant Venice abstract painter Ed Moses, was originally from rural Bristol, Tennessee, where summer afternoons at his grandmother’s house were spent drinking mint juleps, then switching to old-fashioneds when the fireflies came out, and that cask-strength whiskey spoke to him in a way no spirit quite had before. Moses’ next bar, Seven Grand, in an upstairs space that used to belong to the white-glove cafeteria called the Silver Spoon, was a cocktail bar that concentrated on whiskey in a huge way, bringing back the juleps and Sazeracs and sours that had languished in the land of the poorly made cocktail for decades. The Doheny, Moses’ membership club near Staples, delved even deeper into the classic cocktail repetoire, instituting things like absinthe service, which probably hadn’t existed in Los Angeles since Mary Pickford was a girl; reviving the Blue Blazer, a 19th-century specialty from bartender Jerry Thomas, the Escoffier of cocktails, which involves flaming Scotch whisky poured between glasses from the greatest possible distance; and a real, old-style Tom Collins.