THE DOHENY
Anne Fishbein
Why did the bartender wear suspenders? Joel Black at Comme Ça.
Anne Fishbein
Shaken, not stirred: Ice at Comme Ça; Vincenzo Marianella getting his back into it at Copa d’Oro; Marianella’s customized long drink of cachaça, passion fruit and strawberries
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The Doheny is the sanctum sanctorum of cocktail culture in Los Angeles at the moment, a luxurious bunker, incongruously located at the rear of a downtown parking garage, dedicated to the art of cocktails without compromise. The filigree on the mirrors was painted by Shepard Fairey; the men’s room is papered with old stock certificates; and general manager Steve Livigni, who manages to mash up laconic dude-in-a-band style with the gaslit workingman’s hauteur of the 1890s, is quick to show newcomers through the glassed-in Art Deco patio built for the pleasure of Edward L. Doheny, indirectly the inspiration for the Daniel Day-Lewis character in There Will Be Blood, and whose politically connected oil company was more or less the Halliburton of the 1920s. Where other ambitious bars in town display 300 bottles of tequila or whiskey, the Doheny’s exquisitely curated stash may be no larger than that at your neighborhood bar; where other bars of this stature pride themselves on encyclopedic cocktail menus, the list at Doheny takes up but a few slim pages of large type, much of which is dedicated to the details of the bar’s elaborate tableside absinthe service. Where it is appropriate, drinks are poured over custom chunks of ice the size of Louisville Slugger handles, which resist melting with the tenacity of the polar ice caps.
As at any Cedd Moses–run bar, you can find a decent roster of nearly forgotten classic cocktails — Blue Blazer, French 75, Clover Leaf, Blood and Sand — but most of the drinks are concocted by the staff. And if you should happen to come on an evening that the KoGi taco truck is parked out back, you may run into Korean-themed cocktails that lead bartender Daniel Nelson willed into being just a few minutes before opening time. If you haven’t chased a plate of KoGi blood sausage with a Sesame Song, a drink whose ingredients include vodka, black sesame seeds, red corn silk and ruddy Korean chile powder, you really should. The Doheny is famous for its exclusivity — on one level, it operates as a fantastically expensive private club, and it is kept intentionally uncrowded — but the door is occasionally cracked open for events, including KoGi appearances, and if you are truly serious about cocktails, it’s not much harder to get into than, say, the Magic Castle. 714 W. Olympic Blvd., downtown.
DRAGO CENTRO
Downtown towers gleam through its massive picture windows; a mammoth Bauhaus sculpture soars in the foreground. Drago Centro owns one of the most glamorous urban views imaginable, a panorama that would have worked equally well in an Astaire-Rogers picture or one of the early Georgia O’Keeffes, back when that artist was painting skyscrapers instead of blossoms. On a stark white tablecloth, in a delicately masculine cocktail glass, a liquid glows pink; a bead of condensation trickles; a thin stray wafer of ice melts into the drink. Even if you are a wine drinker — especially if you intend to plunder Drago Centro’s superbly fashioned list of Italian wines — there is occasionally nothing so appealing before dinner as a perfect Negroni, a frosty, pellucid tincture of gin and bittersweet Campari that unlocks appetite like a magically calibrated key. At such times it is possible to become pathetically grateful that Vincenzo Marianella is so promiscuous with his favors. 525 S. Flower St., dwntwn., (213) 228-8998.
THE EDISON
When I worked a block away from the Edison, back when that corner represented urban blight rather than tasty artisanal pizza, the mephitic breath pulsing from the building was so bad that my colleagues often crossed the street to avoid even a hint of its presence, and the Weekly once nominated the alley that the bar opens onto as the worst-smelling street in L.A. But the revitalized Edison is a thoroughly amazing urban space, all towering ceilings and teetering staircase and banks of copper turbines receding into the distance, the kind of spectacular adaptive reuse that until now seemed to have belonged entirely to the English. As a cocktail bar — well, it’s big. And loud. And monitored by a bouncer. And crowded, often with customers less concerned about the provenance of the absinthe in their frappes than with the taut buttocks of their temporary companions. (As is appropriate, but that’s for another story.)
But unlike other bars of its size, the Edison works hard to maintain its place in the cocktail firmament, and although you can probably get the Red Bull/vodka that would get you thrown out of most of the bars on this list, and the Scharffen Berger–based chocolate martini is fairly popular, the squad of bartenders, including Chris Ojeda late of Osteria Mozza, craft their own syrups and mixers, squeeze fresh juices, and mix remarkably detailed versions of classics like Death in the Afternoon, French 75 and Singapore Slings, even if they do take five times as much time to prepare as the 150th Cape Cod of the evening. The Edison’s leader and muse is local dude Marcos Tello, a student of cocktail history who formed the Sporting Life, a combination craft guild and secret society dedicated to the bartender’s art. 108 W. Second St., dwntwn., (213) 613-0000.
