The New Cocktailians

FIG

Anne Fishbein

Marcos Tello contemplates green death at the Edison.

Anne Fishbein

Matthew Eggleston tends to the thirsty at Hungry Cat.

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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

Photos

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More About

• Cedd Moses
• National Basketball Association
• Los Angeles Lakers
• Eating Out
• Main Dish Recipes

Hotel lounges are where you go to drink shots of Lagavulin, bathtub-size martinis and whatever pink thing has recently been featured on Lifetime — everybody knows that. Even if a finance guy or data-systems analyst happens to be passionate about champagne cocktails and old Armagnac, there is something about proximity to concierge desks and high-thread count sheets that makes the banality of Grey Goose and soda seem irresistibly seductive. But Fig, the new bistro from chef Ray Garcia in the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, may as well be connected to the farmers market by a pulsing, produce-filled umbilical cord. And its bar, whose drinks were designed by globetrotting British cocktailian (and perennial Hendrick’s Gin spokesperson) Charlotte Voisey, takes the seasonal organic thing to an extreme, flavoring cocktails with combinations like rhubarb and rosemary or fresh blueberries and thyme that sound closer to hip pie fillings than they do to intoxicating beverages, introducing fig jam to mojitos and lavender to English-cucumber coolers, and the inevitable elderflower to Spanish cava. Do these sound more like a prelude to an hour on the tennis courts than to a languid evening of love? Priorities are changing, I’m afraid, and not necessarily for the better. In the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, 101 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 319-1111.

HUNGRY CAT

With seafood, I tend to be a white-wine guy to the end, loyal to the marriage of Alsatian pinot gris and salmon, steadfast in the belief that oysters were created to be washed down with bitterly cold Muscadet. I probably visited Suzanne Goin’s wonderful fish restaurant 20 times before I even glanced at a cocktail list. But Matthew Eggleston’s bar is different from any bar in Los Angeles, lined with tin buckets piled high with farmers-market citrus, dotted with old-fashioned squeezers, staffed with bartenders who look way more like the people in your yoga class this morning than they do like life-weary mugs. If you squint a little, you could imagine yourself at the juice bar of a gym far grander than you can afford.

While a lot of good cocktails in Los Angeles tend toward juiciness — we may not have much in the way of locally made spirits, but the local citrus is the best in the world — Eggleston’s creations take the concept to an extreme, so that his Aviation, made with lemon and juniper-intensive Aviation gin, bursts with the bright freshness of Eureka lemons at the height of their season rather than the sweetly perfumed effects of maraschino and crème de violette, and his cucumber-based drinks sing with the pure, slightly musky perfume of the cucurbit. There must be a trick to his Proper Greyhound, which as far as I can tell is just vodka, grapefruit juice and ice, garnished with a jagged sliver of candied peel, but the buzzing intensity of the fruit makes it qualitatively a different experience from the cocktail most of us have been enjoying since we bought our first vodka with a borrowed ID. 1535 N. Vine St., Hollywood, (323) 462-2155.

MUSSO & FRANK GRILL

There may never have been an article on Los Angeles cocktail culture that hasn’t included the Musso & Frank Grill, and it’s not a tradition we’re about to break. Because if a restaurant was once forward-thinking enough to let William Faulkner hop behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps, the rest of us can do nothing but clutch our gin rickeys a little tighter in gratitude. For the past 50 years, the molecular structure of half the livers in Hollywood owes what little integrity it may still retain to the tiny flasks of gin martinis mixed by the maestro Manny Aguirre. 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 467-7788.

OSTERIA LA BUCA

La Buca has long been known in Hollywood as a place to drop by for a plate of squid-ink linguine or a slug of gnocchi, an unpretentious trattoria whose cooking is attributed to Mamma. When the restaurant expanded into a slightly grander space, Vincenzo Marianella, the peripatetic cocktail genius who has designed the drink menus at more bars than most of us have probably sloshed out of, took a crack at La Buca too. What this means is that you can get a proper spritz, the perennial Italian aperitif of Prosecco and bitter Aperol. And the annual return of the fizz made with muddled farmers-market strawberries and a touch of Campari is as eagerly awaited as the spring arrival of fresh strawberry doughnuts at Glendora’s fabled Donut Man. 5210 1/2 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 462 1900.

Even before it opened, Osteria Mozza was legendary for its extraordinary collection of amari, a fleet of bitter Italian digestive liqueurs, handsome bottles arranged on shelves that rise behind the bar up to the high ceiling, real great-grandfather stuff, mostly amassed by co-owner Joe Bastianich on his frequent trips to Italy. The rarer bottles didn’t tend to come with proper papers, so the restaurant can’t actually sell them — the array is a massive display of potential flavors, the way that locked-off library stacks are a display of potential knowledge. Some day a postdoc will write a proposal allowing her to scour the collection in the name of researching late-20th-century gentian use or something, and the syrupy aromas will dance again.