The New Cocktailians

RUSTIC CANYON

Anne Fishbein

I thought this was supposed to be an Italian restaurant: The Dutch Daisy at Mozza.

Anne Fishbein

Spoon, man: The Mojito Sphere, Providence-style

Anne Fishbein

Cool, cucumber: The Cucumber Aperol Fizz at Riva

Anne Fishbein

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder: An absinthe fountain at the Doheny.

Location Info

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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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More About

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

Technically speaking, Rustic Canyon, the crowded Santa Monica restaurant whose lemon cornmeal cake and sustainable, humanely raised organic-lamb T-bones with baby artichokes make it one of the toughest reservations on the Westside, doesn’t even serve cocktails. It’s a wine bar. You drink Côtes du Rhône. It goes with the food. But Jon Hoeber, who serves as the bartender for want of a better term, does the sorts of things with Prosecco that other creative bartenders do with gin, flavoring it with lemongrass and ginger, mixing it with blood-orange juice and homemade bitters, or serving it on the rocks with salt, chile sauce and wedges of lime, which I can assure you is not how it is done in the Veneto. 1119 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 393-7050.

SEVEN GRAND

Past the doorman on a busy downtown street, up the stairs, past a herd of deer skulls and vitrines filled with Makers Mark bottles tipped with drips of blood-red wax, Seven Grand is a yawning, loud, crowded big-city bar, separated from the street but somehow very much of it, packed with pool-playing lawyers and stubbly art guys, Fitzgeraldian USC students and women who breathe the twin-set look even when they’re wearing leather, office hardasses and visiting businessmen who can’t believe their luck — a pretty good cross-section of people who suspect salvation is sometimes found at the bottom of an empty bourbon glass. Seven Grand specializes in whiskey, and stocks about 125 kinds. Owner Cedd Moses claims that it sells more whiskey than any bar in California, and he may be right — you could look down the considerable length of the bar and not see a single Cosmo or vodka-soda. This is the land of the Sazerac and the Old Fashioned, the Rob Roy and the whiskey sour, prepared under the expert supervision of bartender John Coltharp. I have had an absolutely life-changing Manhattan here, almost meaty in its intensity, made properly with good Kentucky rye, a bracing dose of Angostura bitters and a dribble of Carpano Antica, which may be the only sweet vermouth you would ever contemplate sipping as wine. 515 W. Seventh St., downtown, (213) 614-0737.

TIKI TI

Fifty years ago, every neighborhood in Los Angeles boasted at least one tiki bar, a 1930s Hollywood fad that exploded after World War II, slaking the tropical thirsts of men who had served in the Pacific — or at least entertaining their families while they sizzled their brains on industrial quantities of high-proof rum. Eric Alperin has a theory that the 1950s popularity of tiki bars had to do with what hadn’t yet been dubbed posttraumatic stress disorder, allowing the returned servicemen to reconstruct their war years in pleasant scenarios that didn’t happen to include screaming machine-gun nests. Carl Jung would have understood.

The most elaborate bars featured hula shows or giant volcanoes that erupted every hour, as well as drinks served in coconuts with yard-long straws, parasols and flaming croutons. But when I started going to the Tiki Ti in the early ’80s, it was already an anachronism, a tiny, high-quality tropical bar, open at odd hours, whose arcane assortment of rare rums and homemade syrups kept customers coming in even as places like the Islander, the Torches and even Don the Beachcomber — the first and most influential Hollywood tiki bar — closed by the dozens. But Ray Buhen, the bar’s late founder (his son and grandson still run it), was an unusually imaginative bartender, inventor of the classic Blood and Sand and an early advocate of the Zombie. It’s always been a sport among local drink aficionados to try and guess the identity of the intentionally mismarked bottles and unmarked flasks, to puzzle out the house formulas for the famous Missionary’s Downfall and Ray’s Mistake. It’s no use: The Tiki-Ti is irreproducible. You may as well relax, have a drink, and chant ooga-booga along with the rest of the mugs at the bar. 4427 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake, (323) 669-9381.

THE VARNISH

In the back of a beefy sandwich shop, behind a shut door that looks more like the entrance to a broom closet than the portal to a secret alcoholic dreamworld, the Varnish is the kind of bar that appears to most people only in the throes of their DTs, a tiny, uncrowded room manned by a dream team of Los Angeles bartenders, a place where the Edison’s Marcos Tello or Hungry Cat’s Matthew Eggleston come to relax by making unhurried, classic drinks. The bar is a project of Sasha Petraske, whose bar Milk & Honey on New York’s Lower East Side is perhaps ground zero of modern cocktailianism; his former sidekick Eric Alperin, who ran the bar at Osteria Mozza, and Cedd Moses, of 7 Grand, Cole’s, the Doheny and probably too many other bars to name. It’s their attempt at an ultimate speakeasy-style cocktail bar. (There is no VIP list, but the Varnish is small: You should probably be prepared to wait a bit over a merely superb cocktail outside at Cole’s.) If you are in a mischievous mood, engage one of the bartenders on the subject of ice – block ice and cube ice, crushed ice and cracked ice, beveled ice and round ice and the ice that they personally are obligated to hew before service every evening – a conversation any one of them would be happy to continue until cock’s first crow. 118 E. Sixth St., dwntwn., (213) 662-9999.