Where to Drink Now: The New Cocktailian's Guide

DRAGO CENTRO

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The Varnish

118 E. 6th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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More About

• Cedd Moses
• Edison
• Eric Alperin
• Main Dish Recipes
• Liquor and Spirits

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.

FIG

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.