Where to Drink Now: The New Cocktailian's Guide

MUSSO & FRANK GRILL

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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

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.

OSTERIA MOZZA

Osteria Mozza is yet another restaurant ruled by the antique virtues of Italian wine. But cocktails have always been taken seriously there, and when Bastianich lured Milk and Honey’s Eric Alperin out to Los Angeles to launch the drinks program, the bar quickly became known for things like his Campari-tinted tequila-grapefruit cocktail Sculaccione; the Meletti Smash, a quasi-Old Fashioned made with black rum, mint, Meletti bitters and lime; and the amaro-powered Montenegro Fizz. When Alperin left, Chris Ojeda took up the program before he left to go work at the Edison; these days Jeremiah Doherty is behind the stick, working out the resonances between Prosecco and amari with surgical precision. Will his antique, resinous fragrances, which in Italy are associated with randy old men, catch the Los Angeles imagination? In a way, they already have. 6602 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 297-0100.

PROVIDENCE

Among the best young chefs in the country, there are revolutionaries, many of whom spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to make hot ice cream or how to serve hard-boiled eggs with the yolk on the outside, and there are traditionalists, who aspire to recreate Bolzano or Lyon on a plate. Michael Cimarusti, the chef and proprietor of the seafood restaurant Providence in Los Angeles, is neither of these and somehow both, unafraid to introduce a smidge of gelling agent into a sauce when the alternative involves several hundred calories’ worth of butter and cream, but respectful of Los Angeles’ superb farmers-market produce, taking several dozen steps to create a seemingly simple dish of lobster and beets, but knowing when to let a crab taste like a crab. At Providence, an ingredient is rarely forced to do something it doesn’t want to do.

Cimarusti was also probably the first chef in Los Angeles to treat the bar as respectfully as he did his wine list or his cuisine. His seafood tasting menus always include a course or two matched to a cocktail instead of to a wine — I remember a plate of crab paired brilliantly with a cocktail made with sake, lychee liqueur and fresh tangerine juice — and it became almost a game in the restaurant to see what founding bartender Vincenzo Marianella would come up with when challenged to invent a drink to complement a specific dish. If a Los Angeles bartender ever merited the phrase “bar chef,” it was probably Marianella, who used all the tricks of the modern kitchen — the sous vide, the foams, the process that encapsulates liquid inside delicate sacs of gel — to prepare his cocktails and infusions at the restaurant. (One of Providence’s most notorious dishes is its tasting-menu course of “cocktails”: a mojito, a greyhound, and a gin and tonic willed into quivering alcoholic three-dimensionality.) The house style, which goes so well with Cimarusti’s cooking, generally calls for freshly squeezed juice, an assertive spirit, a spicy spirit and a crack of bitters — the drinks are balanced, cold and complex.