Where to Drink Now: The New Cocktailian's Guide

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Mar 4 2009

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Zahra Bates, veteran of the London cocktail scene who currently presides over Providence’s intimate bar, has perhaps the oddest background of any bartender in town. While crisply shaking a Sazerac, she confessed that her father is from West Virginia, and her mother, who had been decorated as a young girl for her efforts running guns for the Moroccan independence movement, lives in a traditional Berber village near the Algerian border. (Bates grew up in Los Angeles and went to university in London, where she supported herself working at the Long Bar at the Sanderson hotel.) What do her relatives think of her career? “Oh, I dare not tell them,” she says, lowering her eyes. “When I return for visits, there is often a line of prospective suitors spilling into the street, no matter how often I tell my mom that my life is elsewhere. I do not think they’d understand.” 5955 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 460-4170.

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The Varnish

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

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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RIVA

The Cucumber Aperol Fizz at Riva is an especially nice beverage, the kind of complexly scented long drink you may associate with lazy afternoons by the Mediterranean, exactly the right thing to sip in a restaurant a hundred yards from the Pacific. Another cocktail, a Creamsicle-hued foam of apricot liqueur and jet-fuel-scented grappa bound with egg white, conjures a third, new taste, an illusion of bitter almond that seems to float a few inches above the glass. I probably should have guessed the drinks were designed by the Varnish’s Eric Alperin — he expresses the qualities of beaten egg whites almost on a molecular level — but didn’t until I was dumb enough to try to point him to what I thought was a great bar he may not have gotten around to yet. 312 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 451-7482.

RIVERA

John Sedlar, the godfather of modern Southwest cuisine, has decided to throw his lot in with the molecularists at his new Staples-adjacent restaurant, and the classical French techniques that underlaid his 1980s cooking have been supplemented with a heavy dose of Spanish chemistry-lab stuff. Where his cooking used to be seriously wine-friendly — his restaurant Bikini famously offered Chateau d’Yquem on tap — the tiny, highly flavored bites at Rivera, even the short-rib-stuffed tamales or snips of Serrano ham, lean more into the sweet-sour-bitter snap of Julian Cox’s well-made cocktails instead. A version of Jerry Thomas’ 150-year-old Martinez, sweetened with a hint of maraschino liqueur and herbaceous red Antica Carpano vermouth, tastes more like a primordial Manhattan than like the martini it classically evolved into; the proto-margarita called Rivera’s Cup is spiked with cucumber, and a Donaji, a potent mix of mescal, citrus and pomegranate, is served in a glass whose rim has been dipped in a blend of salt and ground dried grasshoppers. The quiet rear dining room of Rivera is lined with glowing bottles of the tequila custom-distilled for the restaurant, engraved with the names of Sedlar’s best customers. It’s like a Japanese bottle bar translated into Spanish. 1050 S. Flower St., dwntwn., (213) 749-1460.

RUSTIC CANYON

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.