Where to Drink Now: The New Cocktailian's Guide

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

...continued from page 5

TIKI TI

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The Varnish

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

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown

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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.