L.A.'s Best Cocktails

Yee Mee Loo

In the 1970s and 1980s, the fragrant old bar Yee Mee Loo, attached to perhaps the worst restaurant in Chinatown, was famous for its cocktail called the Tidy Bowl, a raw solution of vodka and blue Curacao that was equally vile to sip and behold but did resemble the pale-blue liquid that resided in chemically refreshed toilet tanks and had a get-drunk-quick quality that could not be denied. When the place closed in the late '80s, its elaborate carved bar was moved to a restaurant fitted into an old Bekins Storage building (the bar is still stored upstairs, over what became Palate), and the blue drink flitted all over town. Where can you find a Tidy Bowl now? You kind of can't, actually. But the Good Luck Bar in Silver Lake, a Chinese-themed bar designed as an homage to the old place, has on its menu an azure cocktail called the Yee Mee Loo: surely no triumph of the bartender's art but at least an improvement over the original. Think blue, I guess. 1514 Hillhurst Ave., Silver Lake. (323) 666-3524.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

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Musso & Frank Grill

6667 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Category: Restaurant > American

Region: Hollywood

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• Nancy Reagan
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Blue Hawaiian

Were we talking about blue drinks? Sorry — must have been thinking about something else. Anyway, Damon's Steak House, an old Glendale restaurant that went tiki in a decade when all the other bars in town were tearing the outriggers off their ceilings and replacing them with fake Tiffany lamps and ferns, serves a version that: 1. is blue; and 2. tastes exactly like bubble gum. Say hi to Elvis for me. 317 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. (818) 507-1510.

Greyhound

Hungry Cat was perhaps the first produce-driven cocktail bar in Los Angeles, deeply co-dependent on the Hollywood Farmers Market around the corner, and owned by chefs, Suzanne Goin and David Lentz, with the pull to acquire the most fragrant basil and the sweetest Cara Cara oranges in town. It may be a seafood restaurant, but what you smell when you walk into the place is neither crab cakes nor grilled fish but citrus and fresh herbs. This makes it odd, I guess, that the cocktail Hungry Cat is most famous for is not a formula calling for exotic ingredients or painstaking preparation but its Proper Greyhound, a basic mixture of gin and grapefruit juice that may have been something you slapped together in the parking lot of your hometown 7-Eleven, with a carton of Minute Maid and a half-pint of Gilbey's you bought on your older brother's ID. The grapefruit juice is squeezed to order, of course, no doubt from an Oro or other hard-to-find breed, and the gin is piney Plymouth. It flies a tail fin of candied grapefruit peel. But other than that, I have no idea why the Greyhound tastes so much better than anything you may have encountered. You'll have to order one and see for yourself. 1535 N. Vine St., Hlywd. (323) 462-2155.

Irish Coffee

If you're searching for the most aesthetically pleasing Irish coffee in Los Angeles, you're probably going to end up at Casey's up on Grand, with 36 Irish whiskeys on its list, Bushmills older than your grandmother and long pints of Guinness guaranteed not to evoke memories of the La Brea Tar Pits. Cedd Moses, who owns an alarming percentage of the best cocktail bars in town, is an overachiever that way — even the Irish Car Bomb, a revolting shotgun marriage of Bailey's, Jameson and Guinness, seems artisanal here. But for Irish coffee the old-fashioned way, which is to say lined up in advance five deep down the bar, powered by something like high-test office coffee and both handy and delicious, Tom Bergin's Tavern, catering to sentimental drunks since 1936, is exactly what you need. The bar serves 5,000 Irish coffees on St. Patrick's Day alone. If you get lost, just look for the giant shamrock reading "House of Irish Coffee." 840 S. Fairfax Ave., L.A. (323) 936-7151.

Absinthe

One week you're spending hours on absinthe websites, purchasing tiny flasks of pre-ban Pernod from London collectors and hanging out at a restaurant where the bartender is surreptitiously pushing shots of homemade absinthe that he has fashioned from homegrown wormwood. The next week, when it turns out that absinthe was never illegal in the first place, bars flow with the stuff, and you find yourself engaged in endless conversations about louching and extract. Never has a food culture leapt from connoisseurship to douchebaggery to flameout quite so fast. Are there still exquisite absinthe fountains in the better cocktail establishments? Probably, although they may well be shoved back into a corner behind a case of mezcal. But absinthe is still a fascinating liquor, flavored as profoundly with tragic history as it is with anise. For matters of wormwood these days, it's probably best to retire to Ivan Kane's Café Was. The absinthe bar in the mezzanine is custom-fashioned for washing away the pain in the manner of Baudelaire. 1521 Vine St., Hlywd. (323) 466-5400.

Beer After Branca

You are in Marina del Rey. You are at Vu. You are looking at sailboats. A waitress brings out a bottle of Fever Tree ginger beer and a small glass half-filled with a lukewarm, oil-thick sludge of ginger liqueur with Fernet-Branca. Your experiences with Fernet-Branca have not been happy ones, and you think of James Hamilton-Paterson's novel Cooking With Fernet-Branca, where the unpleasantness of the bitter digestive is a factor in nearly every scene. You are not sure whether to pour the Fernet into the ginger beer or the ginger beer into the Fernet, and your waitress has to ask four people before you discover that you are supposed to alternate sips, Fernet-ginger-Fernet-ginger-Fernet-ginger. This is the kind of thing they do in San Francisco, you think, where shots of Fernet-Branca are thought to be as necessary to the manhood of a chef as the obligatory jagged-knife tattoo. The drink is all gone. You are alarmed to discover that the chef's specialty, chicken-fried watermelon, is pretty much as charming as it sounds. 14160 Palawan Way, Marina del Rey. (310) 439-3032.