L.A.'s Best Cocktails

Dr. Hull's Tonic

Cocktails, I think we can agree, are not health food, no matter how many acai berries, organic pomegranates or metric tons of goji you manage to squeeze into them. Your pounding head the next morning does not care whether you've been drinking Rain or Stoli, Veev or Old Grand-Dad. You're sacrificing those brain cells for the cause. That being said, Akasha customer, if it makes you feel better to know that your vodka is organic, has been mixed with fresh-squeezed carrot juice and contains chakra-snapping doses of ginger, I wouldn't dream of standing between you and the Saturday night of your dreams. Namaste, good buddy, namaste. 9543 Culver Blvd., Culver City. (310) 845-1700.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

At Border Grill, the spicy, citrus-based house sangrita is just right mixed with tequila.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

The Flaming Honey Bowl at Rosemead tiki institution Bahooka

Location Info

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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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• Sweet Bricia
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• Beverages

Smoke of Scotland

When you trace the cocktail movement in Los Angeles, nearly every trail leads back to Vincenzo Marianella, who started the bar chef movement at Providence, the cocktailian modern speakeasy at the late Doheny, and is epitomizing the farm-to-glass thing at Copa d'Oro, a high-volume bar around the corner from the Santa Monica Farmers Market, where he invents drinks on the spot from customer suggestions of fruits, liquors and aromatics like a brilliant improv comic weaving audience suggestions into art. His Smoke of Scotland — ultrapeaty Laphroaig given glowing, moody depth with a few drops of vermouth, elderflower liqueur and the Italian artichoke liqueur Cynar — taught Scotch whisky to speak Italian. 217 Broadway, Santa Monica. (310) 576-3030.

Blackberry & Sage

The Santa Monica Farmers Market is like the giant gas planet of the local culinary universe, influencing the orbit of restaurants even many miles away and bringing local stoves into tight compliance with its rhythms. The bar at FIG, in the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, is no more immune to this influence than the kitchen — the drinks menu, designed by Charlotte Voisey, bursts with things like beet juice, blood oranges, hand-pressed blueberries and organic lemon thyme. (Let us not even speak of the fig-jam mojito.) Blackberry & Sage, a summerish cocktail tied together with good bourbon and a dash of cassis, is the kind of thing you want in your hand after a trail walk or a second set of tennis, an elegant cocktail with an earthy smack of sun-drenched earth. 101 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 319-3111.

Two Moon July

Cocktailianism has always included a certain level of obsessive tinkering, the drive to craft a substitute for pimento dram or the citrus base called falernum when no satisfactory version exists on the shelves, to concoct one's own orgeat from a handful of really delicious almonds, to hunt down a long-discontinued liqueur that exists only in the basement bars of 37 Korean War vets. The bar at Playa, John Sedlar's new small-plates restaurant in the old Grace space, pushes the boundaries of the esoteric into strange, uninhabited grounds. One of the cocktails includes both X.O. Armagnac and bitter corbezzolo honey, a costly substance difficult to find even in Sardinia; another features tobacco-smoked rye whiskey and toasted chiles. A bartender — at the moment, the bartenders include Julian Cox of Rivera and Julian Wayser, formerly of the Doheny — refuses to make the cocktail called An Andalusian because the bar is temporarily out of the rare Spanish vermouth he prefers. And Two Moon July, one of the specialties of the bar, is a fizz involving bourbon, freshly pureed grapes, a Ghanaian spice called grains of paradise and a blend of at least three different Italian amari. It is bitter, refreshing, intense. And it is a good bet you will not be making this at home. 7360 W. Beverly Blvd., L.A. (323) 933-5300.

Cosmopolitan

The Cosmopolitan is the classic sweet pink thing in a martini glass, popular in 1970s fern bars and given a stunning PR boost by its ubiquity in Sex and the City. It is also one of the drinks many cocktailians refuse to pour. What Cole's makes is a Prohibition-era cocktail by the same name that is also sweet and pink — tinted with the bar's own raspberry syrup — and is on the menu presumably so that it will have something to serve the occasional customer who asks for a Cosmo. Is it a drink, or a practical joke? I have no idea. The cocktail menu claims that Cole's Cosmopolitan dates from 1926, but no bar manual I have seen from the period has even a mention in the blank space between Corpse Reviver (No. 2) and Country Club Cooler. 118 E. 6th St., dwntwn. (213) 622-4090.

Last Tango in Modena

Matthew Biancaniello, of the Library Bar in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, can be at the same time one of the most interesting and the most irritating bartenders in Los Angeles, capable of drinks of great beauty, but also of concoctions so horrid that you want to scrape them out of your mouth and out of your mind. He may be the only self-taught Los Angeles bartender in the top rank, and he is as likely to ignore the rules as to follow them. He has no printed menu in his small, dark bar — he likes to intuit what you might like to drink. There are, to be sure, more than a few people here who believe Biancaniello is the greatest bartender of them all; who are happy that his inventions, which are often entire meals abstracted in a rocks glass, exist outside the universe of Milk & Honey or the Savoy. But when it works, it works: When he'll allow you to order it, his Last Tango in Modena, with farmers market strawberries, balsamic vinegar, gin and an elderberry foam, is an intelligent riff on a classic Italian dessert. 7000 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd. (323) 466-7000.