Lesley Jacobs Solmonson

Last year, the Four Seasons Hotel chain jumped on the locavore bandwagon with its 100-Mile cocktail program, challenging its properties worldwide to create cocktails with ingredients sourced from within 100 miles of each hotel's location. This year, CUT and Sidebar at the Beverly Wilshire, Culina and Windows Lounge at the......

This Sunday, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, normally a members-only venue, will open its doors to the public for "Art Beyond the Glass." The event is an art show/bartending extravaganza featuring various creative expressions -- fine art, photography, furniture design, even DJing -- by L.A. bartenders, many of whom are......

In the never-ending quest to encourage the enthusiastic consumption of spirits, another National "Something" Day is upon us. Today, June 19, is officially National Martini Day, which in the grand scheme of "National" whatevers is as fine an excuse to have a drink as any. The noted satirist H. L......

As cocktail books go, The Savoy Cocktail Book is neither precise -- it contains numerous forgotten ingredients (you mean an Aviation uses Crème de Violette?!) and botched measurements -- nor original, as it cobbled together recipes from numerous other sources without any credit whatsoever. Despite the aforementioned facts, the book,......

In the modern bartending pantheon, Sam Ross is a fellow of epic proportions. Having helped his mother and sister open Ginger, a cocktail bar at the forefront of the Melbourne cocktail revolution, he headed to the States in 2004 where he mixed drinks at three of New York's legendary locales,......

Ask for a Picon Punch in Bakersfield and the locals will know you are an out-of-towner. Here in Bako, it's just a Picon, thank you very much. Outside of the Basque country and Central California's Bakersfield, which has the largest Basque population in the States, most of the general populace......

With Negroni Week in Los Angeles fully underway, it seemed only natural that the participating bars might be in a charitable mood -- especially since part of their drink proceeds are donated to charity. And so, in that same spirit of giving, a number of the bartenders involved opened up......

It began with a simple email to a few Los Angeles bartenders. "Hey you all, anyone interested in bringing Negroni Week to L.A.?" Within an hour, barkeeps citywide were hopping on board, linking in fellow bartenders, and making plans for their own personal negroni variations. If you hang out in......

With the flurry of trends in the cocktail world, you'd be hard-pressed to guess which will have staying power. Take barrel-aging. Yes, it's super cool to get your nightly cocktail from a barrel with provenance, but is it really relevant anymore? With barrels now available to the home bar geek,......