In a city known for its spectacular array of Mexican cuisine, it’s fitting that one of its best-known cocktails is modeled after barbacoa, a slow-cook method of preparing meat meant to create a tender, juicy, and extra-flavorful final result.
Made with mezcal, lemon, lime, ginger syrup, and chipotles, with red bell pepper and beef jerky for garnish, Julian Cox’s breakout cocktail, invented in 2008, is the superlative example of a drink born of the Angel City. The ginger syrup is evocative of the Moscow Mule, which was invented here, and its mezcal and chipotle pepper purée from Mexico are emblematic of our large Chicano population. The drink was also created in a restaurant—John Sedlar’s Rivera, to be exact—and not a standalone bar, which reflects how LA’s cocktail renaissance sparked long before the city’s aficionados knew such a culture was emerging. Its influence has made ripples throughout LA’s bar culture since its invention.
In the early aughts, on the heels of cocktail booms in cities like New York and San Francisco, LA’s first cocktail-forward programs emerged inside (and adjacent to) restaurants like Comme Ça, Cole’s French Dip, and Mark Peel’s The Tar Pit—many in part due to outsiders looking at the city as the next cocktail frontier. This is one of the many reasons why LA’s drinking landscape doesn’t resemble that of other major cities in the U.S. It’s not the kind of city where it’s easy to bar crawl, because, as many Angelenos will tell you: Nobody walks. Public transportation isn’t easily navigable, as is the case in cities like Chicago and New York. And the permitting process to open a standalone bar is archaic and prohibitive. That’s perhaps why, on an international stage, LA is something of a dark horse when it comes to cocktails.
Much like how the Michelin Guide ceased publication of a Los Angeles guide, not addressing America’s second largest city from 2010 to 2019 during the boom of its culinary scene, the bar scene is also generally overlooked. “I always think that LA is underrated when it comes to cocktails. When I moved here [from New York] in 2016, my biggest surprise about the scene was that it was so creative,” says Prairie Rose, senior drinks editor of Food & Wine magazine. “It just didn't get the kind of national acclaim that New York and San Francisco did.”
As Rose suggests, just because LA’s drinks scene is so easily passed over doesn’t mean there isn’t a thriving cocktail culture simmering alongside our sprawling highways, and tucked into a variety of neighborhood pockets. You just have to know where to look to find it.
Ask anyone to describe the topography of the almost 470-square miles of Los Angeles, and the first words you’ll hear are “spread out” and “full of traffic.” It’s not a misnomer: On a given weeknight, it can take one to two hours to commute from one end to the other by car. This is due, in part, to the way the dawn of the golden age of the automobile coincided with the development of the city. Late-19th-century Victorian values also served as an impetus for the horizontal sprawl. At the time, Angelenos wanted their own piece of nature—a vast yard surrounding a Queen Anne-style house for those who could afford it—which meant growth moved outward instead of upward. These low-density “streetcar suburbs'' were made possible by, first, the cable car, then the electric trolley. The car accelerated the movement, and things haven’t changed much since.
“Much like how the Michelin Guide ceased publication of a Los Angeles guide, not addressing America’s second largest city from 2010 to 2019 during the boom of its culinary scene, the bar scene is also generally overlooked.”
Los Angeles is the kind of town that geographically and infrastructurally encourages fewer stops on a night out. With almost 4 million people, the city is so big that it can fit as many as six or seven other small ones inside of it, but its lack of population density outside of downtown makes building efficient public transit—an element that fuels the ease of bar hopping in many other U.S. cocktail hubs—an ongoing struggle. Very few neighborhoods are conducive to a walking bar crawl because of this. For example, in West Hollywood it would take 45 minutes to walk from Gracias Madre to Melrose Umbrella Co.; even in the denser urban core of downtown, to walk from Death & Co. to Caña Rum Bar would be the same trek.
And while it’s more than possible to utilize rideshare to visit locations near or far from one another, apps have been increasing fares since the beginning of the pandemic, making rides to one or more stops cost prohibitive for many. Let’s say you wanted to visit three different neighborhoods in a night. Hailing a rideshare from Gracias Madre in West Hollywood to Bar Caló in Echo Park to Bestia in the Arts District would run about $66 including tip, but not including rides to and from a place of residence, which could easily match that figure. And that’s without surge pricing in place, which is often the case on weekends. When the transportation leg of a bar crawl could run well over $100 for the night, logistically, it just makes more sense to hang out at a single establishment for a while instead.
The other reality at play is that antiquated, outdated laws and other roadblocks make it much harder to open a standalone bar than a restaurant. In 2022, there were 7.6 bars per 100,000 residents, 59% less than the national average, which is just over 12. In contrast, in 2023 there were 196.7 restaurants in LA for the same number of residents, a figure that is high compared to the national average (170), and in a city middling in population density compared to other metro areas. With all other things being equal among major American cities, LA’s low bar count is a clear anomaly.
And yet, Los Angeles is firmly rooted within California's cocktail culture because of what the city offers from its restaurants. According to sales data tracked by CGA by NIQ, a market research company that focuses on sales at bars, restaurants, and other "on-premise" locations, California establishments—half of which the company tracks in LA—sell their largest portion of cocktails between prime dinnertime hours of 6-10 p.m. and have sales twice the national average during this timeframe.
Eddie Navarrette, executive director of the Independent Hospitality Coalition and owner of FE Design & Consulting, a firm that guides bars and restaurants through the build-out and development processes (including permitting), says the process of obtaining a bar license (type 48) is much more difficult than securing a restaurant with beer and wine license (type 41) or restaurant with full liquor license (type 47), where at least 50% of profits must be derived from food. “That’s why in LA you're going to find more restaurants that have a thriving cocktail scene, as opposed to bars,” he says. “It's just easier to do it that way.”
“With almost 4 million people, the city is so big that it can fit as many as six or seven other small ones inside of it, but its lack of population density outside of downtown makes building efficient public transit—an element that fuels the ease of bar hopping in many other U.S. cocktail hubs—an ongoing struggle. ”
This complicated system prompted Navarrette to spearhead the Restaurant Beverage Program, which streamlines the permitting process and lowers costs associated with obtaining types 41 and 47 licenses. This program, which the city approved in 2022, is helpful for restaurants—as long as a set of more than 50 standards are met and the restaurant is opening in a program-approved district—but the approval of a standalone bar has even more layers of bureaucratic red tape to cut through. Hearings must be held with the neighborhood council, the police department, and the public, so that concerns can be aired and a dialogue between business owners and locals can happen, all of which often stall the process. And all of that hassle does not include the full liquor license itself, which costs approximately $150,000 to buy on the secondary market—whether you’re a restaurant or bar. (There are lotteries for cheaper licenses, but Manny Diaz, principal planner of FE Design & Consulting, says they are hard to win).
With these—and other more complicated and nuanced—conditions in play, many small business owners simply can’t justify the time and money needed to make a standalone bar worth it. “[Entrepreneurs] think about paying rent in a year and don't know if [they’re] gonna get [the] approval, so they tend to get a little gun shy,” says Diaz. “You have to take a leap of faith with your landlord, contractors, and permitting, because you're not going to have that certainty that you get the approval until at the very end, because they want to file building permits at the same time.”
Navarrette says the complicated nature of this system stems from the lingering effects of Prohibition. “Alcohol has been so demonized, we don't even know why we have so many regulations,” he says. “It's been the status quo, unintentionally, and no one has really gone back to [change the laws and] do anything about it. Why are we making it so hard? Why are we making it so difficult? Do we even know? I think we need to ask ourselves that question and actually put the work into maybe making it a little easier for what we want to see in our city.”
While there’s no shortage of calls to revamp what’s perceived as anti-business permitting and regulations by many industry insiders, LA bars-tooled-as-restaurants have been subverting these technical definitions of what it means to be a bar versus restaurant for years. In most cases, the blurring of these traditional lines ends up being beneficial for the business’s bottom line, because staying for more than one round at a place is made more viable when food is available to balance out the booze.
Take one of LA’s most beloved and acclaimed cocktail establishments, Thunderbolt, for example. Although it’s most well known for serving high-tech drinks within a convivial atmosphere, there’s more to the bar’s business model than turning over tab after tab. It is also a restaurant holding a 47 license, so behind its well-oiled bar is a kitchen with burners, full hood, and cooks serving a Southern-inspired menu. In the beginning, the cocktails outsold the high-end food, but as the culinary focus shifted to more casual dishes better suited for eating alongside drinks at the bar—and as owner-operator Mike Capoferri was diagnosed with celiac disease, prompting a new all-gluten-free menu—food sales spiked. Changing the food strategy at a place known primarily as a cocktail bar ended up being a major game changer for business. “Now we have this whole other contingent of guests who want a gluten free option [and] who are excited to have a place where they know they're safe and there's no cross contamination. And it just happens to be a great cocktail bar. But overall we’re just busier and busier, selling more of both,” says Capoferri.
In the case of Lien Ta and the late Jonathan Whitener’s popular, chef-driven restaurant Here’s Looking at You in Koreatown, the reverse scenario unfolded: Cocktail sales became not merely helpful, but integral, to their balance sheet. It was the duo’s simple love of cocktails that prompted them to recruit bar talent Allan Katz and Danielle Crouch from Caña Bar to create an accompanying drinks program that would match what Ta calls Whitener’s “quirky and provocative” food menu. When they had their first meeting with their financial team after opening, the accountants asked whether or not liquor sales were being input into the system correctly because the drinks were selling so well. “This is astonishing, because [cocktails are] literally saving your business,” Ta recalls of the conversation. “If you can make cocktails work at your restaurant,” she adds, “or you make it a priority and just as special as your hospitality or cuisine, you really help your bottom line.”
This experience tracks: According to CGA by NIQ, customers who visit California’s bars and restaurants are more likely to be influenced by signature drinks than national averages, with almost 15% of California consumers saying a specialty cocktail is influential in choosing what and where they want to drink.
At Death & Co LA, the second of four locations across the country, the team has tailored their Arts District space to mirror the same bar-restaurant crossover model. Unlike the flagship East Village bar in New York—a small, 1,200-square-foot space with dark, cavernous vibes and a reputation for being difficult to get into—D&C LA has two rooms spread over 3,000 square feet to hold more guests. They not only take reservations, but also have an extensive food menu.
“We do probably double the percentage of our sales that New York does in terms of food,” says general manager Matt Belanger. “Over here, everybody will come into one place and post up and say, ‘I want to have my whole experience here. We paid the $20 to take the Lyft down to the neighborhood so we're gonna do our whole thing front to back: Drinks, dinner, hang out, drink some more.’”
As Belanger hints at, what LA establishments lack in foot traffic, they strive to make up for in check size. It just makes more sense to keep seats filled for a longer period of time per party if that accounts for a larger bill. Because tips are based on a percentage of the bill, it also ensures higher pay for workers, as well as higher quality hires for restaurants. Shawn Lickliter, former director of bar operations for Republique agrees. “I think that if you have a bartender that is working at a standalone bar, it's really hard to get a check average up to a certain point that you can make a livable wage with tips. So being in a restaurant bar, food’s involved, the check average is higher, you make more money,” says Lickliter.
With the backbone of a food menu that financially supports the establishment and encourages guests to linger longer, restaurants—including bars licensed as them—are the ones driving innovation in LA’s cocktail scene. In the early days, when the city was attracting top consulting talent from the East Coast, a clear and distinct West Coast style centered around fresh produce quickly emerged, thanks to access to some of the country’s most impressive farmers’ markets. This distinguished LA cocktails from those being made in New York, which were largely characterized as booze-forward at the time.
As early as 2008, Christiaan Röllich of the James Beard Award-winning Lucques Group became known for his green tea-infused vodka cocktail, the Green Goddess, and Matthew Biancaniello of Library Bar at The Roosevelt Hotel made headlines with his candy cap mushroom-infused bourbon Manhattans. In 2015, Shawn Lickliter left Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Beverly Hills to join Walter and Margarita Manzke’s French-inspired Republique (then only one year old and already loved by critics) to level up its drink offerings and create a beverage program showcasing Southern California’s bounty. “Keller thought that a cocktail menu should be the Moscow Mule, a Negroni, an Old Fashioned, and a Dark & Stormy. [At Republique,] I took it upon myself to do a program based around produce,” says Lickliter of the time. The Celery, a vegetal and spicy tequila cocktail with serrano and celery salt, has been a crowd favorite.
This garden-to-glass style was innovative at the time, and today many bartenders have taken the model even further by focusing on cultivating a sustainable approach for working with fresh produce. The symbiotic relationship between bar and kitchen comes in extra handy in this scenario. For example, Kim Stodel, bar director of Providence since 2014, has long sought to minimize waste behind the bar by working in tandem with the kitchen to use all parts of available ingredients. His Notify the Mayor! cocktail with vodka, Jardesca, and espelette incorporates a celeriac lime cordial made with celery root scraps from the kitchen, from which a pickled garnish is also made by marinating the celery root in the aforementioned cordial. “Even though the experience is ultra-luxurious, it doesn't mean we are wasteful,” says Stodel.
Forward-thinking cocktail programs have also moved into some of the city’s most famous legacy establishments, such as Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, which reopened in October 2023 after an extensive renovation. with industry veteran Adam Fournier at the helm as the 41-year-old restaurant’s first-ever bar director. “For chefs and restaurants—especially in the ’80s, ’90s, and even into the early 2000s in a fine dining restaurant—the bar was a holding space for people waiting to get to a table [for dinner]. And what [Puck] said to me was that he realized that that's no longer the case,” says Fournier. Now, many guests expect the cocktails to match the level of the food.
“With the backbone of a food menu that financially supports the establishment and encourages guests to linger longer, restaurants—including bars licensed as them—are the ones driving innovation in LA’s cocktail scene.”
At Spago, fifteen drinks anchor the cocktail menu, delineated in wine language (light-, medium- and full-bodied) to bridge the gap with oenophiles. Fournier also created a section with hyper-seasonal cocktails using ingredient scraps from the kitchen. For his Walrus and the Carpenter martini, he blends Ford’s gin with four different vermouths and sherries infused with oyster shells and sea beans, garnishing it with pickled sea beans and a full oyster on the half shell that reveals a poem as the drink is enjoyed. “I want to bring theater into the food experience. And also good value and that luxurious vibe,” says Fournier.
With Fournier and other veteran bartenders bringing their expertise and experience into places that have previously thrived without a specialized drinks program, they’re also creating a more sustainable and expansive cocktail culture. “So many of us aged out of that 2 a.m. club space … there's a stability that happens in a restaurant that allows for creativity, volume, guest interaction, but also a work-life balance. There's such a need, especially after these lockdowns, where we all kind of looked at our industry and asked, ‘How do we find this balance?’”
Another defining aspect of LA’s cocktail style is how many programs are channeling and celebrating the city’s diverse makeup, pushing the scene beyond a Eurocentric point of view.
Kato—a Michelin-starred restaurant inspired by chef Jon Yao’s upbringing in San Gabriel Valley, which is known as America’s first suburban Chinatown—opened as its second iteration two years ago downtown. There, barman Austin Hennelly offers a solid cocktail menu to complement the simplified Asian and Asian American bar bites created by Yao. As he pulls in kitchen ingredients like Hey Song sarsaparilla (the most popular soft drink in Taiwan), maqaw (also known as Taiwanese mountain pepper, a hard-to-source ingredient indigenous to Taiwan), and other culinary staples like Taiwanese black vinegar and ginger, Hennelly is infusing references to Yao’s heritage into the cocktails in the same way the chef does with his cuisine.
Hennelly’s program also has one of the largest selections of non-alcoholic wine, beer, and cocktails in the country. As a non-drinker, it was partially a selfish move for Hennelly—albeit one that has helped change the paradigm in LA, as Kato was the first to offer alcohol-free pairings, and now almost every restaurant has one—but it proved to be an important one for the community at large as well. “Jon knows from the [first] Kato location that a lot of the guests don't drink alcohol, and a lot of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants, the core constituency, do not drink,” says Hennelly. “The reason why Kato has been so successful are Asian and Asian American guests; that's just borne out by the sales numbers. So, if we are doing Asian American fine dining at the highest level, then we need to provide those guests with as high a level of beverage service.”
At multi-level Mexican restaurant Miraté in the Los Feliz neighborhood, bar director Maxwell Reis has created a compelling beverage program that features conscientiously produced (and sourced) spirits, plus modern versions of ancestral beverages, to reflect how LA is home to the largest Mexican immigrant population of any metropolitan area of the United States. “Miraté is a love letter to our city, California, and the people that have immigrated here,” Reis says. “Because this used to be Mexico, straight up, and our population is reflective of that.”
The house pulque, a pre-Hispanic fermented drink served on nitro at the bar, is one such example of Reis’ quest to introduce traditional Mexican beverages to people who might not be as familiar with Mexican culture. In the Tu Compa paloma, Reis mixes the pulque with a “Squirt” cordial, Cascahuin 48 tequila, nami junmai ginjo saké, and Granada Vallet (a Mexican-made pomegranate liqueur); it’s packaged in a yellow, Squirt-like can that comes with a QR code that leads to a fun video game. “Our goal is to pay homage to Mexican culture by not changing it at its source, but using innovation to present it in a way that is still true to itself and interesting and engaging,” says Reis.
In a city that’s also home to the largest Korean American population in the United States, modern restaurant Baroo is at the forefront of pushing the progression of Korean cuisine—and cocktails—into the future. Their third location is the first to have a tasting menu and a beer and wine license (a type 41 costs 1% of what a full liquor license costs), and there, beverage director Jason Lee is working to raise diners’ consciousness of Korean alcohol beyond the omnipresent green bottle of soju often seen next to a grill laden with marinated meats. Soju is not wine or beer, but because the traditional liquor is often packaged at below 25% ABV, a loophole dictates that it can be served under a 41 license. Lee brings in versions distilled from rice, barley, green plum, and even mung bean nuruk (fermentation starter) to supplement a lineup of other Korean beverages like makgeolli (milky, slightly carbonated rice wine) and yakju (clarified rice wine).
“There are all these craft alcohols being made [in Korea] for hundreds of years. They vary from village to village and region to region, even family to family, and carry many traditions,” says Lee, adding that the ones he sources are all made by small, independent producers in Korea, but also in Brooklyn and Pasadena. “We're seeing this as an opportunity—since we won't be able to serve whiskey or tequila—for this category of Korean alcohol. We're just starting to scratch the surface of it in the States.”
Lee is also creating lower-ABV drinks to simulate the other Korean liqueurs he’s prohibited from using by mixing these unique alcohols with house-made, concentrated juices he makes using produce from the local farmer’s market. Lee says the restrictions help create a blank slate for creating something new. “There are no requests for us to make riffs on classic cocktails,” says Lee. “It frees us up to really make the fresh ingredients an integral part of things. Basically everything, if it’s not a Korean ingredient, is from the farmer’s market. So in that way, it’s very reminiscent of my time growing up in LA.”
LA has always existed on its own terms, but as with all things, when you meet a place (or even a person) where it’s at, you’re the one who benefits from that newfound understanding.
Take one final case study, for example: 20-year-old restaurant The Alcove, housed in a Craftsman cottage ensconced in foliage in the Los Feliz neighborhood, is one of the most popular, buzzy daytime patios in all of Los Angeles. Most customers flock there on weekends for its reliable, unchanging brunch menu and huge cake and pastry case. Many have no idea that one of the city’s best bars is attached to it.
Big Bar bears all of the hallmarks of America’s best cocktail programs. Its progressive, seasonal menu offers a distinctly LA point-of-view; many members of the bar staff have been working there for more than a decade—a remarkable amount of time for an industry known for high turnover rates—and most importantly, it serves as a community gathering space where it's not uncommon to find creatives on laptops day-in and day-out. Now 14 years old, which is dinosaur years in bar terms, Big Bar has proven its staying power with accolades from respected industry organizations including The World’s 50 Best Discovery and Tales of the Cocktail.
“LA has always existed on its own terms, but as with all things, when you meet a place (or even a person) where it’s at, you’re the one who benefits from that newfound understanding. ”
When you discover Big Bar after having visited The Alcove for years, it’s an exciting moment, like unearthing a hidden secret that only locals know about. The same can be said for our cocktail scene at large. While most progressive and worthwhile bars in the city might be hard to identify at first glance, or hard to get to, thanks to our sprawl and traffic, it’s unfair to judge LA cocktail bars based on the same criteria used to discern bars in other international cities.
Just because nobody walks doesn’t mean we haven’t found workarounds for a great night of drinking cocktails out on the town. And with so many forward-thinking bartenders adding to the conversation, working in tandem to cement a distinct West Coast style, many of the city’s most dynamic cocktails are simply hiding in plain sight.
You just have to know where to look to find them.
Words by Esther TsengPhotos by Jon Endow
