The One-Eyed Gypsy Bar | downtown L.A.

A full rundown of what you need to know about the new, kind of 30s-carnival-themed bar/performance venue from the woman behind Villains Tavern (compliments of Thrillist.com):

• Though thematically similar, each room is decorated in its own style, with unique adornments like hand-drawn wallpaper featuring tiny pictures of Medusa, chandeliers made of Bedouin jewelry imported from Egypt, and a stage with a crescent-shaped Austrian curtain that looks like a waterfall when it opens.
• Scattered around the bar are old-school games the owner’s collected, including a Big-style fortune-teller, a love-o-meter, and two skee ball machines that distribute tickets redeemable for drinks & food.
• Because fairs traditionally have the best food, they’re got the Brite Spot guy slinging an extensive fried menu (corn dogs, sweet potato tots, funnel cakes, deep-fried Chocodiles, etc.) as well as share-eats like a reuben pizza with sauerkraut, corned beef, and thousand island.
• You can wash down those Chocodiles with drinks like a sloe gin float with cider/sweet & sour, and the vodka/red wine/blood orange/lemon & lime/bitters Riddler’s Punch from a dude who’s done time at Villains Tavern & 7 Grand.
• There’s never a cover for the entertainment, which’ll include up-and-coming indie rock bands (one-off 45s will be specially pressed for the show!) to ukelele players and magicians.

One Eyed Gypsy
901 East 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 | MAP

Joe Jost’s
2803 East Anaheim Street
Long Beach, CA 90804

The bartender’s tasks: pouring drinks, cleaning glasses, making sandwiches and peeling hard-boiled eggs.

The bartenders at Joe Jost’s, in Long Beach, peel a lot of eggs.

That’s because this bar, one of the oldest west of the Mississippi, is far more famous for its pickled eggs ($1 each) than for its handful of beers on tap.

Opened in 1924, as a barbershop, the bar has been a mainstay of Long Beach life since long before you heard Snoop Dogg or Sublime for the first time. It may be called the LBC now, but back then, Long Beach was home to so many Midwestern immigrants, it was known as Iowa-By-The-Sea; Joe Jost’s encapsulates that history.

The pickled eggs—punchy orbs full of the tang and heat of vinegar and yellow pepper—are one of our favorite bar snacks in the Southland. Served in a twist of deli paper, with a pile of pretzel sticks and a heavy-handed showering of black pepper, they’re tailor-made for timeless bar snacking.

The bar’s trifecta of pickled eggs, a “special” ($3)—soft rye bread slathered in mustard and wrapped around a Polish sausage, a pickle and a slice of cheese—and a schooner ($5-$6) of literally ice-cold beer, is far more than a meal.

Joe Jost’s, 2803 East Anaheim Street, Long Beach, CA 90804  joejosts.com

There seems to be a Cedd Moses-owned bar for every purpose in downtown L.A. If you want rye whiskey, you go to Seven Grand. If it’s mezcal or rum you’re thirsting for, there’s the newly opened Las Perlas. And now, for Irish whiskey lovers, there’s Casey’s.

You could always count on this Grand Avenue bar—open since 1969, but owned and operated by Moses since 2007—for a shot of whiskey or a beer. But now there are more than 30 Irish whiskeys on offer, a breadth of selection rarely found in the U.S.

The menu is full of rare and unique finds, all listed according to distillery (there are only four distilleries in Ireland). From the Irish-owned Cooley Distillery, there’s Kilbeggan, a silky whiskey with hints of golden raisin and vanilla, and single-grain Greenore which tastes almost like bourbon.

Everyone is familiar with Bushmills, but the same distillery also produces Knappouge, a lighter single malt with notes of honey, as well as smooth, crisp 12-year-old Redbreast, the only pure pot-still whiskey from Ireland currently available in the U.S.

Regular Jameson can do the trick, but once you sip Jameson Gold Label, which gets its strong vanilla flavor from new oak barrels, there’s no turning back.

Casey’s Irish Pub / 613 S. Grand Ave. / Downtown LA / 213-629-2353 /  www.bigcaseys.com

New westside bar from the people behind the original Bigfoot Lodge in Atwater Village. Find a red leather booth by the totem pole and start researching your whiskeys, bourbons and ryes—they’ve got some impressively oddball rarities like the Willet 17-Year Single Barrel—it’s spicy, it’s from the wilds of Kentucky and there are only 24 bottles of it in the world.  They’ve also got some recognizable specialties including the Toasted Marshmallow and the Sasquatch that you’ll recognnize from the original Bigfoot Lodge as well as an unlabeled, innocuous-looking jug behind the bar—filled with a potent brew, dispensed in shot form, with exotic herbs claiming to cure everything from weak bones to infertility to…sobriety.

Bigfoot West
10939 Venice Blvd
(at Prospect)
Culver City
Los Angeles, CA 90034
310-287-2200
website