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

Barbacoa from Rivera in L.A.

A Sexy, Smokey Cocktail

Barbacoa Recipe:

½ ounce lemon or lime juice
½ ounce homemade ginger syrup* (recipe follows)
¾ ounce simple syrup
½ teaspoon chipotle puree (canned chipotle is easiest to puree)
3 small lime pieces
3 small slices red bell pepper
2 ounces Mezcal
Beef jerky

*Ginger syrup: Juiced ginger is the most accurate way to make the syrup, but you can blend ginger if you don’t have a juicer. Add 2 parts water and sugar (50-50) to 1 part ginger juice.

Muddle first 6 ingredients. Add mezcal, shake and pour into rocks glass. Garnish with additional lime, bell pepper and the beef jerky.

More recipes from Rivera’s Julian Cox HERE

(Source: jasonz)

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

Taking a favorite staple to new heights—Street-Cart Fries, a gluttonous pile of Mediterranean wonder, now being served at Spitz.

Head over to the Little Tokyo outpost this afternoon for a spot in the sun (the fries are at both locations, but only this one has beer and wine), and soon you’ll find a giant basket of warm, crisp fries—string cut or sweet potato—topped with feta that melts admirably quickly. On top of that you’ll find uncountable layers of garlic aioli, lettuce, peppers, onions, olives, more feta and the half-beef/half-lamb meat used in Spitz’s famed döner kebabs. Think of them sort of like a mountain of animal-style fries, if you went to an In-N-Out in Madrid.

It’s available anytime, but during happy hour—which, by the way, is 3 to 7pm weekdays, and all weekend from opening to closing—it’s only $4 without meat, $6.50 with. (Chicken is also an option. You know, if you’re watching what you eat.) And happy hour also means $3 draft beers, $4 sangria and $5 off all pitchers.

Street-Cart Fries
at Spitz
371 E Second St
(west of San Pedro)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213-613-0101
www.eatatspitz.com

From the dudes behind Eagle Rock soul food joint Larkin’s, Mac & Cheeza’s a refrigerator box-sized, spartanly decorated, mostly-for-take-out ode to mac & cheese, with a menu that’s completely customizable. Start with your choice of a base starch (regular pasta/rice noodles), which’ll be filled with a four-cheese blend, and then go to town with twenty-or-so toppings, ranging from veggies (collared greens/jalapeno/peas) to meats (BBQ chicken/hot links/chorizo). Concoctions range in size from the snack-ish Baby Mac to the feeds-15 Mac Daddy and’s available cooked in-house or “Take and Bake” to go; they’ve also got a rotating slew of desserts based on recipes concocted by the owner’s mother, like banana pudding, peach cobbler, and sweet potato pie.

See Armando’s review on Yelp.com

Mac and Cheeza
223 W 8th St
Downtown LA, CA.
213.622.3782
www.macandcheeza.com

Lazy Ox Canteen
Downtown’s all-star gastropub

241 S San Pedro / Little Tokyo, Downtown L.A. / 213.626.5299 / www.lazyoxcanteen.com

The Lazy Ox’s an open-kitchen’d, industrial-feeling, wood-laden gastropub, helmed by an all-star group of restaurateurs, including the guy who opened the first Sushi Roku, the lauded chef from Opus, a beverage director poached from Boa and a past Chaya GM.  Most of their organic produce is from Sage Mountain Farms in Temecula and brought to the restaurant fresh each day by a waiter who also works at Sage Mountain.  The menu’s laden with all-over-the-place deliciousness: pan-fried skate wing w/ ham hock collared greens & shellfish Bearnaise; brick-roasted morcilla sausage w/ licorice pear, black garlic, and charred tomato; and a pancetta tomato sauce/aged pecorino “Jersey Cow Ricotta Agnolotti”.  Ox’s also got wine, sake, soju, and a carefully put-together beer menu, with 20+ options including the honeyish Napa Smith Pale Ale, Japan’s hoppy, hard-to-find Ozeno Yukidoke IPA, and Canada’s dark-colored Terrible.

The plan is to offer “social media” specials/discounts via their Twitter and Facebook, although they’ve already tipped off that they’re planning a whole suckling pig very soon, which takes an entire team to properly eat.

We tried the following, each one better than the one before it:

• assorted seasoned pickles with dill
• hand-torn egg pasta with sunny-side egg, brown butter & citrus vinegar
• charred octopus with pickled shallots, corona beans, garlic-rapini & charred tomatillo
• AND two other seasonal items and one dessert i can’t remember the names of

My friend Margarita and I were astonished at the quality and freshness of each item we ordered.  We are still fantasizing what the rest of the menu items must be like.

Hours of Operation
Day Hours: 8am - 4pm
Dark: 4pm - 5pm
Happy Hour: 5pm - 7pm
Night Hours: 5pm - Midnight
Open: 7 days a week

Map

The Gorbals Los Angeles / 501 South Spring Street / Los Angeles, California 90013 / 213 488 3408 / www.thegorbalsla.com

Open 7 days a week
Lunch: M - F, 11am - 3pm
Dinner: M - W, 6pm - 12midnight | Th - Sa, 6pm - 2am

…and Sunday brunch from 11am - 3pm

Check out the MENU

and this item in particular:
Shepard’s Pie In Potato With Egg this appears like a stuffed potato skin, and in fact that’s what it is. in the skin there is ground beef, spiced with cumin and coriander, and on top of it are mashed potatoes and a soft-cooked quail egg. this dish is also finished with fresh chives.

Review @ foodshethought.com

When we are in a carnivorous mood, we sometimes daydream about Church & State, about wood-baked flatbread with Époisses and poached duck tongues, Santa Barbara spot prawns buried in drifts of finely diced cucumber, and giant, sizzling marrowbones, naked and split in two. Pig’s-foot fritters. Rabbit terrine. Pork belly with fresh peas. Garlicky snails baked under little caps of puff pastry. French fries seethed in pure lard. The whole, whirling carnival of meat. You may have been to Church & State in its earliest days, as a rough-edged artists’ brasserie built into a loading dock deep, deep downtown, music turned up high and lights turned down low; its most interesting features were the cocktails made by its weekend bartender, Michel Dozois. But when Walter Manzke took over the kitchen, fresh from a stint as the chef at Bastide, he transformed the dullish menu into a document guaranteed to dampen the eyes of even the steeliest gourmet. What the restaurant may remind you of is one of the bistros born from the ’90s recession in Paris, slightly grungy places opened by young chefs who had worked in the city’s grandest hotel restaurants, and who transformed simple dishes through hard-won haute-cuisine technique. Manzke shares some of their preoccupations: a fondness for pig parts; fetishes for farmers-market produce and for detail; and the adoption of technology when it suits his purposes. Is this the most refined bistro cooking in Los Angeles? Look at it this way: Manzke can make pig’s ears taste better than fries. 1850 Industrial St., L.A., (213) 405-1434, churchandstatebistro.com. Lunch Tues.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner Tues.-Thurs., Fri.-Sat., 6-11 p.m. Full bar. AE, MC, V.

Serves an endless assortment of waffles and sweet grilled-cheese sandwiches.

From morning until midnight, you can sidle into this unassuming hideaway (wardrobe: T-shirt and jeans) to get your fix of Caramel Apple Pie Waffles. And Double Chocolate Waffles. And Raspberry Tart. Try them on their own with whipped cream and sugar, or match your choice with a deep selection of toppings and suddenly you might have a Tropical Coconut made up of a coconut waffle, lychee ice cream, pineapple and coconut flakes. You’ll probably want some coffee, or maybe a Habanero-Lime Iced Tea.

If you roll in for a breakfast dessert and suddenly you realize it’s already time for a lunch dessert, it might be time to try a Peach and Mascarpone Grilled Cheese, or maybe a Blackberry Grilled  with blackberries, Muenster and walnuts on Texas toast - from UrbanDaddy

Syrup Desserts
611 S. Spring St
(N. of 7th)
Downtown
Los Angeles, CA 90014
213-488-5136

Food tells a story. One sight, one scent, one taste, one bite and it can evoke whole worlds of memory and transmit experiences and truths that words cannot convey. We eat with our eyes and minds as much as with our mouths.

Food is powerful. It sustains body and soul alike. It captures the essence of entire cultures and countries.

Food unites us. A shared experience, it overcomes differences and distances to form common bonds. It is a dynamic vehicle for human understanding.

These are the principles that guide Rivera. Through food and drink, the restaurant relates and celebrates the story and spirit of Latin culture around the world, from the past to the present day and on into the future. It aims to empower both body and spirit, to provide a convivial experience that leaves its guests pleasurably transformed.

Cocktail Menu:

purple rain     10

VODKA, VIOLET, GINGER, ROSEWATER, THAI BASIL

smoke on the water     10

SCOTCH, RASPBERRIES, LEMON, AGAVE NECTAR

sage’d and confused     12

RYE WHISKEY, CHARTREUSE, MARASCHINO, BLACKBERRIES, SAGE

o.p.p.     14

BLANCO TEQUILA, ORANGE, PINEAPPLE, PURPLE BASIL, CAVA

strawberry fields     15

BLANCO TEQUILA, VELVET FALERNUM, STRAWBERRIES, CUCUMBER, MINT

the sabertooth     12

CACHACA, EAU DE VIE, BLUEBERRIES

la picosa     12

REPOSADO TEQUILA, SERRANO CHILE, MANGO, HONEY

clover club     12

GIN, RASPBERRY PRESERVE, EGG WHITE, LIME

blood sugar sex magic     14

RYE WHISKEY, RED PEPPER, AGAVE NECTAR, BASIL

barbacoa     12 - (this is one of my favoties on the menu)

BLANCO TEQUILA, CHIPOTLE, JALAPENO, AGAVE NECTAR, GINGER
(garnished with homemade beef jerky)

  Barbacoa recipe and How To video HERE

donaji     14

MEZCAL, FRESH CITRUS, POMEGRANATE, AGAVE NECTAR, CHAPULIN SALT

like a virgin     6

NON ALCOHOLIC BESPOKE COCKTAIL

bespoke cocktail     14

NAME YOUR POISON

RIVERA RESTAURANT
1050 S. Flower St. #102
Los Angeles, CA 90015
213.749.1460

http://www.riverarestaurant.com/

When Nickel Diner’s pastry chef, Sharlena Fong, created the maple-bacon glazed donut, a sweet-and-savory star was born. Now, the former Bouchon baker is at it again with her latest over-the-top dessert: the s’mores cake. It’s the quintessential summer treat—on steroids. The cake ($5.50 a slice) has all the basic elements of the classic dessert, but this multilayered masterpiece is a far cry from what you had at summer camp. Fong starts with a homemade graham cracker crust, then alternately layers moist devil’s food cake and rich, bittersweet, dark ganache made with local chocolate purveyor ChocoVivo’s cocoa. And instead of marshmallows, beautiful peaks of fluffy whipped meringue top the cake. The kicker: The whole thing is ceremoniously toasted and roasted tableside with…a blowtorch. The scent of burnt sugar and chocolate wafting through the dining room is so potent, several more tables order it after seeing (and smelling) the pyrotechnics nearby.

If that’s not enough, don’t miss Fong’s other showstopping desserts, like the three-layered red velvet cake ($5.50) and the salty-sweet peanut butter-chocolate cake ($5.50).

And with Nickel Diner’s new dinner hours (Tuesday through Saturday, 6 to 11 p.m.), there’s even more time to enjoy them all.

Nickel Diner
524 S. Main St.
Downtown Los Angeles, CA
213-623-8301 
www.5cdiner.com