9 great wine bars in Los Angeles 2024
Here is our guide to some great wine bars in Los Angeles. Enjoy!
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Phone: +1 323 660-4400
Address: 4628 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
When Bar Covell opened nearly 15 years ago, on a sleepy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard bordering eternally-hip Los Feliz, most LA wine bars were, with a couple of notable exceptions (looking at you, Lou Amdur!), sad clichés full of bad cheese boards, themed flights and card-reading Enomatic machines. Covell changed all that. It felt raw, intimate and real. Sommeliers from several of the city’s best restaurants pulled shifts behind the bar. There was no list; the day’s selections were scrawled in chalk pencil on reclaimed windows hanging from the ceiling. Candles offered the vast majority of...
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Phone: +1 (213) 797-5770
Address: 777 South Alameda Street Building 1, Suite 114, Los Angeles
There was a moment, sometime just before 2018, when the hottest ticket in the city was for an $85 tasting menu served by a chef who had just crossed the threshold into his mid-twenties. The restaurant was Kato, the chef was Jon Yao, and the food he was serving at a tiny counter tucked away in a West LA strip mall — anchored in his Taiwanese roots but liberally accented by the kaleidoscope of flavours he experienced growing up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley – was the talk of the town. Yao’s refined cooking was identifiably Taiwanese at its core, with artful and precociously soph...
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Phone: +1 (310) 859-9859
Address: 8700 West 3rd Street, Los Angeles
There isn’t another chef-sommelier partnership anywhere in California that comes close to matching the longevity or successful track record of Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne. For over 25 years, the two have been an inseparable force on LA’s dining scene, opening game-changing restaurants, writing instant-classic cookbooks, spearheading one of the country’s most effective food-driven charities (Alex Loves Lemonade), managing food and drink at the iconic Hollywood Bowl, and racking up award after award in the process. The duo originally opened a.o.c. in 2002, intending it to be a wine bar and...
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Phone: +1 (562) 342-6557
Address: 1147 Loma Avenue, Long Beach
Depending on where you find yourself in LA, and what time of day it is, getting to Long Beach can be a breezy 30-ish-minute drive or a brutal, hour-plus slog. Even the worst of Southern California’s notorious traffic is a small price to pay, though, for a visit to Buvons, a wine bar and retail shop tucked away on a quiet stretch of Long Beach’s trendy Zaferia district. The business is the brainchild of Alicia Kemper, a longtime fixture in LA’s wine scene who made the move south in the midst of the city’s pandemic lockdowns, with the intention of setting up a neighbourhood wine shop in an eme...
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Address: 3501 Eagle Rock Boulevard, Los Angeles
Chef Brian Dunsmoor opened his eponymous restaurant in 2022, just as the city was emerging from the depths of the Covid pandemic. His intention was simple: to create a comforting, approachable neighbourhood restaurant that could serve as a new stage for what he calls “American heritage cookery,” an iterative evolution of the Southern-rooted food he became known for during a years-long run at West LA’s Hatchet Hall. And when Dunsmoor says “heritage,” he really means it – aside from a single four-burner French top stove used for making stocks and some light sautée work, the kitchen is run entire...
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Phone: +1 (323) 460-4170
Address: 5955 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a city famously short on truly fancy, dress-up-and-splurge fine dining restaurants, though whenever such a statement is uttered, it’s generally quickly qualified by something like, “except Providence.” For nearly 20 years, Chef Michael Cimarusti and Co-Owner (and front-of-house wizard) Donato Poto have been among the very few restaurateurs in LA – even, at times, the only ones – executing the type of grown-up fine dining found in other cities across the globe. Providence is a restaurant that exists apart from (perhaps in parallel to?) most if not all the prevailing trends of...
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Phone: +1 (213) 900-4900
Address: 1356 Allison Avenue, Los Angeles
Partners in both business and life, Charles Namba and Courtney Kaplan opened Tsubaki in 2017 with the modest ambition of creating a small, neighbourhood restaurant based on their shared vision of a modern izakaya. Each brought their own sensibilities to the table. Charles was born in LA to Japanese-American parents and, though he grew up eating his mother’s traditional Japanese cooking, his culinary path veered in a decidedly European direction, with several formative years spent in resolutely French kitchens with chefs like David Waltuck (at Chanterelle) and and Thomas Keller (at Bouchon). Co...
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Phone: +1 310 899-6900
Address: 1314 7th Street, Santa Monica
International Sustainable Wine List of the Year, presented by Oddbird 2024
In a city that hasn’t quite adopted the wine bar culture, Esters has been able to resonate not only to the locals of Santa Monica but to all of LA. Whether you’re there to buy a bottle to take home, have a glass at the bar, or taste through a line of a visiting winemaker, Esters over delivers on all accounts. Note the perfect ratio of indoor to outdoor seating, a casual menu that features visiting chefs on certain nights, and a knowledgeable and welcoming staff. This sentiment is universally agreed upon as well, with the LA Times naming it the best wine bar in Southern California in 2017.
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Phone: +1 213 290-6309
Address: 5125 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles
Tabula Rasa is housed in a dimly lit space where Los Feliz and East Hollywood adjoin, and quite simply brings a lot of fun to the Los Angeles wine scene. The team takes programing to a whole new level with food trucks, pop ups, guest DJ sets, and industry nights rotating just about every night. This continuous energy keeps one coming back regularly to open bottles with friends and experience the array of events. The minuscule kitchen manages to dish out everything from a cubano to an octopus salad to pair with your glass of orange wine or bottle of Champagne.
