Stir Crazy

For decades, Stir Crazy was just another Hollywood-adjacent coffee house – or, in LA terms, a co-working spot for aspiring screenwriters. It had grown tired over the years and seemed destined for closure until an unlikely trio of young operators took over in 2023, when the original owner decided to retire. The new trio kept both the name and the rough bones of the small space, but updated the worn finishes, made the tiny kitchen more serviceable and jettisoned the coffee and scones in lieu of a produce-driven menu of small plates and one of the city’s best wine programs.

This new Stir Crazy will feel immediately recognizable to anyone who has done some travelling in the hipper quarters of Europe’s major cities lately. It’s a tiny, convivial jewel box of a wine bar run by passionate young people serving unpretentious, delicious food accompanied by generally low-intervention wines. They’ve even gotten the opening hours right: evenings only from Monday to Friday, which is almost unheard-of in the US. Perhaps most impressively, they’ve managed to create a lovely, vibrant community within a very short period of time, which is no mean feat in a car-driven city practically built on individuality and solitude.

Wines at Stir Crazy are the purview of the immensely talented Mackenzie Hoffman, a recent-ish transplant from New York who cut her teeth at James Murphy and Justin Chearno’s legendary The Four Horsemen. After stints at Santa Monica’s now-closed Onda and natural wine hotspot El Prado in Echo Park, Hoffman fell in with her two current business partners and the rest, as they say, is history.

The program at Stir Crazy is as unpretentious as it is personal. There are no ostentatious verticals of marquee producers, no blurbs extolling the virtues of Kimmeridgian limestone, no filler and no comfort blankets. It’s a list of wines Hoffman finds delicious, period; thankfully, she has very good taste.

French wines form the core of the offering, accentuated by selections from Central Europe and California. Almost everything is sourced from producers working with a minimal-intervention approach, organised in broad groupings by colour (white/orange/pink/red) with very few additional guideposts to light the way – presumably to help drive questions and discussion. Occasionally you’ll find a helpful annotation (e.g. “oxidative”), or perhaps an indication of whether a wine is on its way out (“last call”) or freshly-landed (“new”), but beyond that, this is a list that warrants a conversation. Pricing is variable, but in general terms, there are a ton of sweet spots… and more sub-$100 finds than most places in LA these days.