Varnish

from LA Weekly:

In the back of a beefy sandwich shop, behind a shut door that looks more like the entrance to a broom closet than the portal to a secret alcoholic dreamworld, the Varnish is the kind of bar that appears to most people only in the throes of their DTs, a tiny, uncrowded room manned by a dream team of Los Angeles bartenders, a place where the Edison’s Marcos Tello or Hungry Cat’s Matthew Eggleston come to relax by making unhurried, classic drinks. The bar is a project of Sasha Petraske, whose bar Milk & Honey on New York’s Lower East Side is perhaps ground zero of modern cocktailianism; his former sidekick Eric Alperin, who ran the bar at Osteria Mozza, and Cedd Moses, of 7 Grand, Cole’s, the Doheny and probably too many other bars to name. It’s their attempt at an ultimate speakeasy-style cocktail bar. (There is no VIP list, but the Varnish is small: You should probably be prepared to wait a bit over a merely superb cocktail outside at Cole’s.) If you are in a mischievous mood, engage one of the bartenders on the subject of ice – block ice and cube ice, crushed ice and cracked ice, beveled ice and round ice and the ice that they personally are obligated to hew before service every evening – a conversation any one of them would be happy to continue until cock’s first crow. 118 E. Sixth St., dwntwn., (213) 662-9999.