Big Bar at Alcove

Big Bar sits alongside Alcove Cafe in two historic bungalows on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, sharing what is one of the larger patios on the east side of Los Angeles. Tom Trellis opened Alcove in 2004 with no prior restaurant experience and, in his own words, no concrete expectations other than to create a community within a community; Big Bar followed on 8 October 2010, a 325-foot bar with a deliberately ironic name. Cari Hah has run the bar since 2015, and her framing of the drinks has held up: they do not take themselves super seriously, and while the cocktails are serious, she is not trying to be nerdy and deep or make things too complex to enjoy. The kitchen is a proper all-day operation — a burger at $23, a lobster roll at $32, steak frites au poivre at $34 — and the bar opens with the cafe, from eight or nine in the morning.

This entry has been rewritten from scratch, because the cocktail programme is not the one we described. Big Bar has rebuilt its entire list around a board-game conceit, with each drink carrying a game's name in parentheses and a featured cocktail rotating monthly. None of the four zero-proof drinks we previously listed survives. The current section is headed fun & games non-alcoholic cocktails, and there are four, all $14. Can Chevy Come Over?, playing on Red Rover, uses a Plaid Circus kimono dragon spirit with dandelion, lime and corn silk kefir — kefir being the interesting part, since a fermented dairy drink gives body that fruit and soda cannot. Sister Sister, for Twister, layers Plaid Circus vespa rossa with Optimist's Cali amaro, a dogwood lemon oleo saccharum, celery and acid-adjusted blueberry. Billie's Holiday, for Cat's Cradle, is the gentle one: Seedlip Garden with catnip cream, vanilla bean, soda and mint. Something Wicked, for Ouija, runs Pathfinder against sour Fuji apple, green almond orgeat and lemon. Two non-alcoholic beers sit on the beer list at $8 — Best Day's west coast IPA and a Fremont Brewing dark, both under 0.5% ABV. Because the featured drink changes monthly, expect the specific names here to move on too.