Botanica

Botanica opened in May 2017 on Silver Lake Boulevard, founded by Emily Fiffer and Heather Sperling — both former food and lifestyle writers — as what they describe as a destination for nourishing hospitality. It works as a restaurant and a market at once, and the cooking is seasonal Southern Californian built around the products of regenerative agriculture, sustainable seafood and responsible animal husbandry. The dinner menu runs a bistro burger at $24, steak au poivre at $45, California steelhead trout at $38, braised pork cheeks at $28 and a tomato tonnato panzanella at $19. It opens Wednesday to Sunday from 9am, with coffee until four, brunch from ten, happy hour from three, and dinner until nine.

This entry has been upgraded, because our earlier assessment was out of date. We previously had no drinks on file for Botanica and rated its non-alcoholic offering as minimal. The current menus — both dated this summer — carry a printed section headed Zero Proof on the dinner card and again at brunch, and it is a proper list rather than a token line. At dinner there are seven: a blueberry yuzu shrub at $10, a cucumber, lemon and ginger spritzer at $12, a yuzu spritzer at $10, a Ghia spritzer at $15 built on the Los Angeles-made non-alcoholic aperitif, Lovely Bunch apple juice at $8, Strange Water sparkling coconut water at $8 and Fermensch kombucha at $9. Brunch keeps all of those and adds two more: a sunrise juice of orange, grapefruit, lime, lemon, yuzu and ginger at $8, and the little tomato, which is the house non-alcoholic bloody mary, at $10. The shape of that list tells you what kind of place this is — shrubs, spritzers and small-producer bottles rather than non-alcoholic spirits imitating cocktails, which fits a restaurant whose wine programme, run by beverage director Pierluc Dallaire, has been built on low-intervention producers since it opened. It is not the deepest zero-proof list in Los Angeles, but it is real, current, priced fairly and made from the same ingredients as the kitchen.