De La Playa Records & Leisure

De La Playa Records & Leisure is an alcohol-free record shop and community space at 110 South Avenue 56 in Highland Park, opened in June 2024 by three co-founders whose reasoning was refreshingly unsentimental. There are enough alcoholic bars in the neighbourhood, John David Preap told L.A. TACO at the opening; we just wanted to create an alternative space for people to listen to music and chill. Preap, who goes by Bles, is a first-generation Cambodian-American raised in the Harbor Area and came to the idea through his work as beverage director at Melody Lounge in Chinatown, where he also DJs. His partners are Diego Fuego Guerrero, a first-generation Mexican-American raised in Long Beach who is an associate civil engineer for Los Angeles County in his other job, and Jon Paul Lourenço, known as Soulchild Seb, also raised in Long Beach to parents from the Azores. Both are established DJs, and Guerrero and Lourenço designed most of the room themselves — an ode to the founders' roots in Long Beach and the Harbor area, worked through a tropical, jungle-minded interior heavy with plants. Notably, the alcohol-free identity was a deliberate choice rather than a licensing constraint, though Lourenço has said they briefly considered a beer and wine licence before deciding the process was too gnarly.

The shop pairs thousands of records — hip hop, reggae, jazz, cumbia, salsa, funk and house — with a retail range of more than a hundred non-alcoholic drinks, taking in Greek and Italian-style amari, non-alcoholic IPAs, de-alcoholised wines and ready-to-drink cocktails. Anything on the shelf can be bought and drunk in the space rather than taken away, which is what makes it function as a bar rather than a bottle shop. At weekends the founders run Bar Non, their own made-to-order zero-proof cocktail pop-up, on the patio alongside guest DJ sets, listening parties and visiting vendors; opening-weekend drinks included a build on non-alcoholic rum with ube, cinnamon, maple and black walnut, and a Paloma finished with hopped grapefruit bitters. The shop is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm, with the Bar Non patio running Saturdays and Sundays.