Boutique cocktail shop to open in Grand Central Market

If you like drinking at Bestia, the insanely popular downtown restaurant, you may want to start shopping at Grand Central Market. That’s not as tangential as it seems, or won’t be come this fall when Bestia bar program director Nicholas Krok and bar manager Ryan Duffy open a boutique cocktail, wine and beer shop in the downtown food court.

Called the Courage and the Craft, the shop will sell hand-made spirits, syrups, bitters, bar utensils, recipes and literature, as well as have a curated selection of craft beers (mostly from Germany, Austria and Southern California) and wines.

Going into the roughly 400-square-foot space that recently housed an old-school liquor store, the Courage and the Craft will be on the Broadway side of the market, right across from Las Morelianas — or about where the Eggslut line would end if it stretched south instead of west.

Krok and Duffy have the knowledge, so it will be fun to check out what the two will do with the space. Krok ran the bar programs at Calle Ocho in Manhattan and the Gorbals and Ford’s Filling Station here in Los Angeles before working with chef Ori Menashe at Bestia. Duffy has worked with chef Josef Centeno at Bar Ama, 213 Enterprises’ Cedd Moses and Acme Bar Group in Los Angeles.

The booze-shaped hole that’s currently in the front of Grand Central will be reworked by District Mills, a fabrication and design company based in downtown Los Angeles, and designed by longtime downtown resident Ashley Hohmann, who also helped design Ilan Hall’s Gorbals. Krok and Duffy are both residents of downtown.

If you haven’t been keeping up with all the recent changes at Grand Central, the 1917 historic food court, the new booze boutique joins a list of coming projects, including Golden Road Brewery, an all-vegan ramen and pho shop from chef Ilan Hall and a pasta shop from chef Bruce Kalman.

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