White Russians, uni cocktails: Roy Choi’s Pot Bar opens in Koreatown’s Line Hotel
Sometimes your favorite bar is an intimate speakeasy where the martinis are stirred and the Penicillins are made with single-malt Scotch in an atmosphere of reverence and subdued sparkle. And sometimes your favorite watering hole is a ring of a bar in a hotel lobby smack dab in the middle of K-Town’s splendiferous urbanness where the drinks include the creamiest, dreamiest White Russian and an over-the-top concoction of grassy tequila with uni puree, toasted nori, sesame seeds, cumin and smoked applewood salt.
The latter would be Pot Bar, the newly opened booze-o-rama from Roy Choi with cocktails created by mad mixologist Matthew Biancaniello. It opened on Wednesday, when a mixed crowd of restaurant industry insiders, curious locals, Mid-City professionals and urbane women in black sidled up to the pentagonal bar inside the Line Hotel.
The Line Hotel’s a re-do of what was formerly a Radisson on Wilshire Boulevard near Normandie, whose clientele always seemed to include a corps of Korean Air flight attendants. In the coming weeks, the Line also will include Choi’s vegetarian canteen Commissary, a bakery at the Cafe, and Pot, which is an ode to hot pot, the Asian communal build-your-own meat and vegetable stew.
At the bar, guys with full beards and bare ankles drank Fuzzy Navels, a mixture of peach and apricot liqueurs, passionfruit concentrate, muddled kumquat, candied kumquat and dried peaches. Like the White Russian (which is candy-cap-mushroom-infused vodka, Kahlua, cream, Kahlua foam and grated espresso beans), it’s one of the menu’s Classic Cocktails ($11) reimagined by Biancaniello.
“I’ve never really done these kinds of cocktails before,” Biancaniello said. “For me it was like starting from scratch.” Which is why the Fuzzy Navel is nothing like the peach schnapps and orange juice you drank in high school.
Choi worked the bar and adjacent dining room of the forthcoming Pot (where some bar guests took seats in the circular booths), recommending drinks such as the Uni, White Russian and the Hops with sweet potato. The Hops is another of Biancaniello’s creations listed on the menu under Original Cocktails ($13): Anchor Distilling Hop Head vodka with either carrot or sweet potato juice. “I love juicing sweet potatoes,” Biancaniello said. (Because who doesn’t love juicing a good tuber?)
Two suits with eyes glued to their cellphone screens sipped persistently until one eventually succumbed to the temptation of a large box on top of the bar that contained a mass of squirt guns and plastic sunglasses. He donned a pair of red plastic light-up spectacles, which must have given him the confidence boost he needed to strike up a conversation with the lithe woman next to him.
Occasionally Choi would walk by with a gift of culinary R&D from the kitchen, such as soy-marinated grilled quail. But the only other snacks were bags of all kinds of chips and candy hanging behind the bar and lining the ceiling, among the balloons that spell out POT: chile and lime chicharrones, Doritos, jalapeno popcorn, Chiclets, marshmallows, cotton candy. There were also hidden gems such as a pregnancy test, turkey baster and nail clippers.
A would-be prophet of doom who spotted open bags of marshmallows and chicharrones on the bar claimed, “I don’t eat packaged snacks.” He was ignored.
Pot Bar at the Line Hotel, 3515 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 368-3030, www.thelinehotel.com.
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