THE VARNISH, LA’S MOST INFLUENTIAL COCKTAIL BAR, IS CLOSING AFTER 15 INCREDIBLE YEARS
The Varnish, arguably the most influential and important cocktail bar in modern Los Angeles history, is closing its doors for the final night on July 3, 2024. The speakeasy inside Cole’s in Downtown LA announced Tuesday afternoon on Instagram that it was closing after 15 years of business. Founded by Eric Alperin, Sasha Petraske, and Cedd Moses, the bar opened in February 2009, introducing a modern speakeasy that used market-fresh produce, small-batch spirits, hand-cut ice, classic cocktail recipes, and vintage interior appointments.
In 1999, Petraske, a legendary barman who passed away in August 2015, opened Milk & Honey — which Punch called the most influential bar of the past 20 years — in New York City’s Lower East Side. Milk & Honey introduced a reimagined speakeasy with a set “House Rules,” that included “no fighting,” “gentlemen must take off their hats, hooks are provided,” and “do not linger outside the front door.” Alperin had worked at Milk & Honey and Petraske’s other bar, Little Branch, before he and Petraske partnered at the Varnish with prolific LA bar owner Cedd Moses (Broadway Bar, Seven Grand).
The Varnish opened inside a former back storage room of the 115-year-old Cole’s, one of LA’s longest-running saloons that also claims to have invented the French dip sandwich. Alperin told Tales of the Cocktail that notorious crime lord Mickey Cohen once held court at a table at Cole’s, and allegedly roughed people up outside of plain view in a “back office” that eventually became the Varnish. The Varnish didn’t have the strictures of Milk & Honey, with looser seating arrangements and a more casual dress code. It did have some rules posted inside, such as “no vulgar language or loud behavior” and “cocktail attire is admired but not required.”
The Varnish’s small opening cocktail menu, which charged $11 for drinks, included classics like the Business (gin, lime, honey), Hot Buttered Rum (aged rum, butter, honey, hot water), and Remembering the Maine (rye, vermouth, cherry hearing, absinthe). The menu also had a Bartender’s Choice with the note “Allow us” to help imbibers venture into cocktail territory.
Like speakeasies of the 1920s, the Varnish played mellow jazz tunes in its sub-1,000 square foot space filled with small wood-lined banquettes, white tiles, vintage lamps, and cafe chairs. The room was probably the dimmest drinking space in the city. The late LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold was a regular there, often enjoying a nightcap after meals out on the town.
In 2009, shortly after the bar opened, Gold wrote a feature on the new cocktail movement in Los Angeles, describing the Varnish as “an idealist’s vision of the perfect cocktail bar, a place where drinks can be celebrated as a great American artform, like abstract expressionism, Fred Astaire movies, or jazz.”
The Varnish was awarded Best American Cocktail Bar by Tales of the Cocktail’s Spirited Awards in 2012, was a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Bar Program in 2017, and was number 22 on the World’s 50 Best Bars in 2011. In 2020, Alperin also published a memoir and recipe book about his time at the Varnish called Unvarnished: A Gimlet-Eyed Look at Life Behind the Bar.
In 2019, Alperin reflected on the bar’s 10-year anniversary in a Los Angeles Magazine article: “Even as a classic cocktail bar, we strive to be a local. Sasha, Cedd, and I wanted the Varnish to be that port in the storm. We wanted to comfort and mend. Celebrate and serve. We wanted to make a place where people felt at home. And home only exists when you have community, so without the support of Los Angeles and our incredible employees we wouldn’t be here after 10 memorable years. The plan is to be here for decades.”
In its closure announcement, Alperin recounted the bar’s genesis:
987 square feet. That’s what it took to change my life. Back in 2007 The Varnish was a storage room in the back of Cole’s. Dark and windowless and looked, well, like a dark windowless storage room. But for two New Yorkers looking for a home it glittered like a jewel. The next time Sasha was in LA we ate Bibimbap at Soot Bull Jeep in Koreatown with Cedd, and after, he showed us the tiny space again in the back of Cole’s. Several emails and phone calls later, the three of us agreed to partner up. After all these Los Angeles miles it happened in a New York minute.
So much can happen in a little room the size of a postage stamp.
15+ years, and as we turn the lights off one last time we’ll see you on down the road. XO
