QUICKER than you can say "Cruvinet," Los Angeles has become quite the town for wine lovers looking for a little fun.
Consider the 5-month-old wine bar Vinoteca Farfalla in Los Feliz. A chalkboard over the long wooden bar lists some 45 wines by the glass. Friends huddle over plates of \o7salumi\f7 and cheese, dipping breadsticks into tapenade and sipping Nero d'Avola from Sicily or Malbec from Argentina. It's Wednesday night, and the narrow little place is packed.
In Studio City, an exciting selection of sherry accompanies the bar snacks at Next Door, a stylish new tapas lounge attached to La Loggia Italian restaurant. Nothing could be better with that plate of 18-month-aged \o7jamon serrano \f7and Spanish cheeses than a little glass of "La Gitana" Manzanilla. Interested in an oloroso? The Bodegas Dios Baco is just the thing, hazelnutty and rich and deep burnished gold.
Restaurant openings may have slowed to a crawl in the last few months, but no fewer than nine wine bars have opened, with several more on the way.
Their range, stylistic and geographic, is striking. They include a cash-only, roughhewn Fairfax district hideaway that stays open till 2 a.m., and a sleek, Christopher Lowell-designed indoor-outdoor space in a Manhattan Beach boutique hotel. Even Fleming's, a nationwide chain of high-end steakhouses with a new location in Woodland Hills, calls itself not a bar and grill, but "prime steakhouse and wine bar."
The food is all over the map too -- a minimalist selection of cured meats, olives and cheese; Francophile crepes and \o7croque monsieurs\f7; futuristic tapas such as a "sundae" of potato and oranges; and even a New York strip steak.
For a certain type of enterprising wine lover, there's something irresistible about the idea of opening a wine bar. It's a relatively inexpensive way into the restaurant business, and the result can be terrifically personal.
On an unlikely block of Fairfax Avenue, Bodega de Cordova swings into action on the late side. Step into the narrow little candlelit room and you could be in a village in Spain -- or maybe on New York's Lower East Side.
"You have a tavern every 10 feet in Madrid," says owner Kenny Cordova, who opened the place three months ago. Returning to Los Angeles after living for a year in the Spanish capital, he brought with him a dream of opening a wine bar. "When I lived in Spain," he says, "one of my favorite things to do was to sit down in a nice environment that feels cozy and enjoy a nice bottle of wine with friends. Or alone."
