Wine Bar

The sleepy Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, population 17,000, is the ideal place to shut out the mayhem of city life for a few days. There's not much to do except relax, drink wine, read your book and take sunset strolls. The bed. House of Another Tyme Bed & Breakfast (227 Le Point St.; (805) 489-6313; http://www.anothertymebnb.net ; rooms for two, $120) is a remodeled Victorian home that dates to 1916 and contains three guest rooms. The B&B is run by husband-and-wife Jack Tiedemann and Judy Zwarg.

The sleepy Central Coast town of Arroyo Grande, population 17,000, is the ideal place to shut out the mayhem of city life for a few days. There's not much to do except relax, drink wine, read your book and take sunset strolls. The bed. House of Another Tyme Bed & Breakfast (227 Le Point St.; (805) 489-6313; http://www.anothertymebnb.net ; rooms for two, $120) is a remodeled Victorian home that dates to 1916 and contains three guest rooms. The B&B is run by husband-and-wife Jack Tiedemann and Judy Zwarg.

In downtown L.A.'s old Bank District, two new nightspots are concocting different approaches to draw cash-strapped drinkers in uncertain economic times. One wine-and-beer spot, the Must, is employing a slash-and-burn policy of serving well-liked wines on the cheap ($3 during happy hour, for example), while the other -- the homespun, tiny Varnish -- is hoping classic cocktails and a hidden location might lure those eager to squire their dates to a speak-easy-style boite.

The Red & White Wine Bar is across the street from beautiful Lake Como, with forever views, in Tremezzo, Italy. The chef and his wife are charming, friendly and speak English. The food is outstanding: It was the best pasta e fagioli I have ever had, and my husband had the lasagna three days in a row. Prices are reasonable. Red & White Wine Bar, 18 Via Portico Sampietro, Tremezzo; 011-39-0344-40095. Pizzas and pastas from about $10. Main dishes $20-22. Jade Kemble Rancho Bernardo

With 18 seats in a 700-square-foot room anchored by a black-painted island bar, Mignon, which means "diminutive" in French, earns its name. To step off the 6th Street bustle into the wee wine bar is to enter an enclave that's as big as some of the poured-concrete boudoirs in the lofts upstairs at the Pacific Electric Building. One aspect that's not petite: The rotating menu of Old World wines handpicked by sommelier and co-owner Santos Uy, who opened Mignon last month after some permitting snafus were successfully resolved.

At Bodega, a wine bar inside Pasadena's Paseo Colorado, patrons, the majority of them female, are perched at outdoor tables and on Philippe Starck sofas to gab, flirt and sip on a warm Thursday. Cocking her tweed cap, Kandal Smith, 24, of Arcadia explains why she's a regular. "It's a hipper atmosphere compared to anywhere else in the Pasadena area," she says, holding a glass of Australian Woop Woop Shiraz. "It's more mellow, and they serve really good wine."

DRIVING west on 3rd Street through blocks I know so well, I barely glance at the shop fronts east of the Beverly Center. I glide past saucy knitted bikinis in the window of the Knitter's Studio and, just before Crescent Heights Boulevard, a blue storefront with a sign spelling out "Tasca" in pretty lettering swims up out of the gloom. Though this Spanish-Mediterranean wine bar opened nearly a year ago, it has just now gotten its wine and beer license after a year's worth of delays.

I love the idea of a wine bar, the chance to drop in somewhere congenial for a glass of wine and a bite on the spur of the moment. Bottom line, though, a wine bar should be a place where you can discover new wines and regions, not just a place to get a glass of wine. And after studying the wines proposed by this new generation of wine bars, with a couple of exceptions, I have to wonder why so few of the owners seem to have done their homework.

On the surface, almost everything appears as it has for decades on East 1st Street in Boyle Heights, the neighborhood east of downtown known as a haven for immigrants and blue-collar families. It's mid-afternoon and a couple of tipsy men spill out of Las Palomas Bar, arms locked over their shoulders, heading toward the nearby birrieria, a restaurant specializing in goat stew. Others greet more soberly as they pass traditional mom-and-pop shops that line the thoroughfare, selling soccer trophies, mariachi outfits and secondhand clothes.

Spring is here and all you want to do is hang around in your bikini and look appealingly pouty. Oh, and you want to do that with a drink in your hand, preferably poolside at a rooftop bar near the coast. That's where Rooftop 360, the new rooftop pool deck and bar at Avia Long Beach hotel comes in handy. Opened late last month, Rooftop 360 gives guests (and not just those registered at the hotel) the option to rent a cozy cabana for $25 an hour, or to just while away the time sinking into a sofa or sexy lounger.

We met at the Santa Monica outpost of the Bodega wine bar. Though it was fairly dark inside, I recognized his face at the bar. I waved and walked toward him. As he stood up, his body did not match his face, or any of his online pictures. He was not the same guy surfing in the wetsuit, or wearing the tux, or looking all skinny with his bushy brown hair. He must have gained 50 pounds, maybe more. Beneath his beige button-down shirt I could see man boobs. "Shall we get a table?" he asked.

SAN JOSE - Stephen Terrell expected a group of happy users when he updated his company's Facebook profile page to the new Timeline format, allowing his mostly senior-citizen customers to register for a contest to win a trip to Hollywood to meet nonagenarian actress Betty White. Instead, there was an explosion of anger and confusion. When the Lifeline Program, the Atlanta company for which Terrell is senior vice president of branding, revamped its Facebook page last week, some elderly users trying to register for the contest were so angry and vocal that Terrell had to ban them.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has announced that 4.9 million international visitors traveled to the United States in November, an 8%  increase over November 2010 . . . . In honor of its 20 th anniversary, Taste of Solvang has expanded to five days, beginning March 14 . To purchase tickets, call (800) 719-9106 or go to www.SolvangUSA.com . . . . .Enjoy an evening of seafaring adventures on the big screen Feb. 24 at Aquarium of the Bay's newly renovated Bay Theater, on Pier 39 in San Francisco.

Turophiles (yes, that's what cheese lovers are called) look forward to the cheese course the way dessert hounds long for their pudding. But not every cheese course is equal. Some restaurants try to get away with industrial cheeses straight out of the fridge or, not at all prepared, offer a hunk of the Parmigiano used on their pasta. That's why we treasure the restaurants that take care with their tomme and bucheron and bleu d'Auvergne. Here's a selection of places with especially well-chosen cheeses, but they're by no means the only ones.

The Spanish are on to a good thing with tapas, those lusty little bites that bars in Spain put out in the early evening. Ever wondered how the Spanish can eat dinner at 11 or later? Because they stave off hunger pangs and socialize earlier in the evening at tapa bars, ordering wines by the glass and nibbling on anchovies, chorizo and garlicky sautéed shrimp. In L.A., we now have enough restaurants specializing in tapas that you could actually do some bar hopping. But that would involve a bit of driving.

Spring is here and all you want to do is hang around in your bikini and look appealingly pouty. Oh, and you want to do that with a drink in your hand, preferably poolside at a rooftop bar near the coast. That's where Rooftop 360, the new rooftop pool deck and bar at Avia Long Beach hotel comes in handy. Opened late last month, Rooftop 360 gives guests (and not just those registered at the hotel) the option to rent a cozy cabana for $25 an hour, or to just while away the time sinking into a sofa or sexy lounger.

YOU SNAG a parking spot on the street in the middle of Brand Boulevard's endless row of car dealerships and as you get out of the car, you can feel the salesmen go into high alert. A possible buyer for that gas-guzzling truck? No, just another food lover on the way to the most exciting and delicious new restaurant to open in a very long time -- Palate Food + Wine. This is the breakout restaurant for Octavio Becerra, who put in years with Patina Restaurant Group and was the original chef at Pinot Bistro in Studio City.

Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne, the chef/front-of-the-house team behind Lucques, have just opened a second restaurant, A.O.C. Wine buffs will know this is short for Appellation d'Origine Controlee, the French system that designates and controls geographic names for wines and also certain foods, such as cheeses. It's an apt name for this chic new wine bar. Barbara Barry, who also designed Lucques, has transformed the funky space on 3rd Street just west of Fairfax that was once L.A.

The downtown Los Angeles nightlife scene is bearing ever more exotic fruit as the area continues to draw bar crawlers from all over Southern California. Last Saturday night, more than 1,000 twenty- and thirtysomethings swooned over the area's just-opened hot spot, Belasco Theater, paying $100 or more per ticket for a grand opening featuring one of electronic music's hottest names, Deadmau5. But the Belasco isn't just for dance fans. The massive theater at 1050 S. Hill St. has undergone a meticulous, $10-million-plus restoration and comes across as a hybrid of adjacent historic haunt the Mayan Theater and Hollywood's Music Box at the Henry Fonda.

Actor Neil Patrick Harris has listed a ranch-style house in Studio City at $1,599,000. Built in 1950, the home sits on more than a half-acre with mountain and valley views. The interiors feature dark-stained wood floors, vaulted ceilings and French doors. The house's 2,408 square feet include a living room with fireplace, a media/family room, a kitchen with an island and wine bar, three bedrooms and two bathrooms, according to details at Realtor.com. The guest suite has its own entrance.