When downtown Los Angeles’s storied craft speakeasy, The Varnish, announced that July 3 would be its final night of service after 15 years, it sent shockwaves through the cocktail world.
Regulars and former Varnish bartenders lined up to squeeze once more into the booths for a final Bartender’s Choice. I had the famously cold Gibson, with the bar’s house-pickled onion, and thought about a first date in 2013 where I sat at the table beside the piano with the woman I would go on to marry. The final nights were filled with many such shared memories.
“There was a crazy energy and magic from the overwhelming emotion of ‘this is it,’” says Wolfgang Alexander, The Varnish’s closing manager.
The Varnish was widely considered ground zero for the craft cocktail movement in Los Angeles. The bar inspired the whole beverage industry in Los Angeles and beyond to be more intentional in the work they were doing. Some of the best ideas in the city began with a Martini at the beloved speakeasy tucked away behind Cole’s.
To the residents of downtown Los Angeles, The Varnish was a beacon for the revitalization of the Historic Core, a dense cultural and architecturally significant neighborhood sandwiched between the towering high rises of LA’s central business district and Skid Row, a 50-block area known since the 1930s for its large unhoused population.
“It was like we had discovered a crown jewel in the attic of a city that just needed a little dusting off,” says Eric Alperin, who opened The Varnish in 2009 alongside the late Sasha Petraske and Cedd Moses, founder of hospitality group Pouring With Heart. “And then it glistened, and more operators came to DTLA and we all created a city center that LA was proud to call a part of their city.”
The Varnish is one of many downtown businesses that survived the pandemic only to close in 2024. The list includes another shocker in Otium from French Laundry alum Timothy Hollingsworth, which closed in September after 10 years, as well as Angelo Auriana and Matteo Ferdinandi’s cavernous Brera, and the Ace Hotel, each of which operated for nine and 10 years, respectively.
For longtime downtowners, the recent closures are more than heartbreaking; they’re creating an existential anxiety about the future of an area that seemed to have limitless potential before the pandemic. The fortunes of downtown have been closely tied to the health of its cocktail and culinary scene since its resurgence, so many people are now questioning: What are the major sources of the pain the industry is experiencing, and can those challenges be overcome, or will they be the demise of the neighborhood?
The Rise of Downtown
Before the pandemic, downtown enjoyed a massive resurgence. The mid-century suburbanization of Los Angeles had sacrificed urban density and the nation’s largest electric public transit system in favor of single-family homes, parking lots, and freeways. By the 1980s, downtown was largely abandoned, with the notable exception of Skid Row. But the derelict streetscapes depicted in movies like “Repo Man” became a thriving creative hub with a vibrant cocktail and culinary scene in the 2000s.
“Downtown was an overnight wonder that I’ve been working on for 30 years,” says Hal Bastian, a real estate broker, community leader, and former executive vice president of the downtown Business Improvement District (BID), a privately directed, publicly sanctioned organization funded by local businesses that improves a defined area with economic development initiatives. “When I got here in 1994, only 18,000 people lived downtown. Today it’s pushing 95,000. That was a direct result of the adaptive reuse ordinance.”
The adaptive reuse ordinance allowed vacant historic commercial buildings to be rezoned for residential and mixed usage, paving the way for the reinvention of the neighborhood and its architectural treasures. Soon, real estate and hospitality visionaries like Tom Gilmore, Andrew Meieran, and Cedd Moses were turning their eyes toward DTLA.
“It was a little bit of the Wild West frontier with extraordinary, underutilized spaces that were ripe for a creative vision and the craft cocktail scene was just starting.”
“Downtown was so overlooked,” says Andrew Meieran, proprietor of Clifton’s Republic and The Edison. “You had an entire historic city center that was abandoned, which doesn’t exist anywhere in the country.”
Meieran opened his post-industrial steampunk nightclub The Edison in 2007 in the basement power plant of the Higgins Building. He followed up in 2010 by purchasing Broadway landmark Clifton’s Cafeteria, turning the space that famously inspired Disneyland into an ambitious multi-floor nightlife destination.
“It was a little bit of the Wild West frontier with extraordinary, underutilized spaces that were ripe for a creative vision and the craft cocktail scene was just starting,” Meieran says.
DTLA becoming the beating heart of the exploding craft cocktail renaissance on the West Coast was intrinsic to its rebirth.
“The Varnish and Cedd Moses pushed downtown in that direction,” says Leandro Monriva, the face of The Educated Barfly and former bartender at Cole’s, the historic watering hole every Varnish customer had to pass through. “[Moses] grew up in LA, saw the potential, and wanted to bring downtown back to its former glory when the Oscars were here.”
Moses would become downtown’s most prolific bar owner, partnering in over a dozen bars including The Varnish, Seven Grand, Cole’s, Las Perlas, and The Golden Gopher. The nightlife boom and a creative community blossoming in repurposed historic buildings led to a critical mass that attracted people from the rest of the city and beyond.
The restaurant scene took off as well. Anchored by early arrivals like Bottega Louie, the neighborhood saw a surge of openings, eight of which achieved Michelin stars. At one point, celebrated chef Josef Centeno had five restaurants within two blocks.
“It was such a great era,” Monriva says. “There were so many bar openings, every bar was busy, all the bartenders knew each other and went spot to spot moonlighting shifts and opening new places. There were tons of regulars, money was flowing, everybody was drunk. … It was a wonderful party that had to end.”
A Slow Recovery
Like many neighborhoods worldwide, downtown suffered a huge loss of businesses during the pandemic, which tore gashes in its cultural fabric.
“You didn’t want to walk down a new street because you didn’t want to see what closed,” says Lydia Clarke, co-owner of DTLA Cheese Superette and tinned-fish-centric wine bar Kippered. “I’m going to cry, I can’t believe we made it, … not that we’re making it now. It’s still very much a struggle.”
Indeed, recovery has been slower than expected. Some blame a fundamental neighborhood demographic never fully returning: office workers. Downtown currently faces a commercial vacancy rate of over 30 percent. Office towers are defaulting on billions in debt and the loss of so much business has resulted in the exodus of longtime residents who wished to live near work.
“During the pandemic, things ran rampant and it feels like it never went back.”
“A lot of restaurants don’t even have lunch anymore because why bother?” says Mathieu Giraud, co-owner of wine bar Garçons de Cafe and French restaurant L’Appart. “Everybody is asking the same question: ‘What are we going to do with those towers?’”
Longtime Varnish manager Max Seaman, who now works as a sommelier at Republique in Miracle Mile, agrees. “Without places like Varnish, Cole’s, Nickel Diner, Baco Mercat, what’s left?” he says. “A bunch of cool old buildings owned by private equity ghouls and a homelessness crisis.”
High-profile incidents of unrest during the pandemic led to a National Guard deployment in the neighborhood, renewing concerns about public safety that the city has been unable to mitigate since. The apparent municipal ambivalence toward crime has frustrated many residents into moving away from downtown.
“I call the police and it’s like ‘they’re busy right now,’” says Nathan McCullough, bar director for The Wolves in downtown. “During the pandemic, things ran rampant and it feels like it never went back.”
It isn’t just the police; business owners feel other city services are lacking. While there has been welcomed investment in public transit expansion and creating more bike lanes around the neighborhood, other issues slip through the cracks.
Basic amenities like sidewalk cleanliness and street lighting have not been maintained. Sixth Street in front of The Varnish has long been dark and thieves have stripped all the electrical wiring from the iconic 6th Street Bridge. Burned-out buildings linger for years, like one at 4th and Broadway across the street from California State offices that has become a street art installation called “Chateau Broadway.”
Councilperson Kevin de Leon, whose office did not respond to requests for comment on this story, has been a particular target of criticism.
“There’s no response,” says David Poffenberger, a longtime downtown resident and partner at architecture firm Ravel, where he designed many of DTLA’s iconic bars and restaurants for clients like Cedd Moses. “You might as well be throwing your complaints into an empty well. If you do end up talking to somebody, they send you to a different department.”
The Elephant in the Room
Downtown’s biggest issue is the unhoused population, which in 2022 was estimated at 4,400 people in Skid Row. Mayor Karen Bass’s ambitious program, Inside Safe, which aimed to get people permanently off the streets, has seen success across the city. Homelessness dropped by around 14 percent in Skid Row in 2024, with a 22 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness. But downtowners say they still aren’t feeling it. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s controversial order on encampment clearing has had similarly little effect.
Ysabel Jurado, a tenant’s rights attorney and affordable housing activist, is running to unseat Kevin de Leon from Los Angeles City Council District 14, which includes downtown. She believes that the lack of cooperation between city departments, county and state agencies, and resources, is a major obstacle to the progress that needs to be made.
“The situation in Skid Row is a moral crisis,” Jurado says. “We need a housing-first approach that provides permanent supportive housing, mental health services, and substance abuse treatment. We need a government that is responsive, accountable, and willing to work across departments to get things done.”
“All the businesses are wondering, ‘What is downtown going to look like?’”
Before the pandemic, the neighborhood was thriving with many of these problems still very much in place. Many in the hospitality industry, including Giraud of Garçons de Cafe, believe the current climate is an issue of perception and the neighborhood has the same issues and potential it always had.
“The historic core doesn’t look much different, but back in 2011 people would say ‘downtown is dangerous.’ Then in ’16, ’17, ’18, they were saying ‘downtown is a place to party, oh my God, it’s like New York!’” he says. “And now we’re back to this ‘downtown is dangerous and dirty’ thing again. It’s perception.”
One of the major tasks for Bastian at the downtown BID was attracting outside investment in the neighborhood by overcoming its bad optics. He is incensed over what he characterizes as maliciously negative coverage by the media, which undermines that goal.
“The El Segundo types go out of their way to write negative stories about downtown LA, which is amazing because they were headquartered here,” he says of the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times, which sold its circa-1935 headquarters near City Hall in 2016 and moved to El Segundo. But Bastian remains steadfast that the neighborhood will endure and become the great destination he believes it can be. “Downtown has been around since 1781, we’ve been through lots of bad times, we’ve gotten through them. We’re coming back, we’re reinventing ourselves.”
By many measures, the neighborhood was far worse off in the early 2000s, when the resurgence created by the adaptive reuse ordinance began. All the factors that made the neighborhood ripe for that boom still exist. Residents and business owners feel that it just needs another push like the craft cocktail boom to jump-start another era of reinvention. They hope the 2028 Summer Olympics will be just that.
“The Olympics is the hot question right now. All the businesses are wondering, ‘What is downtown going to look like?’” says Ricky Sanchez, director of programming partnerships for the Los Angeles Athletic Club and the Aster. “There is eagerness; there is hope. But there is some anxiety; it’s a lot of people coming through the neighborhood’s metaphorical doors.”
Destination DTLA
When people do walk through those figurative doors and fill downtown’s streets again, the hospitality scene will look much different than during the last craft cocktail and culinary explosion. There may be no Varnish, Otium, or the dozens of others that have closed in the years since the pandemic, but there are plenty of bars and restaurants that have followed in their footsteps.
“The Varnish has a few pages in the history books and we got to be here for it,” says Poffenberger of architecture firm Ravel. “But moving on can be a great thing, too. There will be other places that will do what the Varnish started.”
Huy Pham is the bar director at one such place, Bar Suehiro, his interpretation of a Japanese-style cocktail bar that opened this summer at 4th and Main. As a downtown resident himself, he is keenly aware of what he needs to do to be successful.
“I need to be a destination,” Pham says. “Thunderbolt [in Echo Park] and Death & Co [in the Arts District] serve their neighborhoods well, but they also service a clientele who are traveling because they know what they are going to get.”
A stone’s throw from Bar Suehiro at The Wolves, McCullough has a similar perspective. He believes that their rich and historic space helps attract people from all across LA County to the bar, but that once they walk in the door he has to back up that unique atmosphere with exceptional hospitality and craft.
“My focus is about the cocktail program making it an experience in itself serving things you won’t find anywhere else,” he says.
The future of downtown may lie in that type of destination hospitality that Meieran, who just reopened Clifton’s Republic this summer after a prolonged closure, has always believed in.
“Trends are leading towards a type of experiential hospitality that isn’t driven by a single component like cocktails, or food, or entertainment. It’s going to be a combination of everything to create a holistic experience,” he says. To be successful, he believes, bars have to offer something that can’t be replicated anywhere else, especially digitally. “Walking into Clifton’s isn’t something where you can say, ‘Let’s do it in Hollywood’ or ‘Let’s do it in Iowa.’” Meieran says.
The key to downtown’s next reinvention will lie in applying these ideas to the neighborhood as a whole. Retaining bars and restaurants that are worth traveling to will help, but downtown itself needs to become a destination again. It has always had the bones to achieve this as a unique landscape in the Southern California environment — a truly urban center. The only thing it’s lacking is people.
Once upon a time the corner of 7th and Broadway, where Clifton’s is located, was the busiest intersection in the world. Desolate in recent years, Meieran is counting on Clifton’s reopening to bring people, and the rest of downtown, back.
“We’re trying to lead by example,” he says. ”I still truly believe in downtown for the same reasons I did when I was building The Edison.”
The article What Does the Future Hold for Downtown LA as a Cocktail Destination? appeared first on VinePair.
