Drink: Los Angeles: The Drink Lover's Guide to L.A. - Softcover

Colleen Dunn Bates is the editor of Eat: Los Angeles, a longtime restaurant critic for Westways, the former editor of the Gault Millau gourmet guides, and the founding editor of Prospect Park Books.

Seemingly overnight, Los Angeles has become a fantastic drinking city. We’ve had great eating for decades, but no one would have put us first in the beverage department, except perhaps for horchata. Seattle had better coffee, Portland had better beer bars, Boston had better pubs, San Francisco and Chicago had better neighborhood bars, and New York had better cocktail lounges. Boy, have times changed.

This explosion in good drinking inspired us to take the Eat: Los Angeles concept to a new place and create this curated pocket guide to find the best drinking across the greater L.A. area, whether you’re thirsty for a boba or a beer. This is by no means a comprehensive guide that would be so massive you couldn’t lift it. Drink: Los Angeles is, however, a broad-ranging book, in terms of geography, styles, and price points. Most of all, it’s a discerning one we don’t have every single karaoke bar in Koreatown, for instance, but we point you toward our favorites. Our goal is to give you interesting, thoughtful, tasty choices in every category across L.A. County.

Here you’ll find the Why, What, and Who for L.A.’s best beverage sources, from cocktail bars and coffeehouses to craft breweries and cold-pressed juiceries, along with a bunch of great bar crawls, where you can imbibe without driving. Slainte!