With its huge skylight and its necklace of ivy hanging from a ceiling planter, Bavel feels like an oasis. This second act for Bestia’s Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis leans into the duo’s heritage (Moroccan, Turkish, Israeli and Egyptian), taking local ingredients into a Middle Eastern realm of flatbreads and slow-cooked meats, like the herb-laden roast lamb-neck shawarma. To drink, start with a cocktail—perhaps the Nebuchadnezzar, an Old-Fashioned of sorts with lamb-fat-washed Bourbon, smoked ice and grapefruit juice; then delve into Ryan Ibsen’s wine list, which hugs the sunbaked parts of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Lebanon.
500 Mateo St., Los Angeles, California
Middle Eastern
213-232-4966
Karen started her career in wine as an enologist at Araujo in Napa Valley, having graduated with a BA in International Relations and French from UC Davis. She went on to handle education and sales support for Indie Wineries in California before joining the sommelier team at Spago for a year. For the past several years, she has been working with the publishing group behind the Somm Journal, part of the launch team for The Clever Root, where she served as Managing Editor for two years, then going freelance as a Senior Editor, to raise her daughter, who is now two years old. She also contributes to the Josephine Porter Institute’s newsletter on Applied Biodynamics. Karen has studied in Bordeaux and worked in the Rhône, led there by a glass of Domaine du Pegau, which sparked her interest in the Rhône. And it was a bottle of Diamond Creek’s Gravelly Meadow from the early 1990s that had shifted her view of Napa Valley—her family has been in the Valley for five generations, and once had a dairy farm on the land that became Lake Berryessa.
This story appears in the print issue of April 2019.
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