Bar Avalon has just popped up at Mohawk Bend, where Sunset Boulevard doglegs toward Dodgers Stadium in Echo Park. It’s an outpost of the Birmingham-based Revelator Coffee Co., but the space plays multiple roles—as café, wine bar, restaurant and adjacent wine shop (called Eve), with Josh Guarneri overseeing the kitchen. Guarneri, who worked under April Bloomfield at The Breslin and Hearth & Hound, offers hearty dishes like blue prawns with preserved lemon and ’nduja, or lamb braised with tomato and ras el hanout. Nathaniel Muñoz oversees everything else, including the bottle shop and wine list. The shop selection is small and largely Old World, with a penchant for low-intervention wines; in the restaurant, Muñoz has fashioned a wine selection entirely from the Americas, like the cinsault-país blend from Itata producer Rogue Vine, or Lee Hudson’s rare, crushable Carneros Aleatico.
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
This story appears in the print issue of February 2020.
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