As if you needed another reason to go to LACMA, LA’s great museum of art, now there’s Ray’s and Stark Bar, a sleek establishment spilling into the atrium behind the museum’s most famous sculpture, Chris Burden’s luminous Urban Light. Chef Kris Morningstar, who has trained in some of LA’s most prestigious kitchens including Meson G. and Grace, brings California touches to Mediterranean dishes like octopus with burrata and Fresno chiles, or poached albacore on a smoked onion purée. It would be hard to escape the bar without trying one of Paul Sanguinetti’s cocktails, but his California-centric wine list will not disappoint either, with rarities like Saxon Brown’s Cricket Creek Semillon or the Santa Barbara syrah from Emanuel Tres known as Roberto.
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, California
American
323-857-6180
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 April 2012.
Like what you read? Subscribe today.