Grá is in HiFi (Historic Filipinotown), just south of the Echo Park tennis courts, on the wrong end of East Side nightlife but all the more secluded because of it. It’s a pizza joint, nominally, but you could say that pizza is the medium through which proprietor Michael McSharry conveys his complex feelings about fermentation, some of which are expressed in an extended meditation on the process on the menu’s frontispiece. Case in point: his mother dough starter is now 20 years old and originated at The Ballymaloe culinary school in County Cork, Ireland, where he studied.
Nearly every item on the menu contains pickled things, even some of the pies, like the one topped with fermented mustard greens, bacon and smoked mozzarella. McSharry’s wine list has a natural bent, beverages of indigenous ferment that are wild and savory, field-blend whites and chewy, earthy reds like Bichi’s tobacco-scented garnacha, Gordo Guapo from Baja, Mexico, Ferme de Jeanne’s Mondeuse, L’Ephémère, and Frank Cornellisen’s IGT Sicilian nerello mascalese, Munjebel.
Grá is part of our Top 30 LA List of 2023. Read the whole story here.
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.
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This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2023.
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