Voodoo Vin slipped in on the Virgil Village food-and-wine row during the COVID times—Sqirl, Bolt and Melody are all on the same block. It quietly joined those places as a destination. Transplanted New Yorkers Michael and Natalie Hekmat call themselves cavistes, a clue to the mercantile aesthetic of the place, an unassuming single-story storefront with a modest footprint, an interior that’s spartan and boxy, communal tables flanked by a tiny kitchen bar above which hover enormous speakers conveying vintage funk and hip hop.
Chef Travis Hayden, ex-Rustic Canyon, works a minimal kitchen—a couple of induction stoves and a toaster oven—with heartfelt results. His plates are heaped with house-made mortadella and buttery bresaola, polenta with romesco and chanterelles, and chicories wilting beneath grilled sardines. Behind the bar the Voodoo wine room occupies the space where the kitchen might have been, holding an inventory some 300 to 400 bottles strong, deep in low-intervention French, Italian and Austrian wines, like Domaine des Rutissons’s verdesse from the Savoie, or Gut Oggau’s Burgenland blaufränkisch blend, Josephine.
Voodoo Vin 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.
This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2023.
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