Board the Flight Around the World at Gate Bar Centro

Bar Centro at the SLS Beverly Hills has always had fun cocktails with molecular mixology components. Last year, they had a cocktail tasting menu of 5 drinks. Now, they've really upped the game. Bar Centro has taken over a new corner at the hotel and built a small new bar dubbed Gate Bar Centro. Gate Bar Centro is serving a reservation-only, 12-course cocktail tasting (don't worry, they're not all full sized cocktails) that takes guests around the world in cocktails. The tasting also includes a few tapas from The Bazaar - not quite dinner but enough bites to soak up the alcohol.

Here are some of the drink we had during our flight:
We started with Italy. Ciao Bella is a take on Aperol Spritz with fresh pineapple juice, yuzu, Aperol that's been carbonated in house.

The next course is Spain with Spanish Gin & Tonic, made right in front of you using a vacuum siphon (I previously wrote about this for The Bazaar's G&T Festival)

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Dandi Pop-Up Brings Modern Korean Dining to LA

Los Angeles may be home to a lot of great Korean food, but they're mostly "old school" restaurants and we don't have too much by way of modern Korean cuisine. That is changing with Dandi, a Korean-Southern Californian pop-up from Joshua Pressman and Jihee Kim, which is popping up for dinner at Hotel Normandie (and other future locations). The two chefs met while working at Rustic Canyon.

Dandi offers two tasting menus, an abbreviated and an extended one. I recently tried the extended tasting and started with this trio of appetizers:

Corn silken tofu, dungeness crab, brown butter.
Squash wafer, chicken liver mousse, apple cider jam
Jokbal (pig trotter) croquette, hot peanut sauce, perilla

The corn silken tofu with dungeness crab was our favorite, not just of the plate but of the entire meal! Needless to say, the meal started off strong. The silken tofu was a little sweet thanks to the corn but it worked wonderfully with the brown butter and the sweet crab meat.

Pressman pairs the tasting with mostly natural wines (as much as he can), like this Hasta la Vizsla, a pet nat (petillant naturel) wine from the Loire Valley.

There are also some beer and wine available a la carte if a pairing seems like too much for you.

Next course: Cold soup of peaches, pork belly, flowering coriander

Yes, there are pork belly bits under those peach slices!

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