Bar Benjamin’s cocktail program feels a little like alchemy: Seemingly disparate ingredients enter a drink, but the results can be liquid gold. White chocolate mingles with English peas, lemon, olive oil tequila and cream sherry, while in another potion there’s fermented-mushroom green tea with red curry, olive-leaf gin, coconut rum, cilantro, and lemongrass foam. At the upstairs follow-up to the Benjamin, one of 2024’s best new spots to grab a drink, the cocktails are taken far beyond the downstairs focus on martinis and classics.
Owners Ben Shenassafar, Kate Burr and Jared Meisler tapped Jason Lee (formerly of n/soto, Baroo) and Chad Austin (formerly of the Mulholland, Bootlegger Tiki) to steer the new venture, and they’ve injected the dimly lit space with equal parts creativity and technical prowess. They draw on L.A.’s cross-cultural landscape with ingredients like Parmesan-washed Oaxacan rum, Sichuan peppercorn-laced mezcal and miso-imbued rye. There’s taro in the clarified milk punch and everything-bagel seasoning in the Gibson, and there’s a selection of bar snacks and small plates — beef tartare, shrimp rolls, deviled eggs — to round it all out.