Swooped from LA Times via PEDEN + MUNK
Raul Yrastorza, the flippant bar manager at Las Perlas – a Disney-meets-dirty Mexico décor’d mezcal bar –is taking this whole cocktail craze with a grain of salt. The oversized hoody wearing, three day scruff sporting dude seems to come at this perniciously trendy cocktail scene with a refreshingly innovative perspective, one that seems to be feigning in the world of the over manufactured bar going experience.
Around midnight last Tuesday, I found myself in a carved out hideaway beneath the Sante Fe lofts Downtown, just a sombrero’s toss from Skid Row. Acting as some sort of sullied safehouse from pretension, Las Perlas, from its hokey wall murals and pastel flavored bar shelves to its kitschy antique vases and cocktail lists hand scribbled on a torn sheet of cardboard, paces a kind of frivolity that manages to protect the “unkemptness” of it all.
Up until this last year, Yrastorza, who was involved in a series of tequila friendly locales, was branded by overly ambitious journalists as LA’s first Mezcalero (a play on the Spanish word for cowboy and the word Mezcal). After the El Dorado Cantina in Brentwood, where he paired Mexican wines with sweet-corn tamales, was sold to Sam Nazarian (becoming the first Katsuya outpost), he made his way over to the Mexican wrestling themed tequila bar in Mid-City, El Carmen, where he spent the next few years until he was offered a corporate six-figured gig running the flashy LA nightclub, Ivar. Quite a shift to say the least. The next eight years of his life were dedicated to peddling vodka redbulls and breaking up drug initiated rumbles outside, “I hated the person I was when I was working there, the late nights, the cocky bartenders, dealing with all the drugged out assholes…it’s not a great scene to be a part of.” After 30 years in the business he decided to throw in the towel, “I was tired of it, people in this business just take themselves too seriously. There’s no such thing as a fucking Tequila Sommelier and I don’t need to be the first.”
As hackneyed as it may sound, Yrastorza just isn’t like the rest of his kind, he was never the guy who needed to be in the spotlight; making drinks he enjoyed was always enough for him. Having both worked and palled around with the (somewhat notorious) gang of nightlife bigshots, Raul, 45, speaks of his compatriots with more of a brotherly love than any abashed cynicism. He says of Marcos Tello, bartender at The Varnish just across the street, “He’s a great guy and he knows his shit and does his job well, but he’s about selling himself, not his drink; and that effects the overall experience. At some point something happened where bartenders stopped being bartenders and started being celebrities.”
Call it jaded, but Yrastorza was just about fed up with all of it –the scene, the people, the egos –and welcomed an early retirement to focus on his passion for photography (something he explored between the hours of 4am-4pm, before and after work). After taking 10 months out of the business to relax and take care of a few athletic induced hernias he ran into an old friend who mentioned that Cedd Moses –the nightlife maven of 213 Downtown LA –was looking for someone to lead his new ‘south of the border’ themed bar across from Cole’s diner, Downtown. After nearly a year of purging (I told you he was tainted), Raul decided that the opportunity was too good to let pass by, “Ya, I understood the danger of getting involved in all of this again, but i’ve always wanted my own place and I figured this was my time to get behind the reigns and do it the right way, to show these kids how a bar is meant to be run [laughs].” And that’s exactly what he did.
When I settle up to the over-crowded bar and ask Mary Louise –a tall & thin, straight banged fashionista, handpicked by Raul himself –for her bartending history (expecting to hear a lengthy recitation) she says, “Oh, I’ve never worked behind a bar before. Raul wanted to train me on his own, I guess.” It so happens that part of his post-pretense plan to dissolve any highfalutin vibe was to start from scratch and craft his own breed of bar person, and I think it might have worked. As opposed to hiring some renowned LA mixologists with a tacit understanding of the businesses “celebrityness,” to helm the bar, Raul wanted to create an experience that was more focused around the drink than the person serving it… and to this degree he has succeeded (though that’s not to say he didn’t have some help creating the list…eh um Julian Cox). Sure maybe she can’t make you a Sazerac or a Harvy Wallbanger, but she certainly makes an amazing Poblano Escobar (muddled poblano chilies, pineapple and cumin); and while she may seem a bit intimidating at first, you realize that if you threaten to steal one of her grapefruits you might just get her to smile (did I mention the makeshift produce counter that envelopes the bartop?).
Yrastorza’s fun-forward attitude doesn’t just manifest in his staff or interior inclinations, you’ll find it peeking out from his cocktail list too. He’s manufactured his menu based off of some of Mexico’s most ghettoist cultural traditions. Everything from the Chingaderra –an anejo and mezcal based drink topped with an apple foam and black strap molasses– whose name can be loosely translated to mean “piece of shit,” to the Mexican Fruit Cart –a cocktail that mimics the infamous bag-o-fruit sold on street corners by actually placing radish, cantaloupe, pineapple and cucumber at its base. And “yes,” he says, “I’m serving it with a spork.”
His favorite drink to tipple is the Paloma, which he describes as the “poor man’s margarita,” a not-so-articulate combination of “lime juice, grapefruit soda and any tequila you can get your hands on,” though he happens to use Siete Leguas Repesado, which (like 30% of his other booze) he buys out of the trunk of a car.
After the last call of an unquestionably busy Tuesday night, the bar is now nearly empty, a few stragglers are finishing up a sloppy game of pool while the barback is busy scrubbing residual balsamic reductions from the counter top. He’s perched at the edge of a tattered booth and just after finishing up the last of his drink and a heartfelt rambling on how he believes that the cultural segregation of Los Angeles could be “mended” by a few well intended social havens, he grabs the bottom of his sweatshirt and lifts it to his eyes, “I’m not taking any of this too seriously, but I am taking it seriously…and I don’t want anybody to be too serious about it, you know?” I don’t. But while I’m not exactly sure how to interpret his meandering sentence, I can certainly feel it. And while I can see that he is quite passionate about the topic at hand, it’d be wrong of me to suggest that that was the reason he’d been tearing up … turns out that he spent the last hour trying to wipe away a few tenacious grains of hibiscus-infused salt from his eye. The war wounds of a seasoned vet.
Rating: Vigilante
Photo’s by Brian Faini
Please, god, hyphenate “straight banged”; otherwise that line reads fairly vulgar.
ahaha, so true. Though I prefer the ambiguity.
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