From the week Vandell opened in early December, crowds have gathered outside its forest-green door and down its patch of Los Feliz sidewalk, waiting to join the civilized chaos inside. Is it the hottest bar in Los Angeles in 2026? Easily, and for excellent reasons.
Vandell’s wood-paneled space — an anchor 30-foot bar and three small rooms, each distinctly decorated and lighted — sits among several pedestrian-friendly blocks of Hillhurst Avenue, where lines form reliably for cream-top coffee at Maru and brunch or dinner at nearly year-old Wilde’s. The location turned out to be optimum for a new blue-chip gathering place.
Also optimal: the bar’s accessible, ground-level blueprint for success. Mini-martinis (all the rage), seasonal cocktails tinted the kinds of saturated colors you’d choose for a den accent wall, great cheeseburgers and a big bowl of snacky fries, a staff capable of staying calm and attentive when imbibers pack in four-deep around the black soapstone counter. The mechanics work. Loud but not deafening, swank but not stuffy, Vandell is a warmly stylish haunt, a place to land at any point in an evening.
A terrific addition to the neighborhood: That’s the face-value read. But as the throngs have begun thinning now and then — say, around 6 p.m. on Sunday nights — I’ve been hanging out at Vandell during quieter moments, when seating options have more flexibility and, in the respite, it’s easier to admire the handsome, detail-packed setting and study the idiomatic lists of spirits and lob questions that receive enthusiastic, geek-out responses.
That’s when I see most clearly that this isn’t just a fresh, cool bar. It’s an exceptional one, an L.A.-specific one, built for the long run on a bedrock of talent and vision and experience. In a moment when the newsy narrative is that no one’s drinking anymore, Vandell pushes forward our drinking culture by writing a surprise bestseller: part urban biography, part California fantasia.
Shawn Lickliter and Vay Su met while working at République. Lickliter joined Walter and Margarita Manzke’s team in 2014; as bar director, he also oversaw the diverse and excellent beverage programs at their now-closed restaurants Manzke, Bicyclette and Petty Cash Taqueria. Su, remarkably skilled at intensifying the flavors of a single fruit or vegetable in a drink of many elements, had a knack for winning national cocktail competitions. They spent years planning to open their own bar, occasionally holding pop-ups under the name Double Dragon.
To launch Vandell, the pair partnered with Michael Francesconi and Matthew Glaser of Park Hospitality, whose establishments include Wolf & Crane in Little Tokyo and the side-by-side trio in Echo Park: easy-goer Lowboy, Karla Flores-Mercado’s wonderful Bar Flores, and Donna’s, the insanely popular homage to East Coast red-sauce joints.
Since the American cocktail renaissance arrived in the 2000s, pros who run top-of-class bars tend to approach their work with a precise sense of history. Are they excavating and reinterpreting pre-Prohibition recipes? Reclaiming tiki or Cosmos? Surveying the breadth of the last century’s most popular drinks? Are they purchasing immersion circulators and siphons, set on modernist invention? Or is the focus more on annals of place, as local sibling bars Miraté and Daisy convey so impressively with their focus on agave-based spirits?
Vandell pulls off rare breadth, incorporating the individual strengths of Lickliter (an expert in vintage spirits) and Su (if you try only the herbaceous smoked-tomato mezcal cocktail he spearheaded, I’ll have done my job) within an atmosphere that pays visual homage to its community.
Vandell Griffith — longtime curator of Griffith Park, who died in 1977, and son of the land’s donor, Griffith J. Griffith — is the bar’s namesake. Allusions brim throughout the design, overseen by architect Brion Moran of Inglewood-based Aero Collective. Cha-Rie Tang and Mei-Ling Hubbard, the mother-daughter team behind Pasadena Craftsman Tile, created a façade that mirrors a style of tilework prevalent when Griffith Observatory opened in 1935. Artist Molly Bounds painted a mural over the red oak-framed bar depicting the park in pastoral, sepia-toned scenes, with a winking “That’s all, folks!” Looney Tunes reference scribbled in the geographic direction of Hollywood. Bounds also etched the moody illustrations of palm trees and other identifiably L.A. fauna along the walls in the center, booth-lined room.
Every corner has its aesthetic intricacies and textures. I’ve grown most fond of the nearly hidden far-back nook behind the bar. It’s cloistered and intimate and a little quieter. More Easter eggs: The art includes an old-timey portrait of John Wayne and a lamp sconce in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s hand, nods to the 104-year-old Tam O’Shanter on Los Feliz Boulevard where both the actor and Walt Disney were regulars.
The overall effect doesn’t ultimately strike me so much as timeless as it does time-full.
Right now, in high summer, find me on a stool in the nook’s half-light sipping a cocktail simply called Peach. The team muddles the ripe fruit from Tenerelli Orchards with Wild Turkey, Domaine Casademont Brisat (a skin contact wine from Roussillon), Quady Essensia Orange Muscat, acid-adjusted rooibos peach tea and a syrup that involves clarified whey, grapefruit peels and cinnamon. That blur of words equates to the sensation of biting into an August peach, closing your eyes and tasting every flavor — juicy, rosy, floral-sweet-mineral peachiness — all the way through. Plus, you know, bourbon.
Every cocktail under the menu’s Market Fresh selection similarly encircles and hits its core ingredient (melon, mango, cucumber, strawberry, the especially excellent smoked tomato garden-bright with lemongrass and basil) like an arrow in a bull’s-eye’s midpoint. I love that Green Pepper, in which an underdog vegetable gains uncommon dimension via green Chartreuse and tequila blanco, has been stubbornly among the options since the beginning.
Note the vintage cocktails under the Olden Days section. They bring to mind an article by Jordan Michelman published by The Times in 2022 about the collection of rare aged spirits and liqueurs that Lickliter had assembled at Manzke. “The result is a drinks program that’s ephemeral and ever-changing, never to be repeated from night to night, making each visit like a moment trapped in time,” Michelman wrote.
If you’re curious about comparable possibilities at Vandell, ask if Lickliter is around and free to advise. He’ll enlighten you on, say, 1960s-era bourbon for a Manhattan, or the provenance of the current Cognac used in a Sidecar. Early on, he concocted an incredible Negroni made with 1970s Campari, softer and more orangey, but it’s long gone. As the bar settles in, he’ll hopefully have more time to invest in the time-intensive search for such bottles.
But also, plenty of other liquid adventures await! Inquire about cult mezcals from legendary distiller Eduardo “Lalo” Ángeles. Or Lickliter’s private stash of shockingly smooth, shockingly expensive limited-edition Japanese single malts. Or a $12 shot of carrot eau de vie, a boozy blast of beta-carotene, that takes nearly 80 pounds of produce to distill a single liter.
Given the bar’s comprehensive strategy, zero-proof cocktails jump out as the early growth-edge opportunity. A frothy, refreshing spin on a melon soda hinted at creative possibilities, but there could be more of them. Nonalcoholic drinks are tricky, requiring their own specific skills; most run to spiced, carbonated juice, or rely on a mixed bag of spirit substitutes. Given room to experiment, a group with this much know-how could surely muster some breakthroughs.
In the meantime, I’m slipping in a mini house martini, tinged winningly with tarragon vinegar, somewhere between a plate of anchovy-arugula pesto toast and a burger with fries. For something more substantial, look to steak frites dashed with chimichurri or chicken and broccoli splashed in sage jus.
The food is generally enjoyable, but don’t expect culinary fireworks as the main event. Our driving-city culture necessarily muddles or fuses the definitions of restaurant and bar. Drinking is truly the marquee experience here. Vandell, as a bar, achieves the same qualities as our best ambitious, rooted restaurants. At minimum, you’re tasting something thoughtfully delicious. At most, your appreciation of where you are, and who you’re among, expands, and Los Angeles feels a little different than it did when you first walked through the door.
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