Zero-proof cocktails and buh-bye ‘girl dinner’

Zero-proof drinking. L.A.’s iconic Ethiopian restaurant Meals by Genet reopens while Sweet Lady Jane, of L.A.’s beloved triple-berry cake, closes. Plus, Jenn Harris wants more superettes and fewer “girl dinner” videos in 2024. And should nazooks be L.A.’s next pastry craze? I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.

Going for zero

In a 1988 lawsuit that Shirley Temple Black brought against a soda company trying to use her name to sell a sparkling, cherry-flavored drink, the former child star denounced what has to be the most famous nonalcoholic cocktail — the Shirley Temple — which was said to have been created for her in Los Angeles at either the Brown Derby or Chasen’s.

Not only did she disapprove of “any kind of cocktail for kids,” said an L.A. Times story written at the time by James Bates, “she says she ‘can’t stand’ the taste of most Shirley Temple drinks because they are too sweet for her.”

That’s been the problem for decades with “mocktails,” an increasingly outdated term for the burgeoning and increasingly sophisticated world of nonalcoholic drinks served in fine dining restaurants. Too often they were either glorified juices with a swizzle stick or just sugary-sweet mystery concoctions.

But as any regular restaurant goer has noticed, the nonalcoholic offerings have been improving in recent years. For instance, at the Marina del Rey restaurant Dear Jane’s, I had a passion fruit “margarita” that I was worried would be too sweet but instead had good complexity from the Monday brand of zero-alcohol mezcal in the drink. It was just one of several drinks on the restaurant’s “Dry Jane’s” section of the cocktail menu.

Of course, NA offerings still trend toward the sweet — and some include CBD, which some in the sober community criticize. But as our series of stories out this week (with recipes) on the evolution of nonalcoholic drinks, Los Angeles bars and restaurants are coming up with “thoughtful recipes that take inspiration from our seasonal bounty. And from the greater availability of dealcoholized wine, beer and spirits, which come in varying degrees of drinkability.

“The NA cocktail options I’ve tried on menus at Los Angeles restaurants and bars have been a mixed lot,” writes restaurant critic Bill Addison. “Plenty of them hew to an earnest formula: something like two or three juices combined with spiced syrup and a splash of soda. Or, the newer default, an NA negroni. They can taste perfunctory, reminding me of kitchens without pastry chefs who throw together a crème brûlée and easy chocolate cake because customers demand it.”

But he has no qualms about the NA drinks at Jon Yao’s downtown L.A. restaurant Kato — No. 1 on Addision’s 101 Best Los Angeles Restaurants list — created by bar manager Austin Hennelly and lead bartender Han Suk Cho.

“Riffs on spritzy aperitifs, mint-laced mules and tropical refreshers are bright and structured and herbaceous. Their NA cocktails, along with the NA beverage pairings they help create to match chef Yao’s Taiwanese-inspired tasting menu, are easily the most rigorously conceived and flat-out impressively delicious examples of such efforts in Southern California.”

Novelist Michelle Huneven, who has been sober for 36 years, writes that she has never had more NA choices for cocktail making at home and for ordering in restaurants.

Lucas Kwan Peterson tried and ranked 19 nonalcoholic IPAs — a far cry from O’Doul’s.

Addison, Danielle Dorsey and Sarah Mosqueda put together a guide to “7 exceptional places to try nonalcoholic cocktails.”

Actor Danny Trejo, who talked with contributor Heather Platt about his book “Trejo’s Cantina: Cocktails, Snacks & Amazing Non-Alcoholic Drinks From the Heart of Hollywood,” says, “What a difference it is for nondrinkers today. We are living in the golden era of nonalcoholic drinks and it is hands down the best time in history to be sober.”

Let’s gather again around Genet’s table

Reporter Stephanie Breijo shared the happy news this week that Genet Agonafer is reopening the dining room of her iconic Ethiopian restaurant Meals by Genet. Agonafer had changed her business model to a four-day, take-out-only operation after restaurants were again able to serve customers after the COVID-19 closures of 2020. This allowed her to spend time with her family while continuing to serve Los Angeles her gorgeously spiced doro wat and green lentils with Ethiopian mustard on supple injera, “the plate, the fork and the spoon of Ethiopian cuisine,” as I wrote when we announced that Meals by Genet was the winner of our 2022 Gold Award.

Her take-out plan worked well for a time — indeed Bill Addison honored the restaurant this year by inducting Meals by Genet into the L.A. Times Restaurant Hall of Fame. But after business slowed in 2023, Breijo writes that “Agonafer faced a difficult choice: Reopen Meals by Genet for regular service or close it permanently. In the end, she chose her passion, cooking.”

“I love, love, love my job,” Agonafer told Breijo. “I don’t know what I would do. I would fall apart if I stopped cooking.”

Los Angeles is all the better for her decision.

Sweet to the end

Meanwhile, we got news early this week that one of Southern California’s most acclaimed bakeries, Sweet Lady Jane, has joined the devastating list of 2023 notable restaurant closures, which reporter Stephanie Breijo documented last month. The bakery’s last day in business after 35 years was Dec. 31. As columnist Jenn Harris writes in her farewell story, Sweet Lady Jane’s triple berry cake — which “accounted for more than half of the bakery’s sales” — became the status cake for certain L.A. celebrations. “In addition to the right handbag, car and social circle,” she writes, “this was the cake you needed at your party.”

I should note that while it’s not exactly the same, you can still buy the single-berry cake that may have helped inspire the Sweet Lady Jane cake: the fresh strawberry whipped cream cake from Chinatown’s Phoenix Bakery.

L.A.’s next pastry craze?

One of the great foods families share during the weekend-long celebrations before and during Armenian Christmas on Jan. 6 is nazook, described by Food contributor Ani Duzdabanyan as “the flaky, rolled, traditional Armenian pastries that have a butter-and-sugar filling, scented with vanilla and burnished golden on top. Although the cookies have been eaten for decades, Duzdabanyan talked with Rose & Rye bakery co-founder Kristine Jingozian about the ways she, her mother and sister are simultaneously preserving tradition with family recipes but also updating nazook with, for instance, matcha, and coming up with the ultimate medovik or Russian honey cake. Could these Armenian sweets, asks Duzdabanyan, be L.A.’s next pastry craze?

“I am obsessed with matcha, I drink it everyday so I decided to add it to the traditional nazook,” Jingozian says. “It was a way for me to incorporate other cultures into our own culture because Rose & Rye is a diasporic project. Diasporic food means that it’s not just Armenian: It means that everywhere Armenians went they cooked and it’s Armenian food.”

Also …

• Ruben’s Bakery in Compton survived the pandemic, but as Metro reporters Angie Orellana Hernandez and Jeremy Childs write, “was destroyed within minutes just before sunrise Tuesday … when a mob of more than 100 people robbed the bakery during an illegal street takeover.”
• Alex Zaragoza writes a De Los column about the ways “diet culture tricks us into thinking our cultural foods aren’t healthy.
• What food trends does columnist Jenn Harris want to see more of in 2024? Her list includes more superettes, more dumplings and more Alison Hammond, the new co-host of “The Great British Bake Off.”

• And what 2023 food trends does Harris want to see go away this year? Besides the Krispy Kreme smash challenge, truffle everything, male-dominated power lists, calling every cheesecake “Basque cheesecake,” “fake meat-tasting ‘meat’” and the “unhinged dunking” of various foods into sauce on social media videos, Harris goes hard after the increasing numbers of untrustworthy restaurant reviews on social media. And don’t get her started about all those “girl dinner” videos people are posting: “Why must the term ‘girl dinner’ imply that girls are not capable of doing more than throwing together random ingredients that may or may not be edible? And in some cases, like with the single piece of cheese, there’s an aspect of diet culture that could potentially perpetuate unhealthy eating habits.”

  Unless we start calling “girl dinner” gender-neutral I-can-eat-whatever-I-want dinner, let’s kill it.