Ideas just seem to pour
The savvy wines at Esters, Rustic Canyon and Cassia emerge from one palate: Kathryn Weil Coker’s.
Josh Loeb — owner with his wife, Zoe Nathan, of the Santa Monica restaurant Rustic Canyon Wine Bar and Seasonal Kitchen — has always had a penchant for wine. As he was coming up in the industry, he had stints buying wine at a small number of places, most notably Capo, Bruce Marder’s wine-centric spot in Santa Monica. And so, naturally, he composed Rustic Canyon’s opening list in 2006.
But when the restaurant became a “group” in 2010, Loeb was obliged to delegate. The task fell to Kathryn Weil Coker, then a 30-yearold whirlwind who rose out of the server ranks with an aptitude and a skill such that she now heads all of the restaurants’ beverage programs. The most active of these, wine-wise, are Rustic Canyon, Cassia — the restaurant Loeb runs with chef Bryant Ng — and Esters, a Loeb partnership with Coker and her husband, Tug, which is, right now, amid great competition, the best wine bar in Southern California.
The menu at Rustic Canyon, the group’s flagship, has always been locally sourced, comfortable, unruffled. One of Loeb’s more oft-quoted sentiments is that it should be an everything place, where people in ripped jeans and flip-flops dine next to linen-clad Santa Monicans and no one feels out of place. The wine program felt similar, fueled by California Pinot Noir, Loeb’s personal fave and the closest thing we have in this day and age to an omnibus wine for an everything place.
In Coker’s hands, Rustic Canyon’s wine list has become both larger and more diverse. She’s compiled an enviable selection of grower Champagne and sparkling wines, and a core of French bottlings, not to mention an ever-growing selection of Italian wines (her floor sommelier, Ferdinando Mucerino, a native of Naples — helps out here). But the spiritual center of the wine list is a special page devoted to Williams Selyem, the iconic Russian River Valley Pinot house, more than a dozen of their single vineyard bottlings, many in verticals, going back as far as 2005.
At Cassia the menu skews southeast Asian, suffused through French bistro. In keeping with the bistro setting, Coker has maintained a fairly small list, about 60 selections, though she intends to expand it to more than 200 within a year.
The focus is on white wine, with a healthy selection of Riesling, but also other, more playful options like Broc Cellars’ “Love White” or the
Austrian producer Moric’s blend, “Super Natural;” or you can get considerably more serious, like F.X. Pichler’s sumptuous Smaragd Gruners, or de Montille’s grand Corton, one of the world’s most majestic Chardonnays. Of the reds, most are diminutive and light-bodied, like Arnot Roberts’ spicy Trousseau and Sebastian David’s jangly, peppery Cabernet Franc “l’Hurluburlu” — served chilled, of course.
Right now, L.A.’s wine bar scene is exploding: Bar Covell, Bar Bandini and Augustine are all thriving in wildly disparate formats, as well as newbies Hayden, Stanley’s Wet Goods and Tabula Rasa. (This isn’t counting wine-themed restaurants like A.O.C., Wally’s Beverly Hills, or Marvin — or Rustic Canyon, for that matter.)
At the moment, none can hold a candle to Esters, a high-ceilinged temple of vinous pleasure that doubles as a retail store by day and chill, intimate wine bar by sundown.
So, some trophies: Current vintages of Château de Brézé’s Saumur Clos de la Rue is here, as is the Muscadet “Gaia” from Jerome Bretaudeau; both rarities, and we haven’t even left the Loire Valley. There are Rieslings from Eva Fricke, rosés from Etna, Bandol, Oregon, even the Nahe if you’re feeling daffy. But the bulk of the list is reserved for Burgundy. Of the roughly 350 selections — massive for a wine bar — fully one-third is devoted to Burgundy, from Bourgogne Rouges to Bonnes Mares from Bruno Clair, putting Esters, if not on par with a Spago or a Mélisse, in the ballpark as one of the best, and best priced, sources for Burgundy in the city.