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Bar Calo offers an elegant space with a Mexican-inspired décor and menu. Best known for their mezcal drinks and modern Oaxacan food options, this laid-back space is the perfect place to connect with Los Angeles locals in an intimate venue.
OUR ARTICLE
BY: Alex Temblador Contributing writerBar Caló is a trendy cocktail bar in Echo Park that embodies a popular Oaxacan saying that goes like this: “For everything bad, mezcal; and for everything good, mezcal, too.”
As a local mezcal and cocktail bar, Bar Caló is there when life is bad and when life is good, and it’s doing so with herbs, spices, and style.
Light beams off of the mirror behind the bar providing a halo effect that dazzles into the surrounding Mezcal bottles.
The walls are painted a rosy hue which makes the long red couch that lines the wall pop out. In front of the couch are small blonde wooden tables that offer additional seating space from the long smooth gray bar complete with red velvet stools. Light beams off of the mirror behind the bar providing a halo effect that dazzles into the surrounding Mezcal bottles.
The Mexican-inspired menu offers an array of Mexican wines, mezcal drinks, seasonal cocktails, and small bites created with ingredients from Bar Caló’s own garden. Here you can pair a Mexican wine with Oaxacan hot chicken covered in a tamarind crema and market oysters, or sip on a shot of mezcal with twice-baked camotes that have housemade chorizo; or chow down on the Quesadilla Jamaica and wash it down with the Brown Buffalo cocktail made from Oaxacan corn whiskey, bourbon, chipotle syrup, and Angostura bitters. You’ll want to get here faster than a strike from Chicharito.
When the light is lowered in the evenings at Bar Caló and the mezcal starts to hit your bloodstream, you’ll feel like your hundreds of miles south of the border rather than in an LA’s Echo Park neighborhood. Because isn’t that what a good bar is all about? For a few hours, taking you out of your day to day life, and exposing a culture that is out of the norm. Wash it down with some of Oaxaca’s finest, and feel as a new spice is added to your life.
Where other bars of LA may take a different approach – whiskey forward, taxidermy on the walls, and vinyl spinning – Bar Caló’s paving its own way, showcasing Mexican heritage in a space that is stylish without being kitschy. Sure, those whiskey bars will warm your soul, but they don’t hold a candle to the cocktails in Caló, because when the bartender starts mixing up Mezcal, get ready, because your drink is going to be so smokey it may catch fire.
