corkbar: wine bar for neophytes

It's been hard to type with my fingers triple-crossed, but I think I've finally found a new home. I don't want to jinx it, so I won't say more than that. Only now I feel comfortable taking some time away from house hunting and money making to sit down and put in some table time. So here we go.

I got a hold of a beer once when I was very little. I don't remember drinking more than a couple sips of it--nor do I remember trying to eat part of a raw steak afterward, though I've been told that I did that--but I do remember slamming my hand in the door of our red Subaru station wagon, and I remember it was horrible.

I like to think of this story as a fun explanation for why I never felt possessed to drink. I didn't start drinking until after I turned 21. And I still don't really drink-drink. But the truth is that I was probably scared straight by a video I watched in the D.A.R.E. program in 5th grade. (You may have seen it too: it's the one with the anthropomorphic bee and rabbit. It's terrifying.) As a result, wine is one particularly cavernous gap in my food culture knowledge.

Now to last week: Aaron and I were invited to sample the summer menu at a wine bar downtown. These things are a bit funny for us because we're always slightly convinced that there's been some kind of mistake. Any minute someone will announce that we were accidentally invited to sit at the grown ups table, and that we should go back to our rooms where we'll be served shells with ragu.

Of course, that didn't happen. And as we sat at the table at Corkbar, looking over the menu with two of the sweetest PR girls, I realized that it is the perfect wine bar for a horticultural neophyte like me. Corkbar's wine menu is meticulous and comprehensible. The list includes notes about flavor and pairing for each wine on the menu, all of which are made in California.

The food menu offered wine notes as well. And everything we ate was delicious. There isn't much to say because the bar seems to specialize in comfortable simplicity. They have taken the impenetrably high culture concept of a wine bar, stripped it of pretense, and given it air and light.

I will say, however, that it does not get better than their bahn mi sliders. Ground pork, ginger, cilantro, garlic, and carrot, with cool daikon that tempers the hot bursts of sriracha for the most pleasant kind of heat I've had served between two mini challah buns.

Corkbar: 403 W. 12th Street, Los Angeles. (213)746-0050