Bar Avalon

Lunch at Bar Avalon ends with a curious ritual: Nathaniel Muñoz, the restaurant’s garrulous sommelier and general manager, hands you a baseball card. It’s the glossy, ’90s-era Topps variety, with a squiggle of black Sharpie across the front

to customers who may or may not care about baseball? Because he and chef Joshua Guarneri are baseball fanatics and they want to put their personal stamp on the restaurant, Muñoz told me recently. Also, it’s fun. Bar Avalon is the first California

In early March, two weeks before the coronavirus shut down L.A. dining rooms — before the new reality of disposable menus, face-shield-wearing servers and robot waiters — I wrote an enthusiastic review of Bar Avalon in Echo Park. In the review, I

baseball card that Muñoz paper-clipped to my bill, a random parting token that I found charming.) Thinking back on those dinners at Bar Avalon, I understand why some people are eager to dine out, even as coronavirus cases climb in Southern California

on a conversation I had in late June with Bar Avalon general manager and sommelier Nathaniel Muñoz, who worried over what he saw as the dangerous, whiplash pace of L.A. restaurant reopenings and closings. Restaurant and bar reopenings ought to center

generated by takeout orders and makes their restaurants one-stop shops for prepared food and essential household items. Among the businesses that have added grocery items since the shutdown: Kismet, Yang’s Kitchen, Go Get Em Tiger, Bar Avalon, Lady & Larder

a recipe for yang chow fried rice inspired by classic SGV restaurants. — Patricia Escárcega reviews Bar Avalon in Echo Park; it’s from a coffee company, Revelator, I remember from my Atlanta days, though Patricia says this restaurant’s draws lean

Drive, Los Angeles, (323) 268-6809 Nathaniel Muñoz is the general manager and sommelier at Bodega Avalon in Echo Park. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times) Echo Park Bar Avalon (Bodega Avalon) The Echo Park restaurant has reinvented itself as Bodega