The Wine Program At LA's Bestia Keeps Getting Weirder, With White Wines Leading The Way

On a recent early Tuesday evening at Bestia, the Los Angeles restaurant that opened in late 2012 in the Arts District, the rush was already underway and Ryan Ibsen, 43, the restaurant's affable, thoughtful wine director, was already busy popping corks.

Imagine keeping wine in stock for this mad dash of a restaurant featuring Ori Menashe's spectacularly creative menu for which the term used most often to describe it, "rustic Italian," seems wholly inadequate. Imagine keeping the wine flowing ahead of 500 covers a night, a roiling agglomeration of the loud, the hip, the bespoke, the foodies, the almost famous, and Gustavo Dudamel, in a class by himself, who takes advantage of Bestia's late-night, post-performance hours.

Imagine pouring wine for Dudamel. It is a good reason to go deep in Spanish wines, which Dudamel loves and which Ibsen has covered, though a guest this charismatic and persuasive might serve as further motivation. Ibsen keeps wines off menu, in reserve, on backup, to fill holes, accommodate seasonal exigencies, and broaden the range of his guests' experience. The list changes every day. Partly it's because this is a program subject to extreme depletion, so you have to have a backup plan. But partly, too, it comes out of a tradition of edginess established long before Ibsen took over in 2015.

There remains a distinct whiff of agitprop in Bestia's wine program, which suggests that Ibsen is drawing from the legacy, or perhaps the residual energy, of Maxwell Leer, the restaurant's antic founding wine director. Leer's selections, and often his service, were as much about disruption as they were about accommodation.

Find out what sets this wine list and this beverage director apart.