“The worst part about it, at least for me, is that they tell you about three months in advance.” On Valentine’s Day, beverage director Max Reis learned his bar program at Mírate earned the restaurant a coveted spot on the list of North America’s 50 Best Bars. Coming in at number 46, the Mexican restaurant in Los Feliz is one of just two places in Los Angeles to make the list; the other is the widely beloved, locally acclaimed Thunderbolt in Historic Filipinotown, which ranks in the list’s top ten.
On one of the restaurant industry’s busiest days of the year, Reis was completely caught off guard by the regional recognition. Unlike most restaurants and bars, Mírate doesn’t carry major brands like Patrón and Jose Cuervo. Instead, the foliage-lined restaurant serves a highly curated selection of Mexican wine, beer and spirits, including agave spirits—a category that encompasses tequila and mezcal.
In this realm, Reis sources his bottles from a range of smaller, hard-to-find Mexican brands that prioritize sustainability and often have a family history of working in the spirits industry. “I want people to pay $20 for a cocktail here and then go somewhere else and pay $20 for Bacardi,” he adds. “And then it’s like, ‘Why would I do that when I can go somewhere special?’”
Another unique aspect of the restaurant’s cocktail program? Pre-Hispanic fermented beverages, listed on Mírate’s menu as bebidas ancestrales. Made with Indigenous culinary techniques, they’re fairly hard to find in Los Angeles outside of a few street vendors. At Mírate, Reis typically serves tepache, a lower-ABV drink based on pineapple rinds and spices plus pulque, a syrupy, kombucha-like fermented agave sap beverage. The latter has a fairly short shelf life, so it’s not always available in its pure form. When a given batch is about to turn, Reis turns the pulque into vinegar for culinary use.
What’s always available, though, is Tu Compa, the restaurant’s paloma which integrates two different kinds of pulque and housemade Squirt. The house-canned cocktail—the vehicle of which ensures consistency in the drink’s carbonation—also comes labeled with a QR code that links to a video game, where you can play the role of “agave defender.” It’s a gentle introduction to the complex drink, and imbued with the sort of thoughtful playfulness core to Mírate’s mixology mission.
“We’re trying to make something approachable while remaining authentic to the people that make it and ourselves,” Reis says. There’s always a couple of carefully constructed margaritas and an extensive, fairly indie agave spirits list at Mírate, but the cocktail menu is ever-evolving. At the moment, he’s working on a cocktail that will feature tejuino, another pre-Hispanic fermented beverage made from corn.
One of his favorite things to do is to take cocktails he doesn’t necessarily love and elevate them. The restaurant doesn’t serve a strawberry margarita, but even the classic margarita, known as Tommy’s Margarita, uses a “nogave” unrefined sugar syrup meant to imitate the taste and consistency of agave sweetener, which is widely considered unsustainable in the beverage industries due to monoculture and overharvesting.
“Our sourcing is the star,” Reis says. Order mezcal at the bar, and the shot you’ll receive is sourced from Emanuel Ramos, a smaller producer that ships roughly five batches a year—and one of the only places you can find it is Mírate. Another house margarita uses a orgeat syrup made of crushed De La Rosa peanut candies in addition to the traditional almond base. It’s another nod to Mírate’s overall emphasis on thoughtfully representing Mexican culture.
His favorite creation, however, is the Margarita Ji-Bol—a crystal-clear, force-carbonated margarita that’s canned and served out of a highball glass. For those familiar with Reis’s work as beverage director at Gracias Madre in West Hollywood, it’s similar to the restaurant’s off-menu clarified margarita. Between there and time at République working with his mentor, Shawn Likliter, Reis carved a path in the world of agave spirits—with Mírate being the full-circle realization of his unique vision.
One of his current goals is working towards exclusively sourcing the restaurant’s well spirits. “I don’t feel like you should come into my bar and have to upgrade in order to have an amazing experience,” Reis says. “I want to be judged by the baseline of what everybody that walks in orders. Usually, that’s well spirits.” This level of attention to detail, and emphasis on ethical sourcing, often at the expense of higher profit, has distinguished Mírate’s bar program from the beginning—and earned it a strong base of devoted regulars, not to mention recognition across the entire continent.