Is It a Bar? Or Is It a Restaurant? Who Cares? It’s Sam’s Place
Where the wings are crispy, the beer is ice-cold, and Instagram doesn't matter.
Photographs by Emily Wilson
Perhaps you’ve seen a picture of a warm, wood-paneled room outfitted with green ceramic candlesticks and booths built of chopped church pews appear in your feed lately. Or of Japanese sweet potatoes, charred in chunks, plated on top of a puddle of tahini, and finished with a heaping of diced chiles. Then you wondered where the picture was taken because there was no tag. If you were bold enough to ask, you know that Sam’s Place—at 5530 Monte Vista Street in Highland Park—is the answer. This charming new hang, a hybrid bar-restaurant situated two blocks parallel to Figueora, opened at the end of August. In the month since, its existence has amounted to an excited hush-hush, with mounting popularity powered by a good old game of word of mouth.
As you have likely gathered by now, Sam’s Place is not on Instagram. It has no website. It’s not yet on Apple Maps, although it is listed on Google. For owners Scotty Cantino and Ben Jones, longtime pals who met as touring musicians and solidified their friendship working at The Hermosillo between gigs, the decision is simply a matter of personal preference. “We both hate it,” they told me in unison, laughing. “I’d rather be tasting wine or polishing a glass than have to update social media or reply to DMs,” says Cantino, who mans the front-of-house and stocks the bar. “It seemed like an organic way for people that live in Highland Park to find it first as well,” adds Jones, the chef.
The duo recognizes that it’s an odd choice for a carefully designed watering hole to disown Instagram. And a risky one, too. Still, the strategy has worked so far. “We haven’t had a dead night,” says Jones. “Not only have people found it, but we already have a pretty high repeat customer base.” Such a refreshingly subversive attitude permeates throughout Sam’s Place, from the cassette tape collection behind the bar (“to stay off the Spotify algorithm,” says Cantino) to the inherent casualness of the overall vibe.
Sam’s Place is situated in a Spanish-style building with a dusty green stucco exterior and a roof made of rounded clay tiles. To the right of the entrance, a wood plaque announces the bar’s name, framed in flowers and carved by the artist Nik Gelormino. Inside, an inviting interior is thanks to Lafayette Studio, run by Alex Neu and Samantha Wetton (Jones’ wife), whom the restaurant is named after—at least in part. (“Sam’s Place” also refers to a Buck Owens’ song about a neighborhood bar.) They sourced the Midcentury church pews from a mission in Ventura, the vintage light fixtures from Europe via Etsy, and the antique sea shell mirrors in Northern California. They also had the ceiling painted cobalt blue. Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn was a core inspiration, design-wise. “I really wanted a space that didn’t feel like it was brand-new. I wanted it to feel kind of like it’s been here for a minute,” says Cantino.
Before opening Sam’s Place, Cantino tended bar at The Hermosillo for 12 years and eventually graduated to becoming the wine buyer for the popular Highland Park bar. Jones, on the other hand, was in and out of The Hermosillo’s kitchen. He also cooked at the formerly beloved Israeli restaurant Mh Zh, catered for Amara Kitchen, helped open Silver Lake’s now-closed Eszett, and operated a sourdough pizza pop-up at Gold Line. When the pair started to hone in on opening a spot of their own, they decided to do what they liked to do on their days off. “Ben would just make food, and I ended up bringing a lot of wine, and then we’d just hang out in the backyard and barbecue, drink wine, and invite friends over,” says Cantino. To that effect, Jones’ describes his menu as “all of the greatest hits from dinner parties past.”
Chicken wings are marinated in spices and shio koji, glazed with aji amarillo paste and pomegranate molasses, and crisped up in the kitchen’s pizza oven. The herb salad, laced with aged cheddar and crunchy sesame-hazelnut bits, is more satisfying than it needs to be. And saucisson and grilled bread are meant to be smeared with cornichon butter so that no tiny pickles are left behind. The star dish, in my opinion, is the Japanese sweet potatoes, a play on an old Mh Zh dish.
Speaking from experience, everything that Sam’s Place has to eat is craveable, well-priced, and comes out fast. House-roasted almonds and marinated Castelvetrano olives are $6 each, while the menu’s most expensive item is a ten-ounce bavette steak with red wine jus and watercress for $32. To order, you belly up to the bar and find Cantino. “In my head, [Sam’s Place] is a bar, but we close at 11, and you can get a steak,” he says. “So it’s not really a bar, and we don’t have liquor. But there are no servers, so it’s not a restaurant.”
If Sam’s Place were to be compressed into a contemporary category of dining establishment, it’d probably be a wine bar. Cantino selects wines made without additives, mostly by winemakers who farm their own grapes. His rotating list leans lighter-bodied, discludes heavy reds, and makes bottles a great value so that the bar wastes less. Like at other chef-driven wine bars (e.g., Stir Crazy), it’s entirely possible to have dinner at Sam’s Place. Then again, Sam’s Place also invites drinking and hanging on the patio all night long, as you might do at Café Triste or El Prado. “I always feel like I want the food that’s at a restaurant, but I don’t want any of the other stuff. I want to be able to stand in the corner and have a drink. I want to be able to invite my friend to come meet me mid-meal. I want to stay after sometimes and have a beer,” says Cantino.
“In my head, [Sam’s Place] is a bar, but we close at 11, and you can get a steak. So it’s not really a bar, and we don’t have liquor. But there are no servers, so it’s not a restaurant.”
Even if Sam’s Place has the temperament of a wine bar, beer is what its owners drink 90% of the time. On draft, they serve a crisp house Pilsner made by a secret brewer in Berkeley, Reissdorf Kölsch, and Highland Park Brewery’s Hello, LA IPA. Bottles of Coors, Pacifico, and Victoria can be mixed with fresh lime juice and made into a salt-rimmed chelada. And all beer is served ice-cold—a nonnegotiable for both Cantino and Jones. “This whole journey started in New Orleans,” recounts Jones, a Louisiana native. “One of my best friends works at this dive bar, BJ’s, and it just has the coldest beer. The bartenders are moving beers from refrigerators into the ice chest before they serve it to you, so it’s as cold as humanly possible. We became obsessed with making that be a fixture here.” In addition to BJ’s, Cantino’s first ice-cold beer experience—at a diner that served ground beef tacos in his hometown of Riverside—is seared into his memory. “They had the craziest refrigerator, and they’d always pull Coors Lights from the back of it. They were $2, and they were so cold, it would hurt in the best possible way.”
By the time Sam’s Place is open for five years—a promising possibility, given the restaurant’s low rent cost and minimal labor requirement—Cantino will have been serving drinks in Highland Park for almost two decades. “We’re just trying to be consistently good. I’d be psyched if, in five years, it was as good as it is now. That’s my focus: just making sure that every beer mug is really cold,” he says. If a true neighborhood joint is dependable, with warm and welcoming service and proprietors who are embedded in the community, then Sam’s Place aims to be just that. If it works, it works, and there’s no need for Instagram.
just the best place!!