Review of La Vela Latina in Playa Samara - 5-16-2012

La Vela Latina in Playa Samara, Costa Rica

La Vela Latina is an upscale, loungy beach bar in Playa Samara, Costa Rica. It was my favorite place to eat and one of my favorite places to grab a beer alone or with new friends from Casa Brian. Several rows of dark wood tables surrounded by low riding plastic Adirondak chairs provide ample seating on the sand. Just watch out for high tide because the tide sometimes laps up to the outermost chairs. Multiple large trees with thick canopies provide shade for the beach seating. Dogs commonly wander through the beach seating, and sometimes inside too. Relax though, they're friendly and are accustomed to tourists petting and feeding them. La Vela's front opens up creating a nearly seamless transition from beach seating to the dark wood floor, tables and chairs of the bar area proper.



La Vela Latina in Playa Samara, Costa Rica

Even on a pleasant afternoon where tourists and expats alike sit outside and throw back Imperials to the pounding surf, you can usually find a table to yourself. There's plenty of seating inside too. If you can, get the first row of tables next to the wooden rail that separates the outside seating from the inside. Most of those chairs lean back nicely and rock a bit. Add in the downbeat trip hop or mellow reggae La Vela usually plays and you've got a relaxing spot to watch the waves, grab a bite or wait out an afternoon thunderstorm. I've done all three there and loved it.



La Vela Latina in Playa Samara, Costa Rica

Of all the restaurants in town, I found La Vela's to be the most tasty, but also the most expensive. The menu is standard tourist fare including hamburgers, nachos, wraps, a steak, and plenty of exotic mixed and blended drinks. La Vela's burgers were too expensive (gor next door to El Ancla for nearly identical burgers for cheaper) and the nachos are more generous at Coco's Mexican Restaurant, but La Vela's Popcorn Chicken was awesome at $8.25 and includes a pile of French fries and a mixed green salad. Give it a try. La Vela runs 2-for-1 mixed drink specials every night of the week from 5PM to 7PM. Every Saturday around 5PM, La Vela also offers free sushi that you can eat off of bikini (and sushi) clad women.

From the beach at Samara's main street and looking into town, the easiest way to find La Vela Latina is to walk up the main street and take the first right. Walk to the end of this street past the tourist kiosk and Super Samara market (both on your left) all the way to the end of the street where it turns left. Instead of following the street left, turn right into the gravel parking lot for Locanada and La Vela Latina. La Vela is the restaurant on the right (and is also the one that does not have the sign that says "Locanda"). You can also find La Vela Latina by walking along the beach to the left (if facing towards the ocean and away from town). Walk past the first two beach bars on the left (Gusto Beach and Lo Que Hay). You'll shortly come upon three beach bars in a row. La Vela is the middle one. At night, look for its burning tiki torches. During the day, look for the sign advertising sushi.

Clement Part 2 - 5-5-2012



Sunset from Barracuda in Playa Samara, Costa Rica

The sun touches the horizon and sinks beneath it. Purple and navy replace soft orange and lavender.

“Where do you live in Paris,” I ask. Clement smiles sweetly as she describes home. She lives in a picturesque quarter of Paris – a flower shop in the ground floor of her apartment building and a bakery next door. A grocer 100m from her front door means she doesn't need to leave her little city within a city. “There is a park 300 meters away from my apartment. It is very nice. In the summer, children run, people eat...”

“And sleep?” I tease.

She smiles again. “Yes, and sleep.”

The sky is dark now, the sun gone and Samara's lights blinking alive. I ask about the boyfriend she mentioned offhandedly at La Vela Latina the previous night.

“How did you meet your boyfriend?”

“I met him in New Caledonia. He was the friend of a coworker. We were friends for one month, just friends, and then we decided we like each other.” She sips her beer.

Clement fell in love with a New Caledonian local who was 20 years older than her with two kids aged 18 and 25. Clement and he professed their love for each other when they were in New Caledonia. “It's complicated,” she tells me softly. “He says he will come to France but I don't think so. His children are in New Caledonia. When we talked yesterday, we talked only about what we did in the day. I tell him I love him and he does not know what he wants. How can you be 50 and not know what you want?”

She continues, “there is another woman who is trying to come back to him. I don't like her, I am very jealous. I call and she pick up the phone and she treats me like his friend.” It's complicated,” Clement tells me again, softly.

She stares out at the night, her voice barely above a whisper.“I am on this trip for myself, not for him. So I do what I wish. I want to dive, so I go dive.” She is going to visit a few other spots in Costa Rica before moving onto Panama, Nicaragua, Belize and perhaps someplace else. She has two months before going back to France, two months to find closure on her trip.

She tells me more and I listen. The talks quietly of her love for her boyfriend, their past and the confusion of their future. She tells me about the diving she wants to do and I wonder if she'll find peace or an escape if she just visits enough beaches. When she stops speaking, we sit in silence together for a long while, sipping in our beers and the burgeoning night before departing.

Four Great Places to a Get Drink in Hollywood on a Sunday Night

The portion of Sunset Boulevard around Highland Avenue used to be so seedy. I drove through here a couple years before the entertainment complex at Hollywood and Highland went up and remember plenty of wig shops, graffiti, and homeless people. Aggressive redevelopment anchored by the Kodak Theater has helped push out the neighborhood's grittier elements, replacing them with gaudy, overwrought tourist attractions like the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, and not one but two wax museums. But no place in the world tries to be more things to more people than Hollywood, and its bars are no different. To enjoy this once-forgotten, now fresh again part of Sunset Boulevard sans the crowds, visit on a Sunday and stop in at these four completely different bars.


Boardner's - Sunset & Cherokee at 1652 N. Cherokee Avenue, Los Angeles, CA. Phone: (323) 462-9621



Boardners in Hollywood, California

Boardners in Hollywood, California

Boardner's has been in business since 1942. Enter and walk down the tight passage between the dark grey granite bar on your right and the booths on your left. The black ceiling, black leather booths, black metal chairs with black cushions, subdued lighting and ornate lamps make you feel like you're in some Raymond Chandler detective story. Red neon signs advertise Oscar's kitchen, open until 9:30PM. Try the build-your-own B52 burger if you're hungry or the chicken quesadilla for something tasty and light. Food is half off all day Sundays. Down a narrow hall at the back is Club B52 and the outdoor patio. Sit on one of several couches, talk with locals under disco lights, or just listen to chill music while admiring the massive candelabrum dripping wax into a water fountain. Enjoy the $14 Caribou Lov (Malibu Rum, pineapple juice, and Bacardi 151) on a warm summer night, or spring for a $650 bottle of Dom Perignon Rose to celebrate your movie script getting picked up.

Full Bar
Food (half priced all day Sundays and 4pm to 8pm Monday through Friday)
Open Monday through Thursday 5:30pm to 2am. Open Friday through Sunday 4pm to 2am


The Power House - 1714 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA. Phone: (323) 463-9438




Power House in Hollywood, California

Power House in Hollywood, California

A welcome oasis in a desert of velvet ropes, manufactured glitz, and pretentious wannabes. Christmas lights hang all year around just inside the entrance. The Sunday night crowd is mostly 30-and-40 somethings wearing old jeans, witty T-shirts, and worn flannel. It's dark, so try not to stumble on a concrete floor so old the top layer has been worn through in places. Look up and count the missing ceiling tiles. Pull up a stool and enjoy $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap at the kitchy Formica bar with fake wood grain. The green vinyl booths look new enough, but the brick wall they're against looks like it was built when Greta Garbo first strutted down Sunset. Throw darts at one of two dart machines in the back while listening to the juke box and munching on the bar's freshly made popcorn. For just a second, I'm back in Pittsburgh.

Full Bar
Popcorn
Darts


Hollywood Happy Ending - 7038 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. Phone: (323) 469-7038



Hollywood Happy Ending

Hollywood Happy Ending

Two words: college bar. Beer company and sports team pennants are strung from post to post at this brightly lit bar and restaurant. The attractive, preppy, barely post-fraternity and sorority crowd gets loud, lively, and flirty. One of those machines with a controllable, drop-down claw is at the back, but it's filled with water and live lobsters instead of teddy bears. Try your luck for $2. Don't like cheap cans of PBR? The bartenders pick a hot blonde from the crowd to spin the Wheel of Specials hourly so $5 Irish car bombs are just a lucky turn away. Enjoy a full food and drink menu. There's even a popcorn machine.

Live music lovers will definitely want to come Sundays for the Frank and Todd Show. I saw these two amazingly talented acoustic cover artists mash-up The Momma's and The Poppa's California Dreamin' with Kanye West's Heartless and never heard a bar crowd cheer so loud at the end. When they closed the show with a fully beat boxed version of It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time, I knew I found the band for my someday wedding. Frank and Todd play every Sunday night from 9:30PM until midnight.

Full Bar
Food
Nightly Events
Open Monday through Saturday 11am to 1am. Open Sunday 11am to midnight.


The Woods - 1533 North La Brea, Los Angeles, CA. Phone: (323) 876-6612



The Woods in Hollywood, California

The Woods in Hollywood, California

Formerly the tiki-bar Lava Lounge, the owners redecorated this cozy bar into part Minnesota hunting lodge and part forest. The small vestibule just after the entrance is lined with wallpaper depicting fishing, hunting, and other summer outdoor scenes. Step into the bar proper and look up. The black painted ceiling is pierced with twinkling pinhole stars. Did you find Orion, or were you distracted by the elk antler chandeliers? The big frosted glass window behind the bar is painted to look like a field of thin, dead trees against a white winter sky. Dark brown seats against a wall of sawn wood blocks face small tables carved to look like cut tree trunks. A DJ spins chill out music in a black corner, only soft blue and red light from his mixing board betraying his hidden redoubt. It was summer when I walked in, but Grey Goose straight up sounds real good right now. In fact, make it a double. Winter's here.

Full Bar
Open seven days a week 8pm to 2am

Special thanks to local resident and my guide, Paul Fontana.