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Reimagined cantina features Tex-Mex comfort food with an upmarket twist along with a tequila menu.
Hours
| Friday | 5–10 PM |
| Saturday | 5–10 PM |
| Sunday | 4–9 PM |
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | 5–10 PM |
| Wednesday | 5–10 PM |
| Thursday | 5–10 PM |
Address and Contact Information
Address: FARMERS AND MERCHANTS BANK BUILDING, 118 4th St, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Phone: (213) 687-8002
Website: http://bar-ama.com/
Menu Photos
Order and Reservations
Order: Order online
Photo Gallery
Related Web Results
Bar Amá
by Bar Amá & Bäco Mercat. where balance meets controlled chaos. location. 118 W. 4TH STREET LOS ANGELES, CA 90013. hours. DINNER TUESDAY-SATURDAY / 5PM-10PM
Bar Amá – Review – Downtown LA – Los Angeles – The Infatuation
Bar Amá’s casual, walk-up cantina vibe is exactly what you want it to be and a nearly foreign concept in this suddenly upscale part of DTLA.
Bar Amá | Los Angeles CA – Facebook
We’ll be opening outdoor dining on Tuesday, March 9! Happy to say that our team already have started to receive vaccinations. You can make a reservation via …
Reviews
Martina Mattar
3,5 / 5 – Staff was super friendly, nice atmosphere, but the food we ordered didn’t impress.
We got the Mushroom Birria, the stew was flavorful but the mushroom felt like it had been cooking for too long in it and lost its flavor. The pita bread was top notch, though.
We also got the shrimp. It was pretty good, but not amazing.
Maybe we ordered the wrong dishes.
On the other hand, the drink we got was pretty great.
There’s an 18% required fee that is supposed to go towards the workers but that’s on top of tax and tip, so the total came out pretty high for the food we had. I admire the attempt but that might not be the best way to go.
… moreWe got the Mushroom Birria, the stew was flavorful but the mushroom felt like it had been cooking for too long in it and lost its flavor. The pita bread was top notch, though.
We also got the shrimp. It was pretty good, but not amazing.
Maybe we ordered the wrong dishes.
On the other hand, the drink we got was pretty great.
There’s an 18% required fee that is supposed to go towards the workers but that’s on top of tax and tip, so the total came out pretty high for the food we had. I admire the attempt but that might not be the best way to go.
Al Wong (wcb79)
Came here on a recommendation from a friend, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. The staff was super friendly. I asked them about portion sizes and any dishes they’d recommend. My favorite was the puffy shell shrimp taco.
… moreM P
We absolutely loved Bar Amá! This is one of the best dining experiences we’ve had in LA (and our three weeks trip through Southwest). The restaurant is stylish, with a warm, welcoming vibe. The staff were incredibly friendly and attentive, and you never feel rushed – it’s a place where you can truly enjoy your meal at a relaxed pace.
The food is fresh, flavorful, and beautifully presented – clearly made with care. Excellent value for money, especially considering the quality. It felt much more like a European dining experience than the usual fast-paced American style.
Highly recommend for anyone looking for a cozy, high-quality Tex-Mex spot in Downtown LA that values both food and atmosphere.
… moreThe food is fresh, flavorful, and beautifully presented – clearly made with care. Excellent value for money, especially considering the quality. It felt much more like a European dining experience than the usual fast-paced American style.
Highly recommend for anyone looking for a cozy, high-quality Tex-Mex spot in Downtown LA that values both food and atmosphere.
Ian DSa
Nice place with some decent food, but nothing mind blowing. Considering the price paid, I’ve had better at food trucks and hole in the wall type of places. But it’s a great place to bring people who are squeamish about eating at restaurants that might be far below their paygrade.
… moreAlexander Kargher
Hit Bar AMA for the first time in a minute and it still slaps. Every dish we had was on point. We had three of the salads— our favorite was probably the Crispy Eggplant Salad, but the Brussel sprout Caesar and the Fig / Croquette salads were both hits. We also appreciated the throw back to Baco Mercat and enjoyed one of the updated Bacos. Finished it off with the albondigas and the spicy shrimp with tortillas.
… moreSandra Simmons
A few months ago the Food 52 cookbook club on Facebook (around 35,000 members) cooked from the Bar Amá cookbook and everyone fell in love with Tex-Mex, Josef Centeno’s family stories, the absolutely excellent recipes, and the alcohol section too. When I finally decided to fly after months and months of being at home during the pandemic, I came to see my daughter in Los Angeles and had literally only one food wish – to go to Bar Amá. I wasn’t disappointed. They have the alley open for outdoor dining, our server was fantastic and she seemed to enjoy all my cookbook stories , I mean, if she didn’t, she hid it well lol! Everything we had was excellent, see the photos. If you haven’t yet been you should go and don’t forget the B side of the menu the blistered okra was stellar and so was the za’atar labneh & puffy bread. P.S. BUY THE COOKBOOK! I’ve made 40-50 of the recipes, they all are totally worth it!
… moreHemal Patel
Consistently a good food experience! Great vegetarian options that are interesting and fun compared to most sit-down LA Mexican restaurants. You can tell the chef put thought into the vegan and vegetarian options.
… moreTopher B
Amazing food! What a pleasant surprise. I had just gotten into town and stumbled upon this place in search of Mezcal in the area. While my drink was amazing, the food was the star! The only reason this isn’t a 5 star review is because our table was not ready, but we were offered to sit on the outside patio/alley for drinks until our table was available. We never got notification of our table as we wished to move inside as there was some sort of singles event going on outside. Possibly a missed communication. Would still highly recommend!
… moreCarey Smith
Awesome experience overall having dinner and cocktails here. The Amá margarita and the Negroni Mexico are especially good. And I’m not a huge dessert person but the rice pudding was unique and superb.
… moreJay Keyes
I came to Bar Amá for one thing: puffy tacos. Bar Amá’s Mexican-American chef (and recent Michelin Star winner), Josef Centeno, is from San Antonio, the city that invented the puffy taco. The puffy taco, a Tex-Mex staple, has made a slow migration to Southern California, now with (at least) two restaurants that serve them in L.A. County: Bar Amá and Arturo’s Puffy Tacos in Whittier. At Bar Amá, they’re available to order off of a “secret menu,” and different varieties are rotated daily. I ordered both available on the evening I was here, the “Puffy Shrimp Taco” and the “Puffy Cochinita Pibil Taco.”
Neither of the puffy tacos served to me here were particularly “challenging” and both mostly avoided fussy “chef treatments,” instead coming across as straightforward rather than reinvented. That said, these are “designer” puffy tacos compared to what I ate and reviewed from Arturo’s Puffy Tacos earlier this summer. Whereas Arturo’s tacos evoked a Taco Bell Chalupa, Bar Amá’s was lighter in weight and color, reminding me more of Indian fry bread. Yet, in both cases, it is masa and not wheat used to make these taco shells, a self-reminder that tastebuds aren’t always reliable when coated in salt and oil.
The process behind the puffy taco shell is that a corn tortilla is deep-fried for a very brief time so that it puffs up from air attempting to escape the masa, thus creating large air pockets, making the tortilla “puffy.” Once the tortilla is “puffed,” it is removed from the fryer, glistening with oil and similar in appearance to a fried dough shell, then stuffed like a normal taco and served.
The “Shrimp Puffy Taco” consists of grilled butterflied shrimp that has been soaked in a sticky, spicy marinade. The edges of the shrimp are charred with a smoky crust of developed flavor, and these shrimp would be excellent on their own. Here they are covered with shredded red & white cabbage, with an airy avocado and chile mousse that channels Cielito Lindo’s famous sauce (and indeed it is the sauce that Bar Amá uses on its own taquitos, according to my waiter), crispy fried parsley, a stewed tomato salsa, and a sprinkling of queso panela. This taco has so many things going on that could easily be overwhelming except that, in Centeno’s skilled hands, you only get just enough of each flavor to derive what you need from it, and no component seems superfluous. I love how spicy and sassy this taco is, but that’s not what is front and center: it is the tremendous grilled shrimp that you’ll remember long after you’ve left here.
I enjoy cochinita pibil when it’s done correctly, when the grassy achiote and sour orange is discernible, when it is thick enough to be scooped into a tortilla. By those measures, Bar Amá’s “Cochinita Pibil Puffy Taco” mostly does its job, even if my hands were slick with grease mixed with recaudo rojo after eating this. Visually this taco resembles the “Shrimp Puffy Taco” due to its small mound of cabbage and specks of queso, but it is a much different animal flavor-wise. For sweetening and texture, the cochinita pibil here is infused with pineapple. It’s a tasty taco that I think would also have been excellent if served traditionally in a regular corn tortilla with marinated onions.
To summarize, these tacos were excellent, service here was pretty good, and the place has an interesting menu. Will I be back? My current lifestyle doesn’t really support the dietary demands of Tex-Mex, even as I have begun to acknowledge it as a legitimate regional Mexican cuisine. If you’re the kind of person who can consume all things oily, salty, spicy, and cheesy, I can think of few better menus for you than Bar Amá’s.
… moreNeither of the puffy tacos served to me here were particularly “challenging” and both mostly avoided fussy “chef treatments,” instead coming across as straightforward rather than reinvented. That said, these are “designer” puffy tacos compared to what I ate and reviewed from Arturo’s Puffy Tacos earlier this summer. Whereas Arturo’s tacos evoked a Taco Bell Chalupa, Bar Amá’s was lighter in weight and color, reminding me more of Indian fry bread. Yet, in both cases, it is masa and not wheat used to make these taco shells, a self-reminder that tastebuds aren’t always reliable when coated in salt and oil.
The process behind the puffy taco shell is that a corn tortilla is deep-fried for a very brief time so that it puffs up from air attempting to escape the masa, thus creating large air pockets, making the tortilla “puffy.” Once the tortilla is “puffed,” it is removed from the fryer, glistening with oil and similar in appearance to a fried dough shell, then stuffed like a normal taco and served.
The “Shrimp Puffy Taco” consists of grilled butterflied shrimp that has been soaked in a sticky, spicy marinade. The edges of the shrimp are charred with a smoky crust of developed flavor, and these shrimp would be excellent on their own. Here they are covered with shredded red & white cabbage, with an airy avocado and chile mousse that channels Cielito Lindo’s famous sauce (and indeed it is the sauce that Bar Amá uses on its own taquitos, according to my waiter), crispy fried parsley, a stewed tomato salsa, and a sprinkling of queso panela. This taco has so many things going on that could easily be overwhelming except that, in Centeno’s skilled hands, you only get just enough of each flavor to derive what you need from it, and no component seems superfluous. I love how spicy and sassy this taco is, but that’s not what is front and center: it is the tremendous grilled shrimp that you’ll remember long after you’ve left here.
I enjoy cochinita pibil when it’s done correctly, when the grassy achiote and sour orange is discernible, when it is thick enough to be scooped into a tortilla. By those measures, Bar Amá’s “Cochinita Pibil Puffy Taco” mostly does its job, even if my hands were slick with grease mixed with recaudo rojo after eating this. Visually this taco resembles the “Shrimp Puffy Taco” due to its small mound of cabbage and specks of queso, but it is a much different animal flavor-wise. For sweetening and texture, the cochinita pibil here is infused with pineapple. It’s a tasty taco that I think would also have been excellent if served traditionally in a regular corn tortilla with marinated onions.
To summarize, these tacos were excellent, service here was pretty good, and the place has an interesting menu. Will I be back? My current lifestyle doesn’t really support the dietary demands of Tex-Mex, even as I have begun to acknowledge it as a legitimate regional Mexican cuisine. If you’re the kind of person who can consume all things oily, salty, spicy, and cheesy, I can think of few better menus for you than Bar Amá’s.