Why Seco matters.
Seco is a cosmopolitan wine bar where Silver Lake's creative character meets Mexico City hospitality, natural wine and a day-to-night concept shaped across Los Angeles, New York and Mexico.
Set along Sunset Boulevard between Hyperion and Lucile avenues and just steps from Sunset Junction, the wine bar occupies a dense commercial stretch between Silver Lake's hillside residential streets, the reservoir district and the neighborhood's southeastern approach toward Echo Park, where restaurants and independent storefronts press directly against one of East Los Angeles's defining urban corridors. Architect Lena Kohl built the interior around a curved wood bar, banquette and integrated cabinetry, concentrating the small room around communal drinking and dining. A compact patio extends seating toward Sunset Boulevard, allowing the activity inside to spill into the street frontage after dark. Custom tables, ceramics and glassware give the room a second physical register rooted in Los Angeles and Mexican makers. The result is a tightly composed neighborhood bar whose scale, artisan-made furnishings and transition from daylight cafe to nighttime gathering place translate the cross-city references behind Seco into a distinctly Silver Lake setting.
What defines Seco.
Seco is best known for extending Mexico City-based SantΕ Group into a Silver Lake day-to-night wine bar conceived by SantΕ founder Jos Gozain and creative director Olivia Lopez. Gozain opened the original SantΕ in Mexico City in 2021 before the group established its Los Angeles sushi restaurant next door to the future Seco. Gozain grew up around hospitality through his grandmother, who owned a Lebanese restaurant in Mexico, and brought to Seco the Mexican tradition of sobremesa, prolonged conversation and drinking after a meal has finished. The partners recruited chef David Potes, previously of Brooklyn's Okonomi, to develop a food program crossing Japanese, Mexican, Mediterranean and European references. Former Kismet and Bar Chelou sommelier Kae Whalen assembled the natural-wine program, establishing a beverage counterpart to Potes's cross-cultural cooking. Seco opened in late August 2024 before adding daytime service that September, creating a cafe in daylight and wine bar after 5 p.m. Creative direction reached into the physical objects surrounding the food: Lopez commissioned metal bread plates from Los Angeles and Mexico City studio Ananas Ananas, tables from Los Angeles designer Michael Felix, glassware from Highland Park designer Valerie Quant and Oaxacan plateware from 1050 Grados.
A hoodless kitchen with no live fire pushed Potes toward crudos, chilled preparations, assembled plates and techniques capable of producing intensity within unusually strict equipment constraints. Hamachi crudo combines yuzu ponzu with brown butter, crossing bright citrus and fermented salinity with warm dairy richness across raw fish. Burrata takes another cross-cultural turn through ikura and truffle oil, placing salmon roe's briny pop against soft cheese and aromatic fat. Endive Caesar uses toasted panko and nori powder to sharpen the salad through crunch and marine savoriness, and an adobo-marinated pork tostada brings chile-driven seasoning onto a crisp base. Spicy vodka strozzapreti breaks from the colder repertoire with a substantial pasta whose sauce supplies heat, acidity and richness without requiring the live-fire equipment absent from the kitchen. Daylight changes the composition through miso-mushroom and spicy tuna salad bocadillos, a grain bowl with roasted oyster mushrooms, black beans, avocado, soft-boiled egg and soba furikake, plus matcha horchata, aguas frescas and Dayglow coffee.
How Seco fits.
Seco works as the anchor for an outing connecting Silver Lake's experimental architectural history with a hillside site central to early American gay organizing and one of the neighborhood's most recognizable pieces of pedestrian infrastructure.
Begin at Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, where Richard Neutra used a $3,000 loan from Dutch industrialist C.H. van der Leeuw to build his experimental home and architectural office in 1932. The compact property occupied a 60-by-70-foot parcel facing Silver Lake Reservoir, forcing Neutra to test vertical living, roof gardens, industrial steel windows and spatial efficiency within severe land constraints. A Garden House followed in 1939 and 1940. Fire devastated the original main house in March 1963, leaving the Garden House and basement intact before Richard and Dion Neutra rebuilt the principal structure on its original footprint, completing VDL II in 1966. The compound subsequently passed to Cal Poly Pomona and became a National Historic Landmark, preserving three distinct phases of the Neutras' architectural experimentation. Continue to Mattachine Steps, the Cove Avenue staircase beside the former home of activist Harry Hay. Hay began organizing gay men in Silver Lake in 1950 with seven other participants, developing the Mattachine Society into one of the earliest enduring gay-rights organizations in the United States. Its 1951 mission joined resistance to anti-gay discrimination with the construction of a broader gay community, and discussion groups subsequently spread into other American cities. Los Angeles formally named the Cove Avenue stairway the Mattachine Steps in 2012, attaching that national civil-rights history to the hillside where the organization began. Conclude at Micheltorena Steps, part of the extensive public-stair network built into Silver Lake's steep residential terrain. The stairway climbs from Sunset Boulevard toward Micheltorena Street through three principal sections, physically translating the neighborhood's abrupt elevation changes into pedestrian circulation. Artist Corinne Carrey painted the staircase's heart in 2013 and joined Carla O'Brien and Mandon Bossi in transforming the risers with a multicolored treatment in 2015. The work later received approval as a public-art project in 2019, survived an unauthorized whitewashing in April 2022 and was restored the following month. The progression moves from a residential laboratory that helped redefine California modernism through a hillside tied to the emergence of organized gay civil rights and culminates on public stairs where Silver Lake's topography became a canvas for neighborhood-scale art.
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