From the LA Times

You know summer's here when your cocktail looks like a snow cone. Or a lassi. Or an ice cream float. Or a fruity soda pop that comes in a glass bottle, complete with bubbles and twist-off cap.

A wave of new cocktails that hew toward the playful not only puts us squarely in summer but also is helping to make L.A.'s cocktail scene uniquely its own.

The snow cones at Son of a Gun on West 3rd Street are tiki-inspired crushed-ice cocktails served in paper cones that rest in julep cups. A new cocktail menu at 1886 Bar at the Raymond in Pasadena features bottled fizzy cocktails. And at Pour Vous, the French-themed bar that opened on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood two months ago, the menu is punctuated with lassis and parfait look-alikes and drinks that resemble something from your favorite juice bar. What's up with all the fun drinks from serious bartenders?

"Our cocktail culture really reflects an evolution," says Lindsay Nader, part of the Pour Vous team that helped realize a novel take on French-inspired drinking. "There are [craft cocktail] pioneers in New York who are still kind of stuck in this rigid way of working and creating. They aren't breaking free of the handlebar-mustache, buttoned-up attitude. In L.A., we're moving out of that era, it's anything goes, we're having fun with cocktails and stripping away some of that seriousness."

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