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YACHT Knows Where to Get the Best Hangover Cure in Silver Lake

We hit up Claire Evans and Jona Bechtolt of YACHT to give us the skinny on Silver Lake's unbeatable vintage shopping and to tell us about the magical—and fragrant—hangover cure they swear by.
Photo courtesy of YACHT

In honor of our new VICE Guide to Los Angeles, we asked some LA-based musicians and artists to act as our virtual tour guides and fill us in on their favorite spots in the city. This time around, we hit up Claire Evans and Jona Bechtolt of YACHT to give us the skinny on Silver Lake's unbeatable vintage shopping and to tell us about the magical—and fragrant—hangover cure they swear by.

VICE: What neighborhood spot do you recommend to first-time visitors?
Claire Evans: Any day in our neighborhood has to begin at Cafecito Organico, the coffee shop on Hoover. We've been going there almost every day for five years.

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Jona Bechtolt: When we lived in Portland, the city had just reached "peak coffee." LA only had Intelligentsia, which is a total shitshow and not worth going to. We were so lucky to find Cafecito because it is truly my favorite coffee now in town.

Evans: We go in everyday. We always get one large iced coffee and one small iced coffee, which everyone that works there now calls "The Biggie Smalls." We walk in, and they're like "Biggie Smalls?"

What are your favorite places to eat?
Evans: Sqirl. Whenever we get up before 10 AM and we think we can beat the line, we'll hit it. Also, Pine & Crane, which is a Taiwanese place.

Bechtolt: That's maybe our favorite restaurant.

Evans: Yeah I have to stop myself from eating there every night cause it's not cheap. But it's so good. It's farm-to-table Taiwanese food, that's so fresh and so delicious. And there's this amazing Italian restaurant, called Aroma Restaurant, that looks so bad from the outside.

Bechtolt: Yeah, one thing about moving to LA from a place like Portland is that you have to learn to appreciate strip malls and know that there are hidden gems in every strip mall. Aroma Restaurant is a pretty prime example, because it is truly the ugliest looking place in one of the worst strip malls, and there's no way that anyone would assume that there would be good food in there or any kind of idea of the service that takes place there.

Evans: It's like going to the most precious like super sincere, family-style Italian restaurant, with such meticulous service. They read to you the specials menu out loud that takes 20 minutes because they have so many specials.

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It's amazing, because there's a ramen place down the street where there's always like 1,000 people in line, and I always drive by it and I'm like, "God, the greatest minds of my generation are being wasted waiting in line for ramen when there's an incredible cafe two doors down that is empty."

Where do you go when you want to clear your head?
Evans: I like to go to Elysian Park. It's kind of a criminally under-used park. You can see Dodger's Stadium and there's this hill that we call the Palm Tree Test garden (that's not what it's really called). It's just this big, weird grassy hill with every kind of palm tree planted, like one of each: short ones, tall ones, shrubby ones, and I don't know why they're all there. That's kind of our favorite chill-out spot.

Where do you like to shop?
Evans: I love Virgil Normal. I guess it's like a men's clothing store but there's a lot of unisex stuff there. They have a variety of really, really good vintage stuff for men. It's really hard for, I think, men to find clothes. Like how do you dress well if you're a guy? They have really beautiful vintage and some designer stuff, and they have a really cool scene. They have a lot art shows and happening and parties. It's a really cool kind of mixing spot for local designers, artists, and their friends. It's a cool vibe.

I also really like Painted Bird. I'm reluctant to tell you about Painted Bird. It's an amazing vintage store in Silver Lake on Santa Monica. It's a store where all the most stylish women in the area sell. I see it as my extended closet because I myself sell stuff and just get trade and then buy stuff. There's always something amazing there, and it's cheap. Or at least reasonably priced. I go there too much. It's my personal therapy.

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There's Otherwild, which is owned by our friend Rachel. It's sort of a community space, a feminist space. They sell a lot of art and books and clothes and designed objects, and weird pictures and crystals. And they do a lot of workshops teaching you how to make candles, or shoes, or how to weave. They also have these comedy shows.

There are all these things in LA that are kind of a mixture between retail, gallery, and community space. I don't really know what is it about Los Angeles that engenders that but I think it's really interesting.

What's the best thing you can do in Silver Lake for free?
Evans: The Chandelier Tree is kind of cool and free. There's this guy who lives in Silver Lake who has like a giant elm tree in his front yard and he's filled it with chandeliers and rigged them up so they light up at night. And it's really beautiful, and dreamy and romantic, and it's totally free—unless you want to tip him. He has a little parking meter outside that you can put money in to help him pay the electric bill.

I also like walking around all the staircases in Silver Lake. We're really, really close to the music box steps. They're a large flight of stairs that cut up the hill that Laurel and Hardy filmed the Music Box—a silent film from the 1920s, on. It's your standard comedy where Laurel and Hardy keep trying to push a piano up a hill, and it keeps falling. There are also cool little staircases that crisscross the neighborhood that a lot of people climb up and down for exercise. It's fun to just explore.

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The one thing you can't miss when you're in Silver Lake is ______ ?
Evans: Silver Lake farmer's market is kind of awesome. It's my favorite thing about living in Los Angeles is that we have access to year-round farmer's markets.

Bechtolt: Yeah, having a weekly farmer's market is incredible.

Evans: On Saturdays it's kind of a scene. We love to go and get our groceries every Saturday, we also get this stuff at this stand called Dave's Korean, which is all-vegan Korean food. They have this incredible broth that you can get.

Bechtolt: It's all fermented vegetables, so everything has an incredibly pungent smell and taste.

Evans: It's like magic if you're feeling hungover from a night or whatever. It's Dave's Korean fermented broth. It's really good, savory, and spicy.

Do you have a favorite neighborhood character?
Bechtolt: There's a man that I've never talked to, I don't know how far he's gone outside of our specific street, but he's a Japanese man who has a dog that his back legs are either broken or missing, and so they have a little cart that wheels the dog, but he has to hold it. He has to sort of hunch over and hold it this thing up so the dog can walk with its front legs. He is my favorite neighborhood guy.

What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you in that neighborhood?
Bechtolt: Another great thing about this neighborhood, and a lot of neighborhoods in LA is alleys. Like there's a whole rich scene of alley culture. Stuff that's happening, like people salvaging garbage and re-selling it on the streets.

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Our first Halloween in LA, we had been out at a party and were coming home at like 3 AM. There was a giant shirtless man who was glimmering in the moonlight, looking super sweaty, who was incredibly ripped and just walking in the alley. We thought nothing of it, drove past him, parked our car in the alley where we park it, and we're getting out of the car. And somehow—he had been 50 yards behind us when we drove by—he was immediately at our car. And he asked, "Hey do you have a light?" asking us to light his cigarette, and we were like, "No sorry."

We closed our car doors and started walking through the back of our house to our little gate and he was mumbling and muttering. Something was going on in his brain, either through substances or mental illness, and he followed us all the way up to our front door. And then he just stood there for like 20 minutes, just staring at our door and muttering stuff under his breath. It was pretty crazy on Halloween night to have this horror movie figure following us to our door.

Evans: And then one day a couple weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night to get water and I saw a man in our yard, and I thought, "Oh, okay he's taking our vegetables from our salad garden. That's cool, you know, for his health." And then later I realized he was stealing our bicycles. And then nothing weird has really happened to us since.

Is there anywhere you like to drink/party?
Bechtolt: Partying and drinking is kind of our job, so we generally like to stay mum, but there are a handful of places that we can recommend.

Evans: Silverlake has a lot of like chi-chi cocktail places and that's not really our vibe. There's a really shitty karaoke bar called the Smog Cutter, which is very close to our house that we often go to. It's really like the worst bar. But they have a karaoke machine, and again very shitty, but it's very fun place to get drunk and do karaoke.

For even more excellent LA-based recommendations from YACHT, check out their app 5 Every Day.

This interview has been edited and condensed.