An Evening at Novikov — When Beverly Hills Discovered Mezcal

There is a particular challenge in bringing mezcal to Beverly Hills. The room already knows luxury. It has tasted grand cru Burgundy, vintage Armagnac, single-malt Scotch with decades of age. It has no patience for things that are merely expensive. What it responds to — when it responds at all — is something it has never encountered before.

On the evening of June 26th, at Novikov Beverly Hills on Canon Drive, Victorioso Mezcal offered exactly that.

The Room

Novikov is not a room that forgives indifference. The restaurant — a London transplant that has made Beverly Hills one of its spiritual homes — operates at the intersection of Japanese precision and European hospitality. The clientele arrives with expectations formed by years of dining at the highest level. They are not curious about new things; they require that new things justify themselves.

We arrived with four expressions and a story that took three generations to complete.

The Pour

The evening opened with our Espadín — the most approachable entry into the Victorioso range, though "approachable" does a disservice to a mezcal distilled at 46% in small batches using a copper still that Juan Sernas has been refining since the 1980s. For guests encountering mezcal seriously for the first time, the Espadín offers a complete introduction: the copal-smoke character on the nose, the stone fruit and roasted agave in the mid-palate, the long mineral finish that reminds you you are drinking something that came from the earth.

From there, the Tobalá. The room quieted.

Wild-harvested from the mountainous terrain above Santiago Matatlán, where the plant grows in rocky shade and takes fifteen to twenty-five years to reach maturity, the Tobalá carries a floral complexity that no cultivated agave can replicate. Several guests — including a sommelier who has worked three Michelin-starred kitchens — asked to return to it. That is the only review that matters.

What Beverly Hills Said

By the time we poured the Ensamble — four wild agaves distilled together in a single run, an expression that takes the concept of terroir and multiplies it — the conversation had shifted from polite curiosity to genuine engagement. People were asking about the Sernas family. About Santiago Matatlán. About how long the agave had been in the ground before it was harvested for this particular bottle.

These are not the questions of people who are being polite. These are the questions of people who have encountered something that demands to be understood.

Why This Matters

Beverly Hills is not a market — it is a signal. When a room this discerning chooses to give its attention, the rest of California takes note. What happened at Novikov on June 26th was not simply a tasting event; it was a conversation between one of the world's most scrutinizing audiences and a mezcal that had spent thirty years earning the right to be in the room.

The Sernas family has never made mezcal for a particular market. They make it the only way they know how — slowly, by hand, from the land they know. On a warm night in Beverly Hills, that turned out to be exactly enough.

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Victorioso pours at select events across California. Follow our Events page for upcoming tastings in Los Angeles, Orange County, and beyond.