There tends to be a certain type of establishment that appears on the prestigious World’s 50 Best Bars list, an annual ranking chosen by the anonymous votes of some 600 industry professionals across the globe.
Among the 2021 honorees: a swanky hotel bar in Central London, a chic speakeasy in Tokyo, a buzzy mixology den in Dubai — establishments that pair well with a platinum credit card and a seat in first class.
Yet there was one name that stood out on this year’s expanded list: Thunderbolt.
The unassuming Echo Park cocktail bar, which opened in late 2019, didn’t crack the top 50 but was named No. 66 on the expanded list of 51-100 and given the “One to Watch” award.
Thunderbolt was the top-ranked bar in Los Angeles this year (the Arts District branch of NYC bar Death & Co landed at No. 99) and only the third L.A. bar to make the list, following the now-closed Walker Inn in 2016 (No. 37) and the Varnish in 2012 (No. 14).
Not bad for a neighborhood spot attached to a sagging Knights Inn and wedged up against the 101 Freeway.
But what makes the story of Thunderbolt so unexpected, however, is not just its sudden elevation onto the international cocktail stage. It’s that it managed to survive long enough to be honored at all.
“We opened six months before the pandemic hit. We weren’t profitable yet. Everything shut down,” said Mike Capoferri, 35, Thunderbolt’s co-owner and lead bartender. “Every day I would ask myself, ‘Is it crazy to keep doing this? Do I close the doors?’”
It was a highly personal decision for Capoferri, whose name, fittingly, means “iron-headed” in Italian. He had spent the last 4 ½ years building the neighborhood bar of his dreams, a project that was the culmination of a peripatetic career in the bar industry, and believed that if he closed Thunderbolt, even temporarily, it was likely the bar would be closed for good.
“It’s harder to open the doors a second time than the first,” he said. “And it was really hard the first time.”
Thunderbolt almost closed during COVID. Then it was named one of the world’s best bars
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