Nursing Your Hangover in Los Angeles

A popular dive bar in Manhattan Beach, Ercoles opens up early on Sundays and welcomes all of the drunks from Saturday night. Another great reason to drink here early are their surprisingly good Dodger Dogs served only from 1 PM to 3PM.

With its unique mix of oily, spicy and savory tastes, I’ve found Pho noodles to be the absolute best post-hangover meal, and Vietnam House makes a mean bowl of the stuff. Many of my Vietnamese friends say that this dish is well suited to this purpose because of their people’s penchant for drunkeness, although I think that the staggering amount of MSG in the soup base also has something to do with it. You know, fighting poison with poison and all that.

Doughboys serves up amazing breakfast and lunch items and they’re just greasy enough to banish your hangover without exacerbating the situation. Scrapple with Dirty Eggs is my favorite.

Toast Bakery Cafe = Tons of hipster customers, poor service and terrible food quality. All consistently barf-worthy attributes in a restaurant and I’ve never failed in leaving them a nice present in their bathroom as added compensation for their continued incompetence.

Despite the extreme heat and demanding positions of Bikram Yoga, I’ve found the class to be extremely helpful in alleviating many hangovers. I’ve been to a couple of studios, but the South Pasadena location, run by Inga, is by far my favorite. The people here are also very nice and most of the time politely ignore the wretched smell of grain alcohol leaving my body in the form of blood, sweat and of course, tears.

McCormick & Schmick’s is a nice place, made much nicer by the fact that they make carefully crafted cocktails starting at 11AM. I’d take advantage of the mimosas that are popular on Sunday mornings, but enough people question my sexuality already.

I’m straight, damn it!

As much as I love lounging in bed for the entire day during a particularly wretched hangover, many times my girlfriend will drag me out to Huntington Library with a loaf of bread in hand and we’ll feed the ducks at the lake. Who said this relationship stuff was easy?

Although I’ve heard numerous hushed accounts about the “special” services offered at this establishment, I’ve always found it to be clean, well stocked and generally law abiding. Plus, the blind masseuse that works here totally gets all of the alcohol kinks out in no time. At least… I think he’s blind.

Located in the heart of Little Tokyo, Tawa’s Shiatsu offers the most merciless shaitsu practitioners in Los Angeles. At least that’s how it felt when my back was pummeled by Toshiro, the venerable “head masseur”. Still, after enduring that beating, my hangover, in comparison was relatively modest.