Taste This
Tequila-Fueled Tasting Dinners Downtown

Now as for that new salsa-soaked restaurant Downtown you've been so excited about.

Not that one. Or that one, or that one. No, the really sleek one with the special tequila-tasting menus served only in high-design lounge chairs—Rivera is now taking reservations for its Friday debut.

It's divided into three distinct areas—the most secluded is the Sangre room, where if you're a member you'll get a skeleton key granting access to your own bottle of chef John Sedlar's specially made extra-añejo tequila. (Tequila is his middle name—just kidding, it's Rivera.)

But if you've dropped in without a reservation, try your luck at the other end in Playa, with a counter and communal table that would be like a sushi bar, if sushi bars had shaken-to-order salsas and flower-imprinted tortillas.

The piece de resistance, though, is the central Samba lounge, stocked with exotic tequilas on tap and dining tables more conducive to sharing (with the lookers at the next table, perhaps). And at the center of it all, comfortable lounge chairs with small trays, created solely for you to sit down, relax and taste some of that tequila. One sample might be infused with cucumber, another with dulce de leche—but each will be paired with a course that only requires a fork.

Suddenly your recliner and beer seem so inadequate.