Perfect L.A. stocking stuffers for the foodie in your life (or, you know, just a gift for yourself)

One of our favorite new quick-and-casual spots—which, prior, was one of our favorite pop-ups—doesn’t just offer French-Vietnamese sandwiches and some of the best wings in town. The beloved Banh Oui also happens to sell a few of its pantry goods, which are perfect little gifts for the local-loving gourmand in your life. Shelf-stable foods (read: can hang in a stocking for a few days) include jams and bread-and-butter pickles, not to mention house spice blends you can sprinkle on anything and everything. You can even get them delivered (might as well get an order of those chicken wings for yourself, while you’re at it).

Priced between $7 and $12.

If you’re stuffing the stocking of a caffeine addict or frequent traveler, these are sure to do the trick. The duo behind one of our favorite local beaneries now offers instant-coffee packets, and the freeze-dried grounds are sourced from the same small-producer farms Canyon normally uses—in this case, a collection of producers in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Just add water. Shopping for someone who’s really on the go? There's even a new gift-pack bundle of instant coffee and a stylish Japanese tumbler for mobile sipping.

Find them online at $20 for a box of six packets.

One of L.A.’s premier tea rooms always offers more than 300 varieties of luxurious and hard-to-find teas, but this holiday season it’s giving us a little bit of merriment in a cup. Chado’s current holiday lineup includes a few extremely festive flavors, including peppermint bark, featuring green rooibos, peppermint and real chocolate pieces; gingerbread cookie, involving black tea, ginger root, licorice, allspice and cloves; and “Red Christmas,” which sports rooibos with rose, cinnamon, apple, almonds, orange and a few other classic holiday spices. These four-ounce bags should spice up a holiday stocking just fine.

Chado’s holiday teas can be purchased online and in-store and range from $11.50 to $16.

This bougie chocolatier corners the market on gift confections year round, but at the holidays, it unleashes a range of festive flavors in equally-festive wrappers. This year, look for bars in gingerbread dark chocolate, sticky toffee milk chocolate, pecan pie bourbon milk chocolate, pumpkin spice white chocolate, dark chocolate peppermint and more. If you’re shopping for more of a truffle fiend, they’ve got holiday boxes in flavors like pecan pie, cinnamon bun and blackberry sage.

Find them online, at the Compartés shop in Westfield Century City or the factory flagship on La Brea. $11.95 per chocolate bar.

Before your loved one snaps a pic of their hand holding that cocktail by the tree, maybe they'd like to paint on a layer or two of a new nail polish from one of the world's best cocktail bars. Death & Co. teamed up with the supremely cool and cruelty-free Death Valley Nails for a trio of colors inspired by three of the Death & Co. leaders: Devon Tarby, Alex Jump and Shannon Tebay. You can purchase them in a bundle or individually; they go fast, so keep your eyes on the website for restocks. Of course if you're looking for more cocktail gifts, Death & Co.'s online shop also stocks custom ceramic tiki mugs, copper flasks, cocktail books, drinkware kits and more.

Available online for $12 apiece or $35 for the trio.

Look, this one’s not so much festive as it is one of the best jarred products in all of L.A. No pantry should be without Gjusta’s thick seed-studded honey that’s perfect in and on, well, everything. Jars contain a compact blend of sunflower, black sesame, white sesame, poppy, pumpkin, flax and hemp seeds—though that mixture can vary—and this provides not only a chewy texture but also a savory note that makes this an ideal toast topper. It’s hard not to grab the first five things you see on a trip to Gjusta, but whatever you do, make sure one of those is a jar of this. 

Available at both Gjusta and Gjusta Goods for $11 per jar.

Cocktail enthusiasts, this one’s for you. The Arts District’s Greenbar Distillery is one of L.A.’s first post-Prohibition distilleries, and since its 2004 founding, it’s carved out a very cool spot for itself in the local booze landscape. Greenbar makes the widest range of liquors in town, offering their own amaro, whiskey, vodka, gin, rum, tequila and a spicy ginger liqueur—not to mention a line of bitters. They make their bitters—sold under the “Bar Keep” label—in an array of flavors, including fennel, apple, lavender, saffron and even their five-spice–inspired Chinese bitters.

Available at the distillery’s store for around $19.99 per bottle, and comparably priced online, depending on shipping location. 

At the intersection of fashion and food is Gucci Osteria, so of course one of the most haute, foodie-perfect holiday gifts can be found at Gucci's new restaurant in Beverly Hills. This year the traditional Italian panettone—a fluffy sweet bread loaf studded with candied fruit and eaten around Christmas—is getting the designer treatment, because Gucci Osteria is whipping up a limited run and placing the holiday treat in a stunning pink tin, of course adorned with an illustration of the iconic Gucci Eye. The panettone can be purchased in the traditional flavors (candied orange peel and raisins) as well as a version with orange and gianduia chocolate. Just imagine how fashionable your tree will look with one of these sitting beneath it.

Each panettone costs $150; orders can be placed by emailing gucciosteria.bh@gucci.com and shipped throughout the country. Background illustration drawn by Lukas Palumbo.

Part cookbook store, part lifestyle shop, Now Serving is one serious destination for boutique kitchenware, international food magazines and cookbooks. The goods come curated by professional cooks and include a range of items that would befit the holiday stocking of a pro, a novice chef or simply a food enthusiast—we’re talking jarred chili sauces, bags of chai granola, and a “Short Stack” book series where each pamphlet is devoted to a single ingredient—but one of our all-time favorites for everyone is the new “Food is Political” tote. These 16.5”-by-16.5” canvas totes feature lettering from Vocal Type Co. that was inspired by protest signs from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and each bag gets hand-printed here in L.A. by Deluxe Screen Printing. The totes are also available in a range of colors; no matter which design you opt for or whether your recipient fills it with goods from the farmers market, books, magazines or anything else, they’ll be carrying a declaration for all to see and remember.

Find it in Now Serving’s online shop for $42.

Chef Steve Samson makes some of the city’s most artful pastas in his Arts District ode to the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and now his restaurant is helping you learn pasta skills at home. In addition to offering digital cooking classes (also a great gift idea), Rossoblu sells tools such as gnocchi boards, pasta cutters and a gorgeous beechwood mattarello (rolling pin) so someone you love can try their hand at home. And psst… that gnocchi board should fit perfectly into a stocking.

Rossoblu's pasta tools can be purchased online and range from $20 to $110.

Leah Ferrazzani is a miracle worker. The proprietor behind Semolina Artisanal Pasta makes wonders out of a little water and some organic durum semolina flour, with a finished result that retains its bite under boiling and makes for some of our favorite local pantry goods in town. She offers fresh pastas and other Italian pantry staples in her Pasadena shop-kitchen, but for a shelf-stable stocking stuffer, go ahead and grab a bag or a box of her dried pasta, available in varieties like strozzapreti, conchiglie (shells) and fusilli. She also sells pasta-party gift boxes, which include multiple shapes and sizes of the dried goods, and a bottled sauce or two, as well as a gift set that includes a brass spoon and bag of Jacobsen Salt—because you can’t forget to salt the water.

Available at Semolina’s Pasadena shop and online for $7.99 per box or bag.

Nothing’s better on a winter morning than a strong cup of coffee, and for the caffeine fiend in your life who knows it’s more than just a cup—it’s a lifestyle, baby—there’s Yes Plz, an L.A.-based coffee subscription service that literally delivers. Each week’s box includes a 250-gram or 340-gram bag of whole beans in a whole new blend or single-origin release that could have you sipping a trio of beans from Guatemala’s Huehuetenango region one week and a chocolate-noted Ugandan variety another. Keep your eye out for coffee-leaning magazine releases as well as collabs: This holiday season they’ve teamed up with local cannabis outfit Dad Grass, which makes CBD-forward joints with low (0.3%) THC content. Slide a bag of Yes Plz coffee with two CBD joints into a stocking ($30), opt for a cartoony collab mug ($13) or snag a combo pack of all three ($42) and really win this holiday season.

Purchase the Dad Grass x Yes Plz collab online. Regular coffee subscriptions available for $17 (250 grams) or $23 (340 grams) online, including shipping.