Recently, an excited college-age friend just had to take his visiting parents (and me, their host) to try Van Nuys' MacLeod Ale Brewing Company, a British microbrewery open since June 2014 (ably detailed in this blog by Karen Young). Enhancing MacLeod’s appeal to the same millennial crowd that likes to chase taco trucks on Twitter, this place is in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by auto body shops. Cool!

Then, of course, there’s the pig.

Rosie (full name Rosie Von Bristle Butt per her Facebook page) is a very busy potbellied pig. It’s hard to get her attention as she beelines for peanut shells on the floor of the establishment. She may lift her nose and smile if you offer her an actual shelled peanut. By text, MacLeod proprietors inform The Sauce that Rosie “comes approximately once per week. Randomly.”

Also random: Googling MacLeod Ale (mostly trying to find out more about the pig) led The Sauce to another new-ish, youth-appeal establishment: NoHo’s TeaPop. Opened in January, TeaPop also goes by the moniker T&A Pop, which doesn’t mean what “T and A” usually means here in the entertainment capital—it means tea and art.

TeaPop popped up because McLeod Ale was holding a special Veterans Day benefit for the Wounded Warrior Project on TeaPop’s wonderful back patio. The event called Brews and Brews, fits right into TeaPop’s mission: to serve by day as a tea and art gallery and by night as a multi-use venue for media shoots, special occasions and performances.

With its in-your-face graffiti art on outside walls, TeaPop would seem at home in a downtown warehouse district, and its heart is definitely in the right place.

That’s what The Sauce loves about the Valley—you just never know what treats you might find here while Googling for a potbellied pig.

MacLeod Ale Brewery, 14741 Calvert St., 818-631-1963

TeaPop, 5050 Vineland Ave., 818-732-0084