MY WEEK IN FOOD

The best “Reuben sandwich – Irish style” I ate this week (and admittedly the only one) was at Dargan’s in Ventura (above). I was less at ease with a cocktail on the menu named The Irish Car Bomb.  Now, I know we all love the Irish for their rollicking ironic wit (I have plenty of it in my heritage), but I wonder how many true sons of the Emerald Isle would be happy with a cocktail named the Irish Potato Famine or Cromwell’s Irish Child Decapitator. 

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The most intriguing hand-painted food sign I encountered this week (and I sure do love a good hand-painted food sign) was this one, also in Ventura:

I like it a lot but the anthropomorphizing of food is always dodgy if you ask me – the notion seems to be that the food item is so happy and human and full of fun that he really won’t mind if you eat him.  Well yes, but …

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Actually there was some competition in the intriguing hand-painted food sign department from this pizza slice painted on the side of a restaurant at Venice Beach (yeah, I got around this week):

The eyeballs are “ironic” I guess, though there must be some places in the world where you can get a little retina on your pizza.

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And the most annoying sentence (by miles) in a piece of food writing I encountered this week - Sam Sifton in the New York Times, writing about Roy Choi, he of Kogi Barbecue, somewhat famous for his fusion of Korean and Mexican flavors.  Sifton writes: “Choi cooks poems, and they taste of Los Angeles.”  Oh gimme a break.

No be fair, Choi can be pretty annoying in his own right.  He writes a blog called ridingshotgunla.  The entry for July 10th is titled “Nowness” and begins, “I try to manifest myself separately through all the different expressions that surround my life.” Maybe that’s fusion too, the melding of the English language with gibberish.  There’s a lot of it about.

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