THE CROSSOVER EPISODE

As you perhaps know, I run two separate blogs, one about walking, one about food, and inevitably there some convergences from time to time, posts that could fit into either or both places.  This is one of those.

A couple of days ago I had lunch in LA’s Koreatown with my fellow traveler, writer and urban explorer Colin Marshall, who lives in the area.  I combined the lunch with a walk, though I walked by myself since Colin’s a committed cyclist, which I am not, and also because he had to go off and get a haircut.

Will it surprise you that Koreatown is undergoing some serious gentrification? And of course a change in the food culture is always a major indication of that process.  

We happened to go past the Line Hotel (that's it above, and further above)which had become a bit of sixties slum by all accounts, but now it’s a hot and happening “design-forward” destination, containing two (yep count ‘em) restaurants from Roy Choi, the LA wonderboy.  The menu in Choi’s restaurant Pot offers the “Beast Mode Seafood Plateau” - oysters, shrimp, assorted crab, hamachi, uni & scallops for $96 (and yes, there’s probably a second marijuana reference in there), and yes, I understand that Choi gets a certain amount of flak from old school traditionalist Korean eaters.

But we weren’t headed there – we were going to Cassell’s Hamburgers, now inside the restored and refurbished Normandie Hotel.  And in fact some purists are vaguely disturbed that Cassell’s was there at all.  It was established in 1948 a little ways away, and had a see-sawing reputation over the years.  The owner Al Cassell worked there until he was well into his 80s.  

Now it’s under new ownership and has become a kind of minimalist hipster diner, with a studiedly simple menu and a range of craft beers. 

Colin had the Cobb Salad (it's not as small as it looks below - that's a trick of the wide angle perspective) and I had the Grilled Ham and Cheese sandwich with tomato jam, though afterwards I wished I’d had a burger.  The best thing about the sandwich – some of the cheese is deliberately left sticking out of the sandwich so it gets fried gets fried as the sandwich is cooked.  It’s hard not to love fried cheese.

As tends to happen when a couple of writers-slash-urbanists get together we talked of many things, and I certainly told the old story of how, when I first moved to LA, I really wanted to see the Felix the Cat sign on the Chevy dealership down by USC, and how it was ten years before I actually get there. 

But I didn’t mention, and in fact had pretty much forgotten, that I’d had a similar urge to see (I’m not sure what you’d call it exactly) the ghost or the specter or the simulacrum of the old Brown Derby restaurant.  The original was built in 1926 on Wilshire Boulevard, a “programmatic” building in the shape of a Derby, not that anybody (me included) has a very clear of what a Derby hat looks like anymore.  It was there that Bob Cobb invented the Cobb salad (did I mention something about convergence?)

The building was demolished in 1980 and I knew there’d been some half-hearted attempt to create a Derby-like or maybe Derby-lite element to the mini-mall that replaced.  Yes, I knew all this but I wasn’t thinking about it at all as I walked along Wilshire Boulevard after lunch, and suddenly there it was.

Frankly, it’s more of a dome than a hat: there’s no brim.  It looks pretty odd from ground level and doesn’t look much less odd when you’re standing beside it.  I gather it’s been a bar and a music venue, but it seems to sit empty most of the time, which is surely a shame.  Maybe nobody wants to eat in a building that doesn’t like much like a hat.

In fact as I walked along Wilshire Boulevard there now seemed to be all manner of intriguing restaurants, the HMS Bounty, which is evidently a place to consume food and grog.

OK, its become HMS Bo in this incarnation.

And here was this vastly intriguing sign, advertising some kind of sandwich joint: who wouldn’t be attracted to a hip Benjamin Franklin with a bit of Korean script behind him? Though actually I think he looks quite a bit like Larry David.

It makes you want to have another lunch and go for anther walk.  I almost certainly will.

SCOFFING AUTHORS

What do writers eat? Well you know, I’d be inclined to say they eat much the same as everybody else, but I know that’s not strictly the case.  Think of Lord Byron who ate biscuits and soda water, or potatoes drenched in vinegar, in order to stay trim and attractive. He looks pretty good on it here, though it's only a painting, of course.

Think of Stephen Tennant who, according to legend, was so fussy about eating that his diet consisted of only champagne, flower petals and the occasional single grape.  And he looked good too!

In any case, I have come belatedly across a book titled Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors b Celia Blue Johnson.  If it’s the kind of thing you like, you’re going to like it a lot, and of course it features some author’s quirky eating habits.

There’s a story, which appears in the book, that Goethe once dropped in on Friedrich Schiller, who was out at the time, but Schiller’s wife Charlotte let Goethe in and said he could wait in the study. Goethe sat at Schiller’s desk and thought he’d do a bit of writing. Then he smelled something funny, and discovered it was coming from a drawer in the desk. The stench became overpowering and he had to stagger to the window for air.  He asked Mrs. Schiller’s what was up, and she said her husband just liked the smell of rotten apples, that it inspired him, that he couldn’t work or live without it.

Admittedly Schiller didn’t actually eat the rotten apples.  Whereas Agatha Christie did eat apples in the bath while thinking out her plots.  Flannery O’Connor ate vanilla wafers, and Vladimir Nabokov obsessively ate molasses candies, though this was a way of overcoming his cravings for nicotine after he stopped smoking.  Poking around online I also find that Stephen King eats a piece of cheesecake every day before he starts writing.  Why not?

I’ve been thinking about this because I “appeared” at the LA Time Book festival over the weekend, on a panel.  I wasn’t there to talk about food, but at other events some were, including Roy Choi, famous for the Kogi food truck, a man who is now both chef and author, having written a book – L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food, though as you see, two other writers get their name on the book too.

Choi was being interviewed by Jonathan Gold, he of this parish, in front of a good big outdoor audience, and Choi said very something interesting.  He said, "I don't know if I'll ever be as good as I was when I started Kogi, but I strive for that.”

And I thought that was a very interesting thing for a chef or writer, or anyone, to say.  Writers and chefs, (and I’m sure sportsmen, musicians, and probably just about anybody else) start out with a kind of zest and an unruly energy, so that the first place where it comes together; the first novel, the first restaurant or food truck (the first season in the big leagues, the first album, etc.) has an intensity and a freshness that often gets lost as you start getting serious and becoming a "professional.”

As for what this author ate at the LA Times Book Festival, well there were quite a few food trucks with very long lines, but because I’m such a big shot author I got to eat in the festival green room, which was actually The Town and Gown Club, and a very fancy joint it is too, though on the day it wasn't laid out quite as fancy as this:

I had a couple of egg salad finger sandwiches, a small ham roil, and some butternut squash soup with a blob of sour cream.   Bacchanalian it was not.

But you know, and I don't quite know why, when an egg salad sandwich is good, there’s something really deeply, alchemically right about it.  When it’s a FINGER sandwich – I could eat them all day – much easier than having to write.

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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