DESERT DINERS

The Loved One and I are just back our now customary pre-Christmas desert road trip, a lot of driving, a lot of walking, a lot of eating.  Hey, what else is there?

The most startling thing I ate was a taco salad, at the Gadsden Hotel, in Douglas Arizona; that's a postcard of it above.  The Gadsden is one of those once great, classic, now careworn, but still sort of magnificent, hotels, right by the Mexican border..  This one has huge a marble staircase leading to a wall of Tiffany stained glass depicting desert scenes.  And there’s a restaurant called El Conquistador.  

Mexican cooks have solved the problem of how to make a 2000 calorie salad – you serve a lot of fried ground beef and refried beans in a deep fried taco, shaped to form a bowl.  I’d had them before but never one in this eye-popping color.

The lovely, stressed, over-apologetic waitress explained the taco was made with sun-dried tomatoes.  And so we sent the rest of the trip going into supermarkets looking for them, and failing miserably.

I suppose a lot of people would imagine that by this point in my life I’d have already eaten testicles.  But until this trip I hadn’t. I lost by cherry at the Old Pueblo Grill in Tucson, where they were on the menu, described as “Rocky Mountain Oysters, Breaded 'Cowboy Caviar,' horseradish cocktail sauce.”  They came looking like this:

I had imagined one mighty gland sitting on a plate but in fact they were (so-to-speak) nuggetted, and frankly a bit over-breadcrumbed. If you’re the kind of person who eats with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, then there are no great surprises lurking in a testicle, though it was softer than I’d imagined it would be, more like the texture of a brain or a sweetbread.  To be honest, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure what critter gave up the ghost to provide this appetizer; a bull I suppose, but I'm not 100 per cent certain. I feel there’s probably more research to be done here.

The motel room where we stayed in Blythe had a menu for the nearby, recently opened restaurant, the Red Cactus Bar and Grill, featuring the Desert Dry Martini, a fairly standard martini but with a blue cheese stuffed olive in it.  We hurried on down there and discovered that the menu has been tweaked.  No desert martini on the menu, though our bartender, Taylor, made a perfectly good dry martini that looked like this.

The most intriguing restaurant I didn’t eat at was Carter’s Drive In, in Wilcox. Arizona.  Who can argue with a larger than life cartoon fiberglass figure, actually swaying and pivoting in the wind.  The place was closed when I was there but not closed down, I think.

But one that actually had closed down was the Desert Center Café, in the town of Desert Center, in California.

We actually ate there a long time ago and I know we had a very odd grilled cheese sandwich, though at this point I can’t recall what was so odd about it.  There was a guy across the street picking up his mail at the post office and we talked to him and he told us the place had closed down 5 years ago and that “It wasn’t that good.”  He was right about that.  It wasn’t great, but it was there.  And the magnificent sign still is, though I’m not sure how long for.

WHAT I ATE ON MY WINTER VACATION

The Loved One and I have been on one of our desert road trips – to Death Valley and the East Mojave.  Nobody expects the desert to be the home of haute cuisine, but we ate pretty well mostly, and always interestingly, although lord knows we ate too much and none of it was exactly “light” and certainly not “healthful.”  So, in the interests of keeping the blog rolling, here’s what we ate and where, along with some “field notes.”

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PLACE:  Astroburger, Kramer Junction

WHAT I ATE:  Birria – yes birria – real Mexican goat stew, as good as any I’ve eaten outside of Mexico.  Boy, it was meaty and greasy and gamey and flavorful.  Menudo was on the menu too.

NOTES:  A hipster couple were in the restaurant – the dude had the porkpie hat and the stylishly unstyled beard, and said to the very sweet Mexican waitress, “Do you have a vegetarian option?”  I was slightly disappointed to find that she did.

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PLACE:  Kristy's Family Restaurant, Ridgecrest

WHAT I ATE:  Corned beef hash, scrambled eggs, hash browns.

NOTES:  There was a poor, obese, young girl, maybe ten years old, in the restaurant with her parents.  She was absolutely huge, a hanging belly and so much fat around her throat that she scarcely had a neck.  Of course one wanted to be sympathetic - maybe it was glandular - but she was eating a gigantic plate of French fries for breakfast, so maybe it wasn’t only glandular.

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PLACE:  Panamint Springs Resort, Panamint

WHAT I ATE:  A fish sandwich – the fish was battered, which I’d expected, and there was a layer of melted cheese, which I hadn’t.  I know they make a lot of fuss on “Chopped” about never serving fish and cheese together, which in general I disagree with, but in this case I think they’d have had a point.

NOTES:  A couple of tables away there were two old guys who looked pretty much like desert rats.  One of them hardly spoke, while the other delivered a continuous monologue.  “Now, these days, I never eat salt, it’s not for medical reasons, I could eat all the salt I want and still be healthy, but I just don’t.  And you know the interesting thing, now when I eat a stick of celery - it tastes salty.”

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PLACE: Forty-Niner Café, Furnace Creek

WHAT I ATE: Breakfast ordered from the side menu: sausage, ham, potatoes, “seasonal fruit.”

NOTES:  The order of fruit was a small attempt to be healthy.  The actual fruit was unspecified but somehow we knew there was going to be a lot of melon, and there was.  Melon – the fruit that’s always in season.  And yes, that is a map of Death Valley on the tabletop.

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PLACE:  Badwater Saloon, Stove Pipe Wells

WHAT I ATE: cheese quesadilla for me, chili cheese fries for my companion.  The latter turned out to be essentially French fries floating in a bowl of chili flavored soup: a bad idea.

NOTES: Having grown up deprived in England I never saw the TV show Death Valley Days, though I knew it existed. However I had no idea there was a radio show.  There in the restaurant they had a vinyl album on display in a glass case – kind of made you want to break in.

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PLACE:  Crowbar Cafe & Saloon, Shoshone

WHAT I ATE: Taco salad – which is never as good as you think it’s going to be, somehow less than the sum of its parts, though this was a perfectly good example of the breed.

NOTES: I ordered a beer.  It was the coldest beer I ever drank.  Not only was there ice on the outside of the glass, as the beer sat in front of me it froze over, developing a head of ice.  Cool indeed.

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PLACE: The Original Pancake House, Primm

WHAT I ATE: Eggs Michael

: toasted English muffin, sausage patties and poached eggs covered with mushroom sherry sauce, served with four potato pancakes.  Sherry sauce for breakfast?   What the hey – I’m on vacation.

NOTES: The music playing in the restaurant was Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” first released in 1965.  That’s a very long “eve,” but the sentiments still seem more or less relevant –

Yeah, my blood's so mad feels like coagulatin'

I'm sitting here just contemplatin'

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PLACE: Route 62 Diner. Yucca Valley

WHAT I ATE: The Big Bopper (yes, really that’s what it said on the menu)

NOTES:  As the name of my breakfast suggests, this was eaten in a themed fifties diner, hot rod pictures on the walls, jukebox console on the table, and curtains that seemed to feature a Tom of Finland cop.

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You’ll notice in the pictures how all this food glistens – that’s the fat – and fat (as we know) is flavor – and sure, nobody held a gun at my head and forced me to eat it, but now that I’m home I do feel like I need some artery-scraping, and perhaps some unseasonal fruit.