THE ANGRY STOMACH

I was on the road, and had stopped in Baker, in the Mojave desert, to eat at the Mad Greek, a very decent diner (way better than any diner in Baker needs to be), good food served in a setting of over-the-top Hellenic decoration.  I had the lamb gyro.

A few tables away sat a family consisting of a very loud child, a mother, and two grandparents.  The grandfather, something of a patriarch by his looks and behavior, and also (I think) Greek, was not having a good time.  He said, more than once, loudly, in what I took to be a Greek accent, “This is very low class food.” 

Well of course I don’t know what he was having – maybe he’d got a bad kebab – but, as I say, in general the food is way better than you have any right to expect in a nothing little town in the desert.  And it did occur to me that there may have been things other than the food spoiling his meal, the pressures of being a Greek patriarch perhaps, but he was taking it out on the food, and eventually he stormed outside for a good smoke.

I thought he was an annoying dolt, but he did set me thinking about the different ways people react to bad food.  Anger is the obvious way – as the reviews on Yelp so clearly demonstrate - and yes, anger gives you a certain release and power in an unpleasant situation, and I’m not pretending that I’m immune to that.  But sometimes anger just doesn’t feel like the appropriate response.

On this same road trip, I ate at a Chinese restaurant in Delta, Utah called Top’s City Café.  That had obviously been the name of a previous incarnation, but the new owners hadn’t changed it, for whatever reason.  The interior still looked like  a very cool, classic diner, though as you can see business wasn’t especially brisk.

I ordered the Cashew Chicken which turned out to be strips of dry, flavorless chicken, overwhelmed by veggies in a bland, glutinous sauce.   It actually looks much better than it tasted, which is a problem we bloggers sometimes have:

It was pretty bad but it didn’t make me angry.  It made me very sad, because obviously the people running the place were good people – the Chinese waitress was cheerful and attentive, and the cook, an older Chinese man, appeared from the kitchen from time to time and looked around the restaurant in a concerned way.  Clearly they were not indifferent, clearly they were trying hard, but they were failing. 

        And we come to that old thing – not the Kitchen Nightmare thing – that if only some Gordon Ramsey type could breeze in and do a bit of swearing, then everything would be all right.  No, rather that maybe it would be better for all concerned if the chef found something else to do, something he was good at. Meanwhile they could get a good new chef for the kitchen. I had a distinct feeling this was not going to happen at Top’s City Cafe, and that was saddest of all.

But not everything in Delta was sad.  Up at the other end of town there was a place called Mi Rancherito, proclaiming itself to be a Mexican restaurant, although there was a huge Salvadorian flag displayed inside: maybe it was fusion.  The carne asade was wonderful: much better than it looks in this pic (see above).

But here’s the thing: were the people working in Mi Rancherito and less attentive or caring than the people in Top’s City Café?  Were the Mi Rancherito crowd trying harder: no, both lots were trying just as hard.  But the cook, was just very, very much better at what he or she did.  And this is the real thing, which may seem obvious, but doesn’t get said nearly as often as I think it should: being good at things really gives you an unfair advantage over people who are less good. 

 

A YEAR IN THE (T)ROUGH

 As the year ends, people, or at least food writers, are inclined to take stock and declare what were the best things they ate or drank over the last twelve months.  I always find this surprisingly hard.  I can never quite remember whether I ate certain things six or twelve or eighteen months ago. 

Fortunately, in the age of the digital camera, images are encoded with the date they were taken, and looking through my iPhoto library I’ve come across various images of some of the food and drink, and other gourmet-related items that I thought were worth photographing this year.  Of course, taking a photograph is no indication that the food was especially good - the better the restaurant, the less inclined I am to make an idiot of myself by taking snaps. 

The above muffin, for instance, eaten in the British Museum in London, looked bizarrely picturesque but didn’t taste especially interesting.

So, pressing on modestly, here are a couple of contrasting cups of coffee.  The very fancily-presented one above, is from Urth Caffe, in downtown Los Angeles: anything looks more organic when it’s got an image of a leaf on top.  The one below is an anything but fancy cup of joe from Lori’s Diner in San Francisco. 

But again, anything tastes better when you’re sitting in a booth with red sparkly upholstery.  And in fact quite a few of the meals I remember best from this year were eaten in diners.  The one below shows breakfast at Sherman’s Deli in Palm Springs – nothing like half a pound of egg salad and half a pound of chopped liver to start the day.

And then, at the Mad Greek Café in Primm Nevada, below, I had this feta and spinach omelet – the highlight actually was the bread, the sourest sourdough bread I’ve ever tasted.  The potatoes were pretty great too.

The Mad Greek also provided the Loved with an opportunity for some low level lewdness.

And here was probably the most surprising thing I ate this year – Thai style cockles. 

 As a Yorkshireman I’m used to having my cockles boiled and then saturated in vinegar.  These, which came in a can, seasoned with chili, soy, salt and sugar, were really great once I’d put aside all my expectations about how a cockle should taste. Apparently it’s called "hoi klang" in Thailand

Somewhere along the line I had the above chocolates with images of cocktails printed on them, but I have no memory of what they tasted like and if I hadn’t taken the picture I might have forgotten about them all together; they sure look great though.  I hope they tasted the same way.

And this was also the year that I became mildly addicted to the Blood and Sand cocktail served at the Dresden restaurant in Los Feliz, you know the place that features in the movie Swingers.    

The Dresden seems to keep its Blood and Sand recipe pretty close to the chest.  My understanding is that it’s usually a whisky drink but the Dresden waiter I spoke to seemed to think it was made with rum.   Either way it’s a fine concoction, and really a perfectly unisex concoction, certainly colorful and fancy but by no means a girly drink.  

 And finally a small celebration of a dying form, the great, overelaborate American restaurant sign.  Again, I realize there may be no correlation between the mightiness of the sign and the quality of the food.  The wonderful example below is from Nicely’s in Lee Vining, Ca, where I had a perfectly decent roast turkey dinner, but it wasn’t as spectacular as the sign.  How could it be?

 And in Ventura I came across the sign below for the Hong Kong Inn, and I confess I didn’t make it inside – it was the promise of the “Polynesian Review” that deterred me, but it’s definitely on my list of places to go back to one of these days.  I’ve got to have something to look forward to in 2013, right?