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.

WWD

Can it get any better?

Why, yes it can!

ENGLISH SCRATCHINGS

You want to know what else I ate while I was in England?  I mean why not, what have you got to lose?

Here’s a bowl of whitebait at Elistano’s, an Italian restaurant in Elystan Street, in Chelsea.  I used to love whitebait when I lived in England, and it seems to be unknown in the States, although the notion of deep fried small fish is hardly very exotic.  So now I always have it whenever I get the chance in England and I’m always somehow vaguely disappointed, but that doesn’t, and won’t, stop me ordering it the next time I get a chance.

                                                              *

Here are pork scratching’s from Brigade, a “social enterprise” restaurant in Tooley Street on the South Bank.  They say, “We help homeless individuals develop skills and motivation to find employment.”  Which may be so, through the waiters looked more like male models than the homeless but perhaps these two things aren’t mutually exclusive.   The scratchings were very good indeed.

*

And here’s the seafood platter for three from the West Mersea Oyster Bar, in Essex.    It was the cockles that really made it for me – and again, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen cockles on a menu in the States, and again I don’t really know why.

*

 And here’s the stuffed cabbage from the Daquise in South Kensington, which has been there since 1947 when it was a hub for Polish émigrés.  Later Christine Keeler and Roman Polanski went there.  I hadn’t been for at least twenty years, and although the interior’s been spruced up – in a sort of deliberately distressed way - the menu looked very much the same. I ordered the stuffed cabbage which I know I ordered twenty years ago.  I suspect the food’s become a bit more sophisticated too, without getting at all distressed.  Best thing about the meal: the staff bring the food to the table in saucepans and then dole it out onto your plate – wonderful, simultaneously very sophisticated and very homely.

*

And finally here’s the Club Sandwich from Café Opera in the Salts Mill, in Saltaire, on the outskirts of Bradford, where the David Hockney gallery is.  The sandwich contains smoked chicken, bacon, lettuce and tomato, and the potato crisps were really good, though I don’t think they were made on premises.  Best part:  the waitress had one arm tattooed like leopard skin, and I did want to take a picture of that, but I was either too cool or too inhibited, I’m still not sure which.

*

GRATE EXPECTATIONS

I was in England, eating among other things, and the best thing I ate – at the Portland restaurant in Fitzrovia, in London  - was this:

It’s a “tartare of Yorkshire dairy cow, smoked mayonnaise and beetroot,” and although I know what all those words mean I’m not totally sure I know what I was eating.  I mean, do people actually eat milk cows?  I can’t see why they shouldn’t but wouldn’t an old milk cow be a bit tough, especially if you were eating it raw? And I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I was actually eating veal, and that maybe restaurants need euphemisms for veal these days.  More research needed there.

Anyway, my tartare of Yorkshire dairy cow was very good indeed, if with perhaps a few more beets than anybody would actually want.  The main course was wood pigeon, and that was very fine, and it came with a warning of shot hazard from the waitress.  She also warned us about the cheese course – but like fools we didn’t heed her.  The menu offered “Montgomery cheddar, pear chutney, water biscuit” which sounded good, and the warning was only that the cheese came grated, which didn’t still seem a particularly bad thing, but when it arrived there was a giant cracker, speared thickly with sticky pear goo, with not very much grated cheese sprinkled on the top.

Maybe they thought that grating cheese was a way of making it look like you’d got more than you actually had – but in fact I reckoned it had the opposite effect. 

I was still thinking about this a couple of days when later I was in Sheffield, at Henry’s, a gastropub, I suppose, though there’s been a Henry’s on that site long before the word gained currency.  I ordered a cheese and onion sandwich (that's it above) – and this came open faced, again with grated cheese, and again not very much of it.  Is it just me or is a sandwich that has more onion than cheese a bit of a liability?

And then right before I flew home from Heathrow Terminal 2 I had lunch at Wondertree a place that offers “all day eclectic dining.”  I had the croque - “
smoked cheddar, spinach & bacon with smoky tomato relish”

And as you see it too had grated cheese on top, but thankfully it also had real cheese inside.  The grated cheese was a garnish – which I think is what grated cheese should always be; an extra, not the thing itself.  If you’re having a cheese plate or a cheese sandwich, then you want a great slab of the stuff, not a few wispy strands.  The good folks at Portland and Henry’s might like to think about that, but I’m not sure they will.