Having a new bar open up in walking distance is always awesome. Even if it is terrible, it is comforting knowing you can get drunk locally and stumble home. And if it doesn’t suck, it can be a place to become a local. So when The Garage opened up in Palms, I was so damn excited that I went pretty much immediately, but being opening weekend I gave them some time to work out their kinks before a real judgment. This is the real judgment.
Steakhouses are generally reserved for special occasions, which are few and far between. On one hand, this is a good thing, because steaks are meant to be appreciated. I, of course, would appreciate a steak everyday but I get it. On the other hand, it makes it tough to truly compare steaks. I mean, how does a steak tonight measure up against one from months back? It’s hard, but I try my best knowing that my steak from Mastro’s is where the bar is set. Enter: Delmonico Steakhouse in Las Vegas.
Deep down in Torrance, there is an old Mexican restaurant called El Paso Cantina. Among my coworkers it’s known as the “$1 Margarita lunch” spot, but seeing as it does indeed serve food, I thought it deserving of a review. In addition to their margaritas, they also have a food lunch special and $1 churros. I’ve had these before and while they were pretty good, the options were quite limited. This time I was looking for more.
It’s not every day you get an opportunity to chow down on some okonomiyaki. Of course, it’s not every or even every millennium that you even hear the word okonomiyaki. While not nearly as famous as just about any other Japanese food, okonomiyaki is equally, if not more awesome. My first taste of okonomiyaki goes back to my days of studying abroad in Japan. It was described to me as “Japanese Pizza,” which it is, as long as your only requirements for pizza are for it to be edible, flat and have toppings with no regard for the ingredients.
Every night on a street called Peachtree in Buckhead, Atlanta, something strange happens. At Holeman and Finch Public House exactly 24 burgers are prepared and served on a first-come-first-served basis. The idea is that such a perfect burger takes time and is impossible to create in mass. How they arrived at 24 is anyone’s guess, but why not? Yet, despite their insistence on limiting burgers, there is a loophole. It’s called Sunday Brunch.
Tucked into a row of warehouses in Gardena there is a big secret. In fact, the secret is so well-hidden, if you weren’t looking for it, you could miss it altogether. This secret is Eatalian Cafe, an Italian restaurant that resides in a warehouse itself and serves up some classy cuisine.
Remember when Hooters was as exciting as restaurants got? Not food-wise, of course, but ummm boob-wise. Well, those days are as dead as the Cold War. Last year I learned this firsthand at the Tilted Kilt and on my recent visit to Las Vegas the point was driven home, hard, at Twin Peaks. It was at Twin Peaks that we basically established our base camp for our time in Las Vegas. The only trouble was it was hard to concentrate on the basketball games with so much else to look at.
One of the last bastions of the vegan superiority complex is that eating meat is bad for the environment. There have certainly been holes in this argument, putting vegetables in an equally damaging light, but thanks to Allan Savory we can now say meat can really save the world where vegetables can’t.
In one of my favorite parts of town, Little Little Tokyo (or Little Osaka if you swing that way), there is a Korean restaurant called Tofu Ya. Certainly, the existence of the word “tofu” within a restaurant’s name is a red flag for an unvegan, but while perusing the area one day, I found myself inside checking out the menu. It turned out that it wasn’t simply a vegetarian place and it smelled damn good, so we gave it a spin.
Airport food is typically pretty terrible. There is a distinct lack of creativity and the prices are often ridiculous. So it was with a great sadness that we realized we would be stuck in Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo airport over dinner. But the airport gods were looking favorably upon us on this day, as they guided us to KEG & Aviator. KEG is a pub chain in South Africa and each one has a cutesy name reminiscent of its location, hence the aviator thing.