Passing through Palm Desert on the way to Phoenix, I opted to stop at a real restaurant rather than any of the fast food chains that are sprinkled along Interstate 10. The real restaurant of choice ended up being Mario’s Italian Kitchen, a neighborhoody place with an extensive menu and load of different specials for just about every day of the week.
As a man who loves to take down burgers, I was a pretty excited man when Short Order rolled into town at The Farmers Market next to The Grove. But then the mixed reviews came in and I pushed Short Order down in my burger eating priority list. It didn’t help that it wasn’t exactly in a part of town that I find myself in too often. My chance came when meeting some friends from the East Side and I was ready to see how it would stack up to those mixed reviews.
The Miracle Mile is often considered to be a culinary dead zone. In the beginning of the food truck explosion, the trucks took full advantage of the lack of good food to dish out grub to those hungry workers. So when I was meeting someone for dinner and they suggested Yuko Kitchen in the Miracle Mile, I was a little bit surprised. They knew I had a food blog, right? It turns out that yes, they did and they were more than a little concerned about what might happen after I got my hands…errr…chopsticks…on Yuko Kitchen’s food.
Originally situated near USC, Mo-Chica was a place I’d been wanting to get to for a while. The only trouble was that…well…why would I ever hang out around USC? Fortunately, earlier this year they moved to central Downtown LA to bring their Peruvian delights to a more cultured audience. I found my way to Mo-Chica for lunch and quickly found out they had themselves an interesting lunch special. And by interesting I mean that you couldn’t order any entrees without getting the lunch special. The lunch special included two sides and a dessert, which were different every day. In truth, they could have said all entrees come with two side items and a dessert, but for some reason the wording made me feel like I was somehow being cheated.
Until my most recent visit to Phoenix, the only Windsors in my mind were a Canadian city across the river from Detroit, a castle in England and way to tie a tie. But now I know better, because the Windsor in Phoenix that Heather and Albert brought me to rivals all of the other Windsors combined. Why? This Windsor has possibly the most productivity-annihilating happy hour I’ve ever experienced. From 11 am to 5 pm, Windsor offers wine, cocktails and mini beer pitchers for the low price of 5 bucks. In other words, lunch break becomes drunk break.
In Phoenix and in need of anything not called cold cuts, I found myself at Delux Burger. With a pleasant blue-colored theme, the look of the restaurant was almost cooling in the sweltering Arizona summer. The air conditioning didn’t hurt either. The three of us each took a stool at the counter that runs through the middle of the restaurant. Strangely, the stools were nailed to the ground and I found myself sitting much closer to the random dude next to me than I would have liked, but figured he was a good man and burger lover due to his being at Delux.
If you, as a restaurant, are going to call yourself great, as the Great Steak and Potato Company does, you had better be truly great. If not, you are opening yourself up for a slew of invited criticism. As an optimist, I figured the place was worth a try, if for no other reason than I had pretty much exhausted the options at Burbank’s Empire Center.
I wasn’t expecting a fancy steak dinner joint, so when I walked in and found it to be a predominantly cheesesteak and fries joint, I was pretty happy. I cannot claim to be a cheesesteak expert, since I’ve never had one in Philly, but I feel as thought I’ve tried enough to say what a good one should taste like. I ordered their Original Philly Cheesesteak, which was offered at a discounted price, without the onions (it was only cheese, onions and steak), then ordered their Coney Island Fries, which were topped with chili and cheese.
Post & Beam sits in a strange area that isn’t quite Baldwin Hills and it isn’t quite West Adams. Because of that, I couldn’t really decide if it was sketchy or classy, and the neighborhood around the restaurant didn’t make that picture any cleared. Post & Beam itself, however, was definitely on the classy end. With modern architecture, interior design and nice menu, it truly seemed like a great place to grab some dinner. And while the menu was certainly on the upscale side, it had sides like corn bread and fried okra to reflect that it was still deeply in touch with its neighborhood.
The decline of the city of Detroit from one of the greatest cities in the world to a land of ruins can hardly be better personified than by looking at Michigan Central Station in the Corktown district. Once the tallest train station in the world with architecture on par with New York’s Grand Central Station and Chicago’s Union Station, it is now a hollow ruin. Approaching the station is like looking at the skeleton of a hero, of something that was once great and never will be again. When gazing at the Colosseum in Rome, you feel surrounded by the ghosts who were both the entertained and the entertainers of the arena. In contrast, Michigan Central Station is the ghost.
Over in Palms, a relatively new Thai place called Moo Moo threw its hat into the ring of Westside Thai restaurants. The place has a decidedly authentic flair inside despite the brightly colored lettering on its sign. In this case, I mean authentic in that it has the ambiance of a little corner Mexican restaurant with hastily cobbled seating arrangements.