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.
At first glance, Lucifer’s Pizza seems like a sort of one-trick pony. Their schtick is having multiple heat levels for their sauces, hence the name. They don’t wood-fire their pizza and like most local pizza places claim to have fresh ingredients. Yet, upon visiting Lucifer’s on Melrose for the first time, I found they were more than just a pizza place with spicy sauce.
Have you ever accidentally swallowed a fly and been told it’s good protein? Well, it’s true and flies aren’t alone in the bug world as a good source of protein. And in some places the bugs are eaten deliberately. I’ve seen scorpions and tarantulas eaten in China, heard about eating silkworms in Korea and now have my own bug-eating experience in Zimbabwe.
Deep in the recesses of my To-Do Lists, I maintain a list of places I want to eat if I find myself in a particular city. Of course, the list doesn’t get much play, but when I found myself in Atlanta for the Final Four, I whipped out the list and found some delights I had only dreamed of. The first place I went to was the Edgewood Corner Tavern. I didn’t go because of some suggestion that they might have good food, I was there for one thing only.
Laguna Beach may be an artsy community, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t able to fit some upscale restaurants in. And while I’m not usually the upscaliest sort of guy, my wife and I were taking my mom out to dinner for her birthday and we wanted to go upscale. For us, this meant a visit to The Beach House. With a view of the ocean and the feeling that we were literally eating in a massive house, The Beach House was just what we were looking for.
Tucked into the back of the Planet Hollywood hotel in Las Vegas is a creatively named restaurant called Cheeseburger. Seriously. And I really mean that it’s a creative name, because the overall ambiance of the restaurant is not cheeseburgery at all. It’s Hawaiian. But, you know, something about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.