LA isn’t the only place in the world to offer a restaurant week. Arizona also flexed their restaurant week muscles last month. At $29 for a three-course meal for every restaurant listed (as opposed to LA, which has three different price levels), it’s important to pick the right place. They also note that the price is $58 per couple. Thank you, but I can do math. I know that 29 x 2 = 58, so if you’re not going to offer me some sort of couples discount, I really don’t see the point of showing me this. Mathematical anger aside, we decided to head to Bloom, a fancy American restaurant.
DineLA extended the LA Food week to make it almost a full month, so I made sure to experience another of the participating restaurants. This time it was One Pico at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. It’s kind of tough to find, since very little of the building actually mentions the restaurant name, but once you realize that the restaurant is actually within a hotel, things become a lot more clear.
A friend of mine suggested a random Greek place called Aliki’s Greek Taverna and I blindly followed him. We ended up close to the airport, on sketchy side street next to a motel. It would have been a great start to a horror story, but instead it was the start of a great meal. On the outside, Aliki’s looked like any old generic restaurant attached to a motel, and the inside wasn’t much better aside from the olive oil on display rather than a crane game.
We were approached by a tall man with an accent (the manager?) and handed some carry-out menus. Thinking this would be a perfect chance to look beyond the world of lamb gyros, I ordered the Chicken Gyros, but with only feta cheese and tzatziki sauce and no lettuce, tomatoes or onions. It also came with a side of hummus, fries or lemon potatoes. I chose the hummus, which is always a good test for Greek food. Our accented manager took our orders to the cook and then we waited.
On day final of my sojourn into Boston, I lunched at Joe’s American Bar & Grill, a casual restaurant with a nice outdoor seating area. We took a table outside to enjoy one of the last remaining nice days in Boston’s summer season and then got down to menu business.
We arrived around that strange hour where you’re not sure if you want breakfast or lunch, so we were given both the Brunch menu and the lunch menu. After long deliberation between the menus, I settled upon lunch and the Blackened Chicken Sandwich. This sandwich was made with Cajun spices, cheddar and sauteed onions. It also came with all the typical sandwich fixing, like lettuce, tomato and pickles. I ordered mine without any of those, and also no fancy onions.
While in Boston for a long weekend, I took the opportunity to check out how people eat on the other coast. My first chance to sample the “local fare” came at Wagamama, an international Japanese food chain originally from England. Ok, so it wasn’t exactly local, but Boston is New England, so I made due with what I had.
Our waiter was a low talker, making it difficult to ascertain what he was trying to say at any given moment, but eventually we all figured out when it was time to order. After a long look at the menu, I settled upon the Chicken Katsu Curry, which is some fried chicken cutlet, rice and curry. It also came with “mixed leaves and red pickles,” which I tried to convince the low talker that I didn’t want.
I love it when sides are bigger than the main course.
For a pre-movie dinner, I found myself at the Century City food court once again and looking for something new. Some of the competitors in the food court have found the best way to bring in new customers: sampling.
I will sample almost anything put in front of me, as long as it has no vegetable qualities. You wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive, so why buy a meal without knowing how it will taste? Well obviously, this isn’t always possible, but when it is I think it’s great to take advantage.
The Rotisserie Works offered me a sample of their Hawaiian BBQ chicken and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It had a nice sweet BBQ taste with the hint of some pineapple-like fruit. After a few other tastes, I decided the Hawaiian chicken would be filling my belly that evening. The order of chicken came with two sides, and I looked at the menu with mild distaste. All but two of the sides had words like “squash,” and “spinach,” so I ordered their mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.
In the quest to finally find some good schwarma in LA, I made my way to a little Lebanese place called Sunnin Cafe. I have fond memories of delicious Lebanese food back in Michigan, so I hoped that this place would be at least a little awesome. Getting there was a little confusing, though, as it appeared as though there were two Sunnins, right across the street from each other. On further inspection, it looked like the larger of the two is unopened and the small place will be moving in there soon.
The inside of the little cafe gave the appearance of a generic diner. There were seats
Mmm spinning meat.
at a counter and no more than ten small tables. The big difference, though, was the strong smell of the Middle East and the rotating spool of meat where a deep-fryer might typically belong. I also loved that they made no effort to hide the fact that the cooks were Hispanic. It’s a pretty widely known fact that kitchens of ethnic restaurants all over LA are filled with Hispanics, despite the fact that waiters and such fit into the ethnicity. It was refreshing to see that Sunnin didn’t hide that aspect of their business.
We ordered some “hommos” (love the spelling) to start things off.
For lunch one day I headed out to Joey’s Smokin’ BBQ in Manhattan Beach. I had heard that Luke Walton of the Los Angeles Lakers was somehow tied to the restaurant, which actually made me a little worried, but I still wanted some BBQ. The place was pretty small and other than the Lakers championship pennant, there was really nothing else denoting that this was in any way related to Luke Walton. Besides, half the restaurants in LA have Lakers pennants (I later found out that Walton essentially wrote a big fat check to get the place started, but it pretty much runs without him). With this in mind, my fears of a generic BBQ restaurant were slightly assuaged.
A little more than eight months after my first taste of Kogi BBQ, I found myself once again standing in the parking lot of The Brig, eager to take on another food truck inspired by the fusion of Asian and Mexican food. If so much hadn’t changed in the food truck scene of LA since that first taste of Kogi, I would have felt some intense deja vu. Since the arrival of Kogi, it feels like a new food truck is unrolled every week. From the architecturally inspired ice cream sandwiches of Coolhaus to the beautiful women running Baby’s Badass Burger truck, I almost feel like LA offers more food on wheels than it does in restaurants, with more coming. Nonetheless, the official opening of the Vietnamese and Mexican fusion Nom Nom Truck was exciting for me, and I made my way to The Brig in Venice to see if I would have a new friend on wheels.
The final true meal in Costa Rica (without counting the continental breakfast where a scorpion fell from the ceiling onto my girlfriend) was at another restaurant in Monteverde called La Bohemia. This restaurant was another pretty fancy one and felt good after a long day of walking on bridges in the rain forest.
To start off the meal, we ordered some nachos. When they came, they were like no nachos I had ever seen before. They were large, round chips, with beans, cheese meat, tomatoes, jalapenos and sour cream stacked on top. I suppose they would’ve been a lot cleaner than regular nachos if I didn’t have to wipe the tomatoes off of them before eating. After the wiping, though, the chips were really good.
