Rick’s Tavern on Main has historically been a divey, somewhat gross college bar. And let’s be honest, on a typical Friday or Saturday night it still is. But after a long bike ride, I found myself at Rick’s for lunch with astronomically low expectations. Don’t get me wrong here, I love me some dive bar food and I’ll take it over a snooty restaurant any day, but I literally knew nothing of Rick’s aside from its ability to cure sobriety.

So, imagine my surprise when I found Rick’s had a fairly large menu with a good diversity of choices. Of course, my eyes immediately found the burgers, which also had a nice range. Plus, just about every one of them came on a pretzel bun. Awesome.

I went with their Western burger, which was topped with cheddar, crispy onions (aka onion rings), bacon and a bourbon BBQ sauce. Nothing too creative here, but sometimes you don’t need to mess with a classic. I also ordered it medium rare and chose fries over salad for my side because uh well I don’t need to explain.

The burger that came out looked pretty good despite the menacingly large bun. Yet, if a bun is going to be too big for a burger, at least it was a pretzel bun. When I dug in, I was pleasantly surprised with the flavors that greeted me. The burger itself could have been more on the rare side, but generally it all tasted pretty good. Not the most creative, but certainly acceptable.

My burger at Rick’s won’t go into any top burger lists, but Rick’s played it safe, added a pretzel bun and churned out something that I have no complaints about.

On a one-night bender, I found myself facing down three strange taco trucks on Main Street in Santa Monica. None looked familiar and none looked particularly amazing. But it was 2 am in Los Angeles, when food options are usually limited to subpar diners and…well…taco trucks. The trucks here seemed to be some sort of missing link between gourmet and roach coaches and so after much circling we wound up at TnB BBQ.

This truck seemed to fuse Korean food with tacos (how creative), and after much deliberation, I chose the beef quesadilla for a whopping 7 bucks. This had to be a damn good and big quesadilla or I was going to be one unhappy drunk. And in my drunk, I was reduced to my most basic unvegan self and made sure to ask if there were any vegetables involved in this pricey quesadilla. The man told me no, and I stepped back to let them prepare my food.

Within minutes, my ‘dilla was ready and I looked upon it in curiosity. It wasn’t huge, but wasn’t slacking in size either. It also came with a little cup of some sort of salsa. I chomped in and what I found was some pretty decent Korean-Mexican fusion. It had your average sweet Korean beef taste and enough cheese to scare off a lactard. But what truly separated this quesadilla from every other Korean taco fusion I’ve ever had was the salsa. Not content to be a simple salsa, this stuff was fruity. And not just “oh heyyyy, lets put mangoes in our salsa” fruity. No, this was fruity to the core, with the most prominent flavor being strawberry. It made for one hell of a twist on your typical dipping sauce.

But was it good? Was it bad? I don’t really think it was either. It was just kind of…well weird. But if nothing else, TnB introduced me to something I never knew existed. Yes, I could have lived a happy life without ever having tasted strawberry salsa on a Korean quesadilla, and now that I have tasted such a thing, my life will continue on as it would have otherwise. Not better or worse, but having eaten something damn strange.