The Works

It’s clear that this food thing that's taken hold of me is a kind of run up to Thanksgiving and probably will not desist until the last kale chip has been crunched. . . . Yet even as I continued to complain bitterly about the plethora of weird veggie dishes lurking far, far west of the New England border, as it turned out my shock and awe at being thrown on the mercy of SoCal cuisine paled next to the realization that there are things even worse than braised broccolini twists, and that everything is indeed relative. . .

Amid the unrelenting blaze of a sun an hour or so south of LA, with rays so trenchant and searing they actually burned through your clothes, in my ultra violet haze I had all but forgotten that another “country” existed in the Golden State too, the ultra cool Bay Area, and that this part of the land had its own particular set of trendy horrors as well.

It all started a few years before when I had occasion to visit San Francisco and wound up having dinner in Berkeley one evening. Almost everything in the area, every business, every eatery, every yogurt stand, had a tendency to give itself a name that ended in “collective” or  “works,” or worse, “worx,” with a dive called Wok Werx being the last straw; eventually we’d had enough and were looking for something a tad more grown up. Through word-of-mouth we found a restaurant located on the main street of a quiet residential neighborhood; a modest store front that led us into a small, squarish dining room, with a tiny bar at the front used mainly for waiting. There was however a lovely little garden in the back visible through a floor to ceiling window wall and the effect was one of space yet intimacy; needless to say, every table was taken and the chatter was the proverbial lively yet subdued. Had we finally struck pay dirt?

It was late in June and the days were long, though thin shadows already were forming at the dinner hour. Ravenna was the type of place that struck you as low key and unassuming and yet quizzically reminded in some way of the Italian Riviera or perhaps an exclusive English club peopled entirely by the Energetically Hip and Environmentally Enmeshed. The wait staff was efficient and professional, almost to the point f making you feel as if you didn't quite measure up, though they stopped just short of that, leaving you dangling on the precipice of insecurity and self-doubt. The menu- the essence of nouvelle cuisine- took itself tres seriously, and the diners albeit casual in attire were anything but cavalier about their vittles; they read their menus intently and there was a quiet insistence in the way they grilled their servers about the special nuances of each and every ingredient. The end result for me was one of hesitancy about ordering anything for fear of making a mistake; it was clear no one would help if you faltered and the atmosphere could best be described as hipster-formal. I recall sitting rather stiffly on my chair with a half smile plastered to my lips, hoping not to reveal my total ignorance of the culinary refinements and eccentricities of NoCal cuisine, either to our waiter or the nearby diners with their impeccably perky yet knowing restaurant deportment, lest I be found out as the uninformed east coast naïf that I was. . . .

To make matters worse, after putting in our prosaic request for two poached salmons and a salad, we noticed the couple next to us had self-devised a kind of intricate tasting menu, wherein they would share each mysterious little dish that was successively placed before them in the middle of the table for sharing, then comment to each other with a kind of thumbs up/ thumbs down action before signaling the waiter to bring on the next delicacy. This obvious display of expert knowledge and discernment made us feel even more clueless and callow. What kind of cave people soothed their palates with two slabs of fish amid such esoteric choices? We continued however to bravely nurse our wine- thin stems with giant bowls and about an inch of chardonnay at the bottom- and were much relieved when the house mesclun salads finally appeared, determined as we were to get through the evening with egos somewhat intact.

It was just after our entrees arrived and the neighbors were up to their tenth or so tiny tasting dish that the first rumblings began. The sound was like distant thunder but much deeper in pitch and a bit longer lasting. The diners momentarily ceased their activity for a second or two with a kind of brief and fleeting suspended animation almost like an afterthought before the clatter of cutlery noisily started up again. A couple of minutes later the rumblings began anew, only this time louder and more persistent with eerie echoes in the background, and everyone more or less froze in place, forks in hand. All eyes shot to the garden for some strange reason, which suddenly had taken on a vaguely sinister air. It was as if these belching tremors of the earth were making an announcement over a cosmic PA system: Look at me goddammit!!! Stop with the gourmet shtick already and drop your butter knives! I am here to introduce the coming of the Big One! Hey everyone, it’s the Big One, the Big One!! The one you’ve all been dreading. . . .

The terror was palpable on people’s faces even as they attempted to tamp it down by pretending to be merely mildly concerned. With this latest round of roaring kabooms all the activity in the room instantly had propelled itself into a kind of terse, silent pantomime that lasted at least ten agonizing seconds, after which the tension spontaneously dissipated into a mildly hysterical collective buzz, and the whole uptight atmosphere turned into one giant Love In. Everyone suddenly was consumed with the desire to make small talk with their neighbor. Cheese Doodle lovers were hangin’ with coq10 addicts and Wise potato chip aficionados schmoozed with the au gratin set. The tasting twosome next to us insisted on knowing our names while politely averting their gaze from our poached salmons. It was party time! The Big One had been forestalled yet again, at least for one more day.  And this was a way to live??? An entire population of flax seed aficionados swam before my eyes as I pictured them slowly downing that last strip of gently marinated rhubarb before the earth opened and swallowed them, for good. 

We passed on dessert as the portions were fairly large, and honestly we felt as if we could not digest another morsel. All in all probably not the most relaxing ambiance, but I will say that the place was clean and the food fresh, if a tad overpriced.

I give it three and half stars mainly because of the location, a major fault. . . . 

Dinner Mexicano at the SoCal Corral

I am screaming.

Those around me are screaming.

One of my table companions has just stopped screaming- I know this because his lips are no longer moving- and I am attempting to scream back.

I scream ‘till I am hoarse but it’s of no avail as no one can hear me and no one ever will, not here anyway. The “acoustics” in this cave-like rotunda that opens onto to the street are non-existent; it’s just a long space with some tables nearer the sidewalk and others way back in the heart of darkness or should I say el corazon oscuro at this “SoCal” eatery that specializes in something called “Mexican Fusion” even though all the dishes have beans and guacamole and look like tacos and are hot. So there are no acoustics, just silent screams amid the deafening din and collective roar of a hungry crowd.

The place, a bit like a patch of the rodeo, sort of rumbles and can best be described as “all the rage” since both the patrons and servers seem to be in various states of fury. After several minutes of mouthing screams and engaging in other futile pantomimes our waiter finally appears, suddenly and rather startlingly, contentiously aiming a small flashlight at one of the menus, the very one in fact which I am holding every which way in an attempt to decipher the words in the near pitch blackness but with little success; however this almost too sharp beam of LED illumination does not do much to clarify a list of arcane ingredients and dishes which I am having exceptional difficulty in comprehending. The truth is I have never heard of most of these concoctions and suspect that the reason is they do not actually exist, nor have they ever existed prior to the fashioning of this complicated list of “authentic” fare that really is comprised of old dishes with new names. This is of no matter though, as the guy makes it painfully clear that if I do not decide within the next three and a half seconds he simply will move on to a nearby table of screamers and we may never see him again and certainly not until hell freezes over. He seems anxious, petulant and on the verge of bolting, so in a moment of induced hysteria I point frantically to something under the category of “salad” that has the world “tomato” next to it along with some other letters that I cannot make out.

When my plate eventually arrives abut a forty-five minutes later it seems that everything on it is chopped into miniscule pieces and piled up perilously high into a kind of pyramid of diced shards; ironically I am not able to discern anything that resembles tomato. When I tentatively stick my fork into the side of this small, fragile mountain of hotness and tension, the whole thing shudders and shakes somewhat violently and then comes tumbling down like the bric-a-brac off a shelf during a small California earthquake.

I make a small meal of little chunks of bread that taste suspiciously like A & P and hunt for a door frame under which to stand while the others finish their meal. . . .

Flying Food and Crazy Lunch

 "Our Clean Store Starts Here"                                                                                                               
This is what the sign quizzically proclaimed outside of “Mother’s,” a chic and purportedly motherly(?) Santa Ana version of the Whole Foods scene. So why would this self-described allegiance to the quality of pristine constitute a problem for me? Am I some sort of unrepentant slob of a food shopper who gravitates primarily toward besmirched dairy cases and encrusted globs of produce? No, no, a thousand times no! It’s just that really, really clean though I will admit to being- as in hating and avoiding food stores with grimy, loose grapes rolling about a sticky produce section- I actually am not that clean that I need to be forewarned about the state of my food markets; and I am also wondering if anyone is that clean- to the point of having to be reassured with a sign no less about the state of the premises prior to entering- outside of course of a few unfortunate OCD sufferers in the world. And along these same lines, if this assurance is indeed needed to attract customers, am I then to believe that a large swath of Orange County is afflicted with the strange compulsion that so beset Lady Macbeth, among others?

Probably not, but why belabor the point- it’s just a sign.

So I ran my hands under the awaiting germ killing soap dispenser that stood sentry outside the doors and ventured into the Clean Store convinced that at the least I probably would not contract ebola or even the common cold, quickly eyed the cute little stools at the lunch counter facing the large front window that offered a view of the mall with its merciless sun shining malevolently down on the cars and brand name shops, and decided I would go the self-serve way and load up on some exceptionally creative and tasty west coast nutrients for an easy and perhaps insanely healthful lunch.

And that’s when the craziness started, the frightening plethora of exotic choices that suddenly appeared, and it became distressingly confusing, fast.

There were soooo many ways to attack that burgeoning-with-eternal- life, self-serve salad bar and hissingly steaming, large hot food counter at the back that I quickly became disoriented, anxious and tentative. Did I really want to shovel all the goodies into what looked like a rather unappealing brown cardboard container, or rather slam the soup, taboule dishes and such into a few of those small, round, white cardboard coffee cups??? Would I chuck the whole cardboard debacle in favor of standing in line for something mysteriously entitled “The Bowl” and opt for Styrofoam-like security instead???” And there were so many dishes featuring tofu that almost all the selections listed were in quotes to indicate that they were perfectly and mercifully safe and animal free, such as “chicken” and “turkey” and “eggs” and “milk” and finally, “food.” Then the very descriptions of the salads themselves made my head spin:

-salsa, cilantro, guac lentil balls with sprinkles of natural licorice and dabs of serenity

-saffron rice with smoked corn kernels and infusion of exceptionally long life

-cous-cous, carob, cauliflower, citrus, cranberry, chile crepes and anything that begins with the letter “c”

I could go on and on but will just mention one particular juice drink that I found particularly upsetting:

Cuke, celery, kale, chard, spinach, granny smith apple, wheat grass avocado, mint smoothie and nothing non-green need apply. . . .

You’ve probably gotten the picture by now and may be wondering what you would have done faced with a similar choice. Well, in the service of simplifying I opted for the brown cardboard catch-all box of god-knows-whats all mixed together from the brimming buffet thinking this would handily solve the problem, then speedily installed myself on one of the little window stools only to realize they were exceptionally low, even for me, and experienced further and almost unbearable consternation when I found that the large flaps used to close the box for carrying had a nasty habit of falling into the food when opened as you attempted to eat your healthy, diverse bunch of salads, even when you tried to push them back and fold them safely away from the food; they were almost like living things.

I felt as if I were losing my mind, downed a few forkfuls and couldn’t wait to get out of there.

In the end of course, I told everyone what a great place it was and why on earth don’t we have more choices like that here. . . .