Update (11/9/11): Elysse has posted her own account of our lunch, with food photos, on The Daily Binge. Don’t believe a word she says.

There were actual tablecloths at lunch this week, which made both me and Elysse Applebaum kind of uncomfortable. Something about linen at midday turns a casual lunch into a Christopher Cross song. We hadn’t expected such class at Rincon Chileno, which we thought was a Chilean deli over by Los Angeles City College, but it turns out they have an extra room with table service and a closed-circuit monitor of the storefront so the host knows when to run over and sell gum. Elysse and I both ate the churrasco sandwich recommended by Serious Eats, a nice but unremarkable pile of sliced beef and avocado. The empanadas were more memorable, wrapped in a delicate, flaky crust and baked so they inflated into crisp bubbles.

Elysse took some pictures for her food-and-TV blog The Daily Binge, which wields the power to destroy a Los Angeles restaurant like THAT.1 Elysse, like me, went to film school — albeit 12 years and 2500 miles apart, she at USC and I at NYU. She, like me, while there discovered that film production blows turd. She, like me, then started toying around with focusing on sound art — she in post-production and I in radio. Then she, like me, dumped that to become a writer. Elysse snuck her way into the TV world so quickly that it makes me just HATE HER SO MUCH. She works with a pair of writer/producers who had their hand in The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle and who’ve already sold two pilots this season.

We spent a lot of time talking about the differences between east- and west-coast film school, and I grilled her about which of the cretaceous crafts I was subjected to are still forced upon students nowadays, like shooting 16mm film (yes), razoring reel-to-reel quarter-inch tape (which I did professionally as late as 1997 – no) and, worst of all, the persecution of editing film on a hideous dragon called a Steenbeck. (Maybe. Elysse remembered certain students being forced into a back room with bizarre machinery that she couldn’t describe, like patients about to undergo Victorian-era surgery. That sounds about right.)

I like Elysse, and it made me happy that she definitively announced me friend-worthy. She also expressed determination to make me friends with her boyfriend which, ladies, I can tell you that no boyfriend wants you to introduce them to the bearded, mentally-ill stranger who lured you to lunch via the Internet.

Follow Elysse on Twitter at @yapplebee, And if you live in LA and want a free lunch from me, just tweet #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday. Details here.

1. “That” being a vole with a cotton swab taped to its back. [↩]