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.
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The latest #SethBuyMeLunch lunch transpired on an objectively perfect Los Angeles day at The Trails in Griffith Park, which would be a wonderful place to hang out, if it weren’t filled with attractive, successful people. Andrew Lee Richey and I ate healthful and inoffensive sandwiches (avocado and egg salad, respectively) on a concrete picnic table in 76-degree shade, and for a while all was right with the world.
Andrew opened with the risky gambit of asking if I was familiar with the company that makes a vegetarian substitute for human flesh.1 He went on to propose a name in the event that anyone ever creates vegetarian sheep testicles: “fauxnads.” I considered setting something on fire to create a diversion and escape, but by then we’d already ordered.
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The fifth #SethBuyMeLunch lunching action1 went down amongst the 1pm civil-servant throng at Phillippe’s near Union Station, a 103-year-old restaurant that claims to be the originator of the French dip sandwich. This week’s winner Heather Johnson went for the pork; I tried the the beef, both “double dipped” thanks to Heather expertly flourishing the code word. The sandwiches are good and reasonably priced,2 and the house hot mustard is even better. But most exciting of all for me, food-wise, was eating my first pickled egg. It was bright red, sweet, and tasted almost like a beet. On my insistence, Heather ate half of it and even politely said she enjoyed it, despite her facial expression reading something like, “The crazy man has just fed me poison.”
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I forgot to take a picture of last week’s #SethBuyMeLunch winner, Ahm, but using surveillance camera footage and FBI forensic artists I managed to piece together this 100% accurate photographic re-creation.
Ahm and I met by her suggestion at Ruen Pair, an excellent little Thai place tucked away in a stripmall in Thai Town. There we ate, by cosmic coincidence, entirely orange food: pan nang chicken, coconut curry soup, and the best Thai iced tea I’ve ever had.
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The second #SethBuyMeLunch lunch was a lovely discount-chicken affair at the legendary Zankou Chicken, West LA location. Our winner, Kerry Gordonson, enjoyed a shawerma plate with extra garlic sauce, while I opted for the tarna chicken platter (though honestly I could happily eat just a pile of their pickled turnips). More… »
Yesterday I happily bought lunch for the first winner of #SethBuyMeLunch. Paul Fisher and the author met at Carney’s in West Hollywood, where they cordially dined upon chili dogs and all the trimmings amongst the fumes of Sunset Blvd.
Paul’s a likable guy and a fellow writer who came to LA a little over two years ago from the namesake of one of my least favorite Jersey bands, Wayne, NJ. He bravely climbed into his car and drove out here with no job and the hope that he’d get into USC’s graduate program in professional writing. Which he did, and finished. He interned at Conan for a while before joining me in the fast-growing field of unemployment.
Paul and I discussed his fondness for Boston sports teams, and I roundly ridiculed his love of hockey. Coincidentally, Paul played high-school hockey against Montclair High, the alma mater of the only other Seth Madej I know of in America, who led the Montclair Mounties hockey team to victory in the 2010 Montclair cup.
I enjoyed meeting Paul, whom I’ve followed on Twitter for a while. You should too. And if you want a free lunch from me, just tweet #SethBuyMeLunch on Monday. Details here.
UPDATE 9/20/2011: I’ve slightly modified the contest “rules.” See below.
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As you’re likely by now aware, I am an unemployed writer. Also, being a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, I know very few people here, most of whom are employed. As such I spend the vast majority of my time sitting at home by myself. This, I can say from experience, puts one on the fast track to insanity. To make matters worse, science has proven that each Italian BMT one eats alone at Subway is the mental health equivalent of moving oneself into the carpool lane on the expressway to bat shit. So no more of that for me! I want to buy you lunch.
Yes, you. Every week, I want to take someone to lunch, to counteract the effects of the above and to maybe make that person slightly happier than they would be otherwise. If you want to have lunch with me, simply tweet me with the hashtag #SethBuyMeLunch. Every week I’ll pick someone, randomly or otherwise, to have lunch with and pick up the tab. We will do this in a public place, for protection in case either of us are lunatics.
To make this a little more interesting, here are a few rules that I’ll enforce or not enforce depending on how things go:
- The window for eligible tweeting each week is between 12am Monday and 12am Tuesday. Don’t forget to include the hashtag: #SethBuyMeLunch.
You must be available for lunch the week you tweet me. (UPDATED: After further consideration, this rule is now more of a preference.) Because I have nothing on my schedule between now and Thanksgiving, we’ll find a time that works for you.- I’ll meet you in a neighborhood of your choosing anywhere in the LA metro area, but not necessarily at a restaurant of your choosing. I am, after all, very poor, and I can’t have unscrupulous people trying to use me for a free lunch at Providence.
- You need to agree to have the lunch documented by photographs, post-lunch blog recap, or otherwise.
That’s really it. Tweet me. Let’s have lunch.
- Note: your lunch may vary from lunch pictured and may not involve silverware and may be eaten in a parking lot from the hood of a car.
I’ve uncovered the shocking truth and reported it to Maggie Serota’s Daily Urban Legend. Click here. Your life may, nea does depend on it.
I have nothing against vegan cuisine, but the names and photos from these VegWeb.com recipes are enough to make me forever swear off food in favor of a nutrient-rich IV drip.
Taco Balls
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Two firsts for me today: I filleted a whole fish and I prepped and cooked a whole squid. I went about both the way you’d hack out a log jammed into your lawn mower, but it seemed to work okay. The fish was a sargo, which I’m told is sort of like a croaker. I just picked it from amongst the piles and piles of fish at the Tavira market that had just been pulled out of the ocean hours ago, because it looked to be about the right size and I guessed it would be the right balance of oiliness/meatiness. The squid started out about eight inches long and weighed about a pound before I removed the parts that I suspected would be unpleasant to eat. They both went, along with some chorizo and little tiny clams, into what turned out to be a lovely caldeirada, which is basically a Portuguese bouillabaisse.
I also have a couple of pounds of salt cod soaking in the fridge right now, enough for two attempts at bacalhau, a traditional Portuguese Christmas dish that we were served at the Douro winery where we spent the night on the way down here after driving through 500km of snow, ice, and impenetrable fog along switchback roads on the side of a mountain without a guard rail.
The point of all this is that right now I’m having such a nice time not doing any of the things that I’ve been doing the last 12 weeks that I might not get around to catching up on the blog like I’d hoped. Also we have the view out of our terrace to stare at (pictured), which takes a surprisingly large amount of time. We’ll see how it goes.
