Congratulations to Brian Morrison, AKA @MorriBri. I’m looking forward to having tacos with him in Culver City. I’m posting the photo above because Brian strikes me as the type of guy who’d have the flagons to walk into a Jack in the Box with a cup from three weeks ago and help himself to some Coke Zero, which I think we can agree is the type of person we all want to be.
Next week is your last chance to win a free lunch with me in 2011. Tweet #SethBuyMeLunch anytime on Monday to enter.
I should really just stop intending to take photographs of the #SethBuyMeLunch winners, because I forget every time. I’m just gonna uese Dave Shotwell’s Twitter photo, which I can verify is what he looks like. Conversely, he can confirm that this lunch actually happened and that I’m not just making this post up from information I learned during the 49 hours I spent hidden in his couch cushions.
On Friday, Rose Hart-Landsberg and I met for lunch at Silverlake Coffee Co., where the staff and customers showered us with ticker tape and baby pandas in a joyous celebration of the tenth #SethBuyMeLunch lunch. Choking back tears, I explained that my and Rose’s lunch was, in a technical sense, actually number nine, because lunch number four has yet to happen. The revelers turned into an angry mob and hosed us down with scalding hot chai.
That didn’t stop Rose and I from enjoying unremarkable sandwiches and a pleasant conversation. Rose was a supporter of #SethBuyMeLunch from the very first week, which I truly appreciate, and I was happy to finally get to meet her. She moved down to LA two years ago from Portland to become a writer, and she’s already experienced the travails of the entertainment industry through internships, development departments, and chai-fused digits. She’s also smartly tried to find both the motivation to write and a cure for the slow-creeping insanity of unemployment by starting a women’s writers group that actually writes when it meets. Not surprisingly, many writers have invented all sorts of bogus excuses not to go, because (and this is a secret) writers are most afraid of two things: 1. other people, and 2. writing. Tweet her if you’d like to join up.
I like Rose, and was impressed that she’s one of those rare people in LA who’s more interested in learning about the person she’s speaking to than in talking about herself. Unfortunately this led to my rambling on about anxiety disorders for approximately 675 minutes. My increasingly more difficult task of finding people to buy lunch for is probably not being aided by my broadcasting details of my mental illness. Next lunch will be nothing but pop culture talk! Is C.H.O.M.P.S. still a thing?
Thanks for listening, Rose. You can follow her on Twitter at @rosyposymagosy. And if you live in LA and want a free lunch from me, just tweet #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday. Details here. Remember that the next two winners also receive a special non-denominational holiday lagniappe: an invitation to my holiday party.
@TheFriendlyEnd, AKA T-Boz, and I braved a cloudy, cool, and depressing Friday in the semi-enclosed Farmers Market for exactly the amount of time required to shovel down a burrito and a cup of soup, which coincidentally was just a few seconds under the amount of time T-Boz could tolerate the extreme willies I seemed to be giving her. The soup was hers — tortilla — and the burrito was mine — cactus salad, my go-to Farmers Market order from the Mexican powerhouse Loteria Grill.
The Farmers Market, with a capital F and M, isn’t an actual farmers’ market but a 75-year-old permanent marketplace/food court in LA’s Fairfax Village neighborhood. It has the feel of a Parisian market crossed with a carnival midway and is a favorite spot of mine, just down the street from my old apartment. It’s always a larf to tell out-of-town visitors that I’m taking them to lunch at the Farmers Market and then watch them sit silently in the car, expecting to be fed a fistful of raw kale and a rutabaga half.
This week’s #SethBuyMeLunch winner — P.T. McNiff — and I had to race out of Langer’s Deli to escape our expired parking meters, and in our hurry I forgot to take his picture. So I used the Internet to piece together a surprisingly accurate approximation:
Joseph Papak was a carpenter, my great uncle, and the only natural-born gardener I ever met. A railroad track ran alongside the duplex he and my Aunt Sue shared with my dad’s family in Monongahela, Pa., and Uncle Joe claimed the strip of rocky soil across the track for his garden. Polio forced him to walk with a cane as long as I knew him, but he scaled the gravel rise along the tracks, “just threw seeds on the ground,” and raised everything without fail. Broccoli, strawberries, corn, massive sunflowers lighting the entrance to the driveway, all in the constant gray of southwestern Pennsylvania. He also took over every unused patch of ground around the house and yard, always growing something year round. Beautiful asparagus shot up randomly along the wooden fence, like they’d taken root in each of his footsteps. He was the first person I ever saw compost, when I was just a little kid. He’d dump table scraps into a perfectly dug hole in the garden, sides as smooth as a beer keg, and cover it with a garbage can lid.
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.
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.”
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.
