Here in Santa Cruz, people dress casually no matter what they're doing. And I mean whatever.
You get used to it. You get used to Hawaiian shirts in church; heck, the pastor at St. Bob the Informal's Presbymethertarian Church (the one we attend) wears one in the pulpit from time to time. The man is allergic to the collar.
Go to the symphony and there's usually somebody wearing a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt. And there'll be deck shoes, too. Lots. And shorts.
And don't get me started on funerals. Just don't.
If you knew me, you'd never expect me to have an opinion on this. In my routine day-to-day life, I'm a slob. But when I go to some formal event or a fine restaurant, I revert to my upbringing and pull out a sportcoat, a good-quality shirt, a pair of slacks, shiny shoes, and a tie (with a spiffy gold cubic zirconia tie-tack). It's about respecting the occasion.
And you know what? I might as well be wearing a kimono. Because nobody else in the room -- or damned few -- is dressed like that.
Rhumba enticed me out to Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon at Theo's, considered by some to be the best and most haute restaurant in Santa Cruz, in a country-French sort of way. If you get out of Theo's for less than $100 a person, you probably weren't very hungry. We never spend that kind of money in restaurants, but Rhumba's logic was impeccable: see, my birthday is very close to Thanksgiving this year. Instead of going out for dinner for my birthday and Turkey Day, why not just go out once -- and spend twice as much money?
Well, why the heck not? I haven't been to Theo's for 17 years; and that had been a business dinner.
So I dressed for dinner the old-fashioned way. I went with a burgundy shirt and a burgundy tie -- I think the monochrome look is cool -- under a tweed sportcoat I picked up at a garage sale for three bucks and had retailored for $50. Best-looking sportcoat I've ever owned. Rhumba wore her usual basic black, as befits an old Socialist who likes to show good taste without flaunting.
So we drove to Soquel and dined at Theo's, a sunny, comfortable space in a pleasant old house. Theo's really is a fine restaurant. And while the poached quail egg amuse bouche with smoked bacon was a bit beyond the pale for me, I've got to say that they really have a handle on flavors there. Every course was like a party in my mouth. The place is even better than it was fifteen years ago.
They believe, at Theo's, that dining should be a measured and relaxing process in the continental tradition. So as the Lobster Gnocchi and the Autumn Citrus Salad and the Roulade of Heritage Turkey came and went, Rhumba and I had a lot of time to talk about the past, present and future and our love for one another. And to people-watch, which is only a vice if you snark too much while doing it.
Sigh. Once again I was the only tie in the room, and almost the only sportcoat; the white-haired guy sitting in the front window wore rumpled a blue blazer. And Rhumba had the only black outfit. Everybody else was dressed for a trip to the mall.
Maybe Rhumba and I are behind the wave on this one. Maybe you don't have to dress up to show respect at a special occasion anymore. But come on, people. You should at least dress as well as the waiters do. No giant orange sweatshirts, no long-sleeved tees, please. And no cut-offs!
Of course all these carelessly-dressed people had money. The signs were there: the hairstyles were the best; the teeth, white and straight; the shoes, expensive. The man at the head of one table sported the mensch/entrepreneur look: a short, greying beard and an open-necked long-sleeve shirt.
Perhaps the truth is this: no one dressed up for a special occasion because, well, it wasn't special to them. $100 for dinner minimum? Just a big yawn. One person who reviewed Theo's online talked about eating there twice a month. Hell, that amounts to more than some people pay for rent, especially with a couple of bottles of wine.
Could it be that dressing up like I do is actually declasse in the haunts of the prosperous? Could it be that my tie and coat shouted to the room, "I don't have enough money to be blase about eating here!"
Perhaps the real status lies in having so much money or status that you don't have to dress up for anyone or anything. Ties? An ironed shirt? That's for the servants.
I always thought, and still do think, that dressing for a special occasion is a sign of respect. For our hosts at weddings, funerals, or parties, and even fine restaurants; for special holidays and the meaning behind them; and for ourselves. Some days are not like all other days; and we should show respect as best we can. Just because you don't have to dress up -- doesn't mean that you shouldn't. No matter how big your stock portfolio.
We had a good Thanksgiving. Rhumba and I said our thanks for the year together over dinner, as we always do, and that would make a special occasion by itself even if we were eating beans. Hope your Thanksgiving was equally special; as it should be.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
In Search of the Perfect Dive
Somebody, I will find the perfect dive. I want to. Badly.
Maybe it's because I'm cheap: I'm always on the lookout for a bargain, and dive food is almost always inexpensive. Maybe -- but I have other reasons as well.
But however I got to it, I'm of the opinion that you find the best food in hole-in-the wall restaurants with dusty windows and old beer posters on the wall. Where the chairs and tables are mismatched -- if there are any -- and the cook and the hostess are related.
In a dive, the prices are low and the menu is on the wall, next to pictures of the owner's relatives, pets, and Marilyn Monroe (just for the hell of it). In a dive, "atmosphere" is what drifts in with you when you open the door. In a good dive, there is no lobster or sirloin steak. But the food is always "extra-something:" extra-large, or extra greasy, or extra cheap, occasionally even extra-ordinary -- and always extreme in some way. Shameless, evil, wonderful food that takes no prisoners and laughs maniacally as it slops cholesterol on the walls of your arteries.
It was a dive, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, that gave me my transformational food experience at the age of 12. First you have to understand: In Northern California in the 1960s, there was no good Mexican food as we know it today. None. Zip. Instead, there were long-established "Mexican" restaurants with burros and sleeping Mexicans in white sombreros painted on the walls and well-dusted pinatas hanging from the ceiling. The staff was mainly Anglo (or so close to Anglo you couldn't tell), there wasn't a chile in sight with any heat (or any cilantro!), and everything came drenched in a bland orange "salsa" of tomato sauce and cheese.
But one day, I wasn't in Northern California anymore. I was in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego and a few miles from the Mexican border on a road trip with my kiddie bowling league. All us kids had our own food money so a few of us wandered off to this Mexican restaurant near the motel instead of eating in the coffee shop. And it was not the kind of Mexican restaurant our parents took us to. No sleepy Mexican on the wall. No pinatas. No tablecloths, even. Just same faded posters and formica tabletops and a waitress who looked like somebody's grandma, if Grandma was named Consuelo. It was a dive.
But the food was killer; I couldn't believe it. Mexican food just wasn't supposed to be that good! I'd never had any food that set my mouth off like that! Forty years later, I can still taste the chile rellenos in my combo plate.
Looking back, I'd say that the cook was actually Mexican or at least knew what the food was supposed to taste like -- the border was ten minutes away, after all. He or she knew how to deal with chiles, and also used more fresh herbs and fresh ingredients than I was used to -- basic moves in good Mexican cooking, but pretty crucial. And damn, nobody in Northern California was doing that!
Every since then I've had a prejudice against big, bright, cutely-decorated restaurants with fancy back-lit plastic signs and dining rooms full of well-dressed, middle-aged white people; I just believe in my heart that the food's mainly prefabricated, the cooking oil is cottonseed, and the sauces all come from cans. And most of the time, I'm right. That's why I like dives.
A dive by its very nature is not a bad restaurant; it's simply a no-frills operation run on a shoestring. No-frills because the clientele is working-class, and they have to keep the overhead low so that their customers can afford to eat there; or no-frills because the owners are new to this country or this area and have little money and have to start small.
So a dive is a low-budget restaurant. But it's also an outsider restaurant. Immigrants start dives. White trash start dives. They do it because their only means of thriving in this country is their ability to cook and willingness to work themselves into the ground. And some of them have never run a restaurant before; but they can cook, and it is their big chance to get ahead. It's the American Dream, fried in oil.
So what do they cook? They cook what they know. They cook Mexican food like they knew it back in Michoacan, or the white-trash recipes their grandma from Savannah passed down to them, or the recipe for barbecue brisket that Uncle Bub taught them back in Texas, or noodle bowls the way they used to make them back in Singapore.
You just never know what you're going to find when you walk into a dive; it might be horrible, or you might just get the first pupusas you've ever tasted, with pickled cabbage on top just like back in El Salvador. I am a treasure-hunter by nature. And when I lived up in the Bay Area, I used to hunt for great dives with the fervor of a forty-niner scrambling for the Mother Lode.
Oh God, the dives I have known. Heaven would be a street lined with all of them, and heart disease or weight gain would be unknown. At the head of the block would be La Rondalla in San Francisco, down in the Mission, where they never took down the Christmas decorations and they served chicken-fried steak and machaca and beer until three in the morning and you never had to ask for butter for your tortillas because of course you'd want butter. Just remember not to park too close to the drug dealers' alley, that's all.
The next restaurant in Dive Heaven would be the United States Restaurant, a long vanished North Beach joint where they patched the ripped-up booths with duct tape and the worn tabletops were all dirty gray formica, but they served the cheapest good steak in town . They'd take some inferior cut of meat and pound it and season it and swear at it until it actually tasted pretty cool. The pesto ravioli was to die for, and they served decent house wine by the liter for next to nothing (your choice of "red" or "white").
The waitresses never wrote anything down, and always got everything right. You could ask for almost anything on the menu as a half-order or a side, and they'd make it as you asked. And did I mention cheap? The U.S. was cheap. Come on a Wednesday evening and the place would be full of white-haired men in black pants from the residence hotels, eating the osso bucco special.
Oh jeez, memories. Delta's Dough in the Lower Haight, also long-gone. A good-natured Castro clone fronted the house; Delta, his white-trash mom from Arkansas, ran the kitchen. Breakfast was eggs, fry bread, potatoes, and Cincinati-style chili. Come around in the afternoon and they'd serve you hot garlic fry-bread and ice-cold Budweiser in a mason jar -- that's a better high than dope. Or they'd make you a plate of actual three-way chili; most Californians don't even know what that is.
Down the block, empty-eyed crack whores from the projects peddled blow-jobs, but inside Delta's it was all good and clean and cheap. Whenever a table turned, they laid a fresh sheet of butcher paper down on it; AND there were crayons to draw with. One of the regulars came in for breakfast every morning after working the night shift at an AIDS hospice and drew witty, funny-sad cartoons. The walls were covered with them.
I could go on, if you can stand it: my favorite taqueria in San Francisco, El Farolito down on 24th Street, where they served my all-time favorite carne asada plato; Kukar's House of Pizza in San Jose, a greasy cave of a joint with pizza so spicy it made my scalp sweat (it's still there and still greasy, though whether you go depends on how you feel about gang bangers).
And from my San Francisco days again there was Josie's Superior Restaurant in the Richmond District, where all the Pac Bell and PG&E linemen ate; Grubstake II, where gay clubbers headed for eggs and burgers after the bars closed. Or Mr. B's in South City, "Where the Elite Congregate." (In South City, all the restaurants on Grand Avenue are dives. All of them. That's why I love South City.)
And then there was Nation's Giant Hamburgers in San Pablo -- the Mother Store of the Nation's restaurant chain -- for midnight breakfast with three eggs and linguica and hash-browns and a quarter of a fruit pie for dessert. Nation's began as a single dive-y hotdog stand in San Pablo 50 years ago, and they never forgot the dive fundamentals: no frills, low prices, big food.
And I can't ignore about a million little Asian restaurants I ate at over the year: just wide enough for one row of tables and nothing memorable about most of them except that I love a big cheap plate of chicken chow mein or pork chow fun or pad thai or Vietnamese pork. And it's really, really hard to mess up any of those.
Oh, wait, there was the Canton Winter Garden in San Francisco, where they made vegetarian goose dishes out of tofu and the owner always wanted to know if I knew where to buy some kind or another of industrial equipment that his brother back in China was trying to get. Or the Tu Lan, a rundown Vietnamese dive at maybe the most dangerous corner in downtown San Francisco but all we office workers went there for BBQ pork and spring rolls because Julia Child recommended it (and it was good and cheap, and it's still there, and the neighborhood is still dangerous).
So. Now I live in Santa Cruz. And I can't troll for dives like I used to. I'm not so young anymore. I have to watch my waistline (Oh, I can see it fine). And my cholesterol. And anyway Rhumba isn't so enthusiastic about trying every odd hole-in-the-wall restaurant that opens its doors. She has this thing about cleanliness and food poisoning; women, go figure.
But I still keep my eyes open, and Santa Cruz most definitely has its dives, and a lot more than it used to. Heck, 20 years ago there were just two taquerias in town, and only one was any good. Now there are ten. There was only one pizza-by-the-slice joint. Now there are four.
Among the better dives is Los Pinos, a just-barely-more-than-a taqueria-joint on North Pacific. Pacific Avenue is full of restaurants with trendy food and trendy people. Los Pinos is not trendy; it lurks a block or two away from the main action, on the wrong side of Water Street. Los Pinos looks like somebody ripped the carpet out of their Masonite-paneled rec room and set up a restaurant. Half the clientele's from Mexico, many in families: two good signs. The decor is courtesy of the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe -- and beer posters.
Los Pinos make the best overstuffed burrito in town; it's almost too rich for my stomach to handle but it - tastes - so - good. The cooking is Mexican for Mexicans -- the kind where an enchilada is a tortilla stuffed with chicken and laid on its side with some salsa and cheese thrown on top, with a couple of minutes under the broiler. And they have carne asada with french fries, something I haven't seen since the old days at La Rondalla. The salsa fresca is so fresh and good that I drink it from the cup when nobody's looking. And they have all the right beer, and it's cold and not too expensive. And there are no burros on the wall.
Two blocks away people are eating mediocre sushi and mediocre Mediterranean-inspired food in sidewalk restaurants, laughing with their friends, seeing and being seen. In Los Pinos, nobody's being seen. They're just sitting quietly, eating honest food that they can afford. And maybe watching soccer on the flat screen, or a telenovela. And sipping a beer and resting up and gathering a little strength for the next thing that life throws at them. It's a dive, and a good one.
Pleasure Pizza on Mission is another good dive. As far as I can tell it's run by surfers, for surfers, and for anybody else on the Westside who can't afford more than three or four bucks per lunch. The West Side has a lot of people like that, even though it seems like there are two Priuses and a Beemer on every block.
Pleasure is a local chain; the decor is photos of friends and employees glued to the tabletops and stuck to the wall, with the odd surfboard hanging here and there. The help stays behind the counter slinging pizza and cleans off the tables on alternate leap years; whatever you touch is sticky, including the ripped-up vinyl-upholstered booths. They don't even bother with duct tape. If you know what's good for you, and the weather holds, you eat at the tables outside where the sun eventually sterilizes everything.
They make good pizza and they do a lot of to go business, but it's their basically cruddy storefront and cash-strapped pizza-by-the-slice clientele that makes them a true dive. A slice of pizza costs from around $2.00 for cheese to $4.50 or so for a plush meat combo. Old stalwarts like pepperoni or ham and pineapple can be had for $2.75 or $3.00. And they are huge, and I really mean huge: one is a solid lunch for most people, two are more than enough for me, and I measure my weight in fractions of a ton.
And the joint really jumps on Dollar Cheese Slice Tuesdays, especially at lunch. Surfers and twenty-something townies (basically the same people) come out of the walls, and the parking lot's full of pickups covered "WS" (West Side) surfing decals and SLUGS GO HOME bumper stickers.
I even see Latino and Asian mothers lunching there on Dollar Tuesdays, baby carriages parked at the table. Even when money's tight, a buck cheese slice is hard to pass up. Especially when it's HUGE.
And speaking of excessive, does anybody but me remember Pon's Chinese Food, "Home of the Egg Roll on a Stick?" At first, Pon's was out on Soquel Avenue where Tony and Alba's Pizza is now; and when they lost their lease, they moved down the street to another location. Honestly, the food there was bad. You ordered off the menu at your own risk. And most people knew it. In the evenings, the place was like a tomb.
But. Along with the menu items, they had a steam table of a dozen or so ready-cooked dishes at the front counter that you could choose from for a cheap three-item or four-item or even five-item plate. And whoever made those dishes believed in meat. Lots and lots of meat. Guys loved it.
Broccoli beef, curry chicken, sweet and sour pork, chicken chow mein, whatever: the chunks of meat were huge and plentiful. After a minute, the dishes on your combo plate would merge into this sticky mass of sweet-and-sour salty curry szechuan chicken/pork/beer over noodles, rice, and and an occasional vegetable. When you stuck your fork into it you never knew what was going to come out: a cube of breaded pork, a strip of tender beef, a big hunk of salty chicken.
I ran into a friend at the gym once, and I told him I was going to Pon's after. He got it right away. "Meat" he hissed, eyes gleaming. "All that meat." He paused. "I can't ever get my wife to go."
Correct. Nobody could get their wives to go. Rhumba went once, looked at the mess on my plate and shuddered. Ever game, she ordered egg fu yung off the regular menu and, uh, it was disgusting. After that, she sent me off to Pons by myself. "The food's terrible," she'd say. "It'll probably kill you."
"Yes, but ALL THAT MEAT!" I replied, eyes shining.
Pon's eventually folded its tent. Mr. Pon moved up to San Francisco; he and his family make their living selling Egg Roll on a Stick (TM) at county fairs around the western states. He has been called "The Colonel Sanders of Chinese Food;" and while I'm sure it was intended as a compliment, it may not be. All I know is, another good dive bit the dust.
But there are always new ones, as long as there are people who need to make a new start -- and know how to cook.
I'm off the job this week, and I see a taqueria that I never heard of over on Barson got a good review on Yelp.com -- just one review, probably because Barson's in a rough-at-the-edges neighborhood and the college kids and tourists don't go down there. It's a mom and pop hole in the wall; the carnitas are supposed to be killer, and they have Mexican-style chicken-fried steak.
Smells like dive to me. I'm heading out there right now. Who knows? I could find food poisoning -- or the Mother Lode. The hunt never ends.
Maybe it's because I'm cheap: I'm always on the lookout for a bargain, and dive food is almost always inexpensive. Maybe -- but I have other reasons as well.
But however I got to it, I'm of the opinion that you find the best food in hole-in-the wall restaurants with dusty windows and old beer posters on the wall. Where the chairs and tables are mismatched -- if there are any -- and the cook and the hostess are related.
In a dive, the prices are low and the menu is on the wall, next to pictures of the owner's relatives, pets, and Marilyn Monroe (just for the hell of it). In a dive, "atmosphere" is what drifts in with you when you open the door. In a good dive, there is no lobster or sirloin steak. But the food is always "extra-something:" extra-large, or extra greasy, or extra cheap, occasionally even extra-ordinary -- and always extreme in some way. Shameless, evil, wonderful food that takes no prisoners and laughs maniacally as it slops cholesterol on the walls of your arteries.
It was a dive, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, that gave me my transformational food experience at the age of 12. First you have to understand: In Northern California in the 1960s, there was no good Mexican food as we know it today. None. Zip. Instead, there were long-established "Mexican" restaurants with burros and sleeping Mexicans in white sombreros painted on the walls and well-dusted pinatas hanging from the ceiling. The staff was mainly Anglo (or so close to Anglo you couldn't tell), there wasn't a chile in sight with any heat (or any cilantro!), and everything came drenched in a bland orange "salsa" of tomato sauce and cheese.
But one day, I wasn't in Northern California anymore. I was in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego and a few miles from the Mexican border on a road trip with my kiddie bowling league. All us kids had our own food money so a few of us wandered off to this Mexican restaurant near the motel instead of eating in the coffee shop. And it was not the kind of Mexican restaurant our parents took us to. No sleepy Mexican on the wall. No pinatas. No tablecloths, even. Just same faded posters and formica tabletops and a waitress who looked like somebody's grandma, if Grandma was named Consuelo. It was a dive.
But the food was killer; I couldn't believe it. Mexican food just wasn't supposed to be that good! I'd never had any food that set my mouth off like that! Forty years later, I can still taste the chile rellenos in my combo plate.
Looking back, I'd say that the cook was actually Mexican or at least knew what the food was supposed to taste like -- the border was ten minutes away, after all. He or she knew how to deal with chiles, and also used more fresh herbs and fresh ingredients than I was used to -- basic moves in good Mexican cooking, but pretty crucial. And damn, nobody in Northern California was doing that!
Every since then I've had a prejudice against big, bright, cutely-decorated restaurants with fancy back-lit plastic signs and dining rooms full of well-dressed, middle-aged white people; I just believe in my heart that the food's mainly prefabricated, the cooking oil is cottonseed, and the sauces all come from cans. And most of the time, I'm right. That's why I like dives.
A dive by its very nature is not a bad restaurant; it's simply a no-frills operation run on a shoestring. No-frills because the clientele is working-class, and they have to keep the overhead low so that their customers can afford to eat there; or no-frills because the owners are new to this country or this area and have little money and have to start small.
So a dive is a low-budget restaurant. But it's also an outsider restaurant. Immigrants start dives. White trash start dives. They do it because their only means of thriving in this country is their ability to cook and willingness to work themselves into the ground. And some of them have never run a restaurant before; but they can cook, and it is their big chance to get ahead. It's the American Dream, fried in oil.
So what do they cook? They cook what they know. They cook Mexican food like they knew it back in Michoacan, or the white-trash recipes their grandma from Savannah passed down to them, or the recipe for barbecue brisket that Uncle Bub taught them back in Texas, or noodle bowls the way they used to make them back in Singapore.
You just never know what you're going to find when you walk into a dive; it might be horrible, or you might just get the first pupusas you've ever tasted, with pickled cabbage on top just like back in El Salvador. I am a treasure-hunter by nature. And when I lived up in the Bay Area, I used to hunt for great dives with the fervor of a forty-niner scrambling for the Mother Lode.
Oh God, the dives I have known. Heaven would be a street lined with all of them, and heart disease or weight gain would be unknown. At the head of the block would be La Rondalla in San Francisco, down in the Mission, where they never took down the Christmas decorations and they served chicken-fried steak and machaca and beer until three in the morning and you never had to ask for butter for your tortillas because of course you'd want butter. Just remember not to park too close to the drug dealers' alley, that's all.
The next restaurant in Dive Heaven would be the United States Restaurant, a long vanished North Beach joint where they patched the ripped-up booths with duct tape and the worn tabletops were all dirty gray formica, but they served the cheapest good steak in town . They'd take some inferior cut of meat and pound it and season it and swear at it until it actually tasted pretty cool. The pesto ravioli was to die for, and they served decent house wine by the liter for next to nothing (your choice of "red" or "white").
The waitresses never wrote anything down, and always got everything right. You could ask for almost anything on the menu as a half-order or a side, and they'd make it as you asked. And did I mention cheap? The U.S. was cheap. Come on a Wednesday evening and the place would be full of white-haired men in black pants from the residence hotels, eating the osso bucco special.
Oh jeez, memories. Delta's Dough in the Lower Haight, also long-gone. A good-natured Castro clone fronted the house; Delta, his white-trash mom from Arkansas, ran the kitchen. Breakfast was eggs, fry bread, potatoes, and Cincinati-style chili. Come around in the afternoon and they'd serve you hot garlic fry-bread and ice-cold Budweiser in a mason jar -- that's a better high than dope. Or they'd make you a plate of actual three-way chili; most Californians don't even know what that is.
Down the block, empty-eyed crack whores from the projects peddled blow-jobs, but inside Delta's it was all good and clean and cheap. Whenever a table turned, they laid a fresh sheet of butcher paper down on it; AND there were crayons to draw with. One of the regulars came in for breakfast every morning after working the night shift at an AIDS hospice and drew witty, funny-sad cartoons. The walls were covered with them.
I could go on, if you can stand it: my favorite taqueria in San Francisco, El Farolito down on 24th Street, where they served my all-time favorite carne asada plato; Kukar's House of Pizza in San Jose, a greasy cave of a joint with pizza so spicy it made my scalp sweat (it's still there and still greasy, though whether you go depends on how you feel about gang bangers).
And from my San Francisco days again there was Josie's Superior Restaurant in the Richmond District, where all the Pac Bell and PG&E linemen ate; Grubstake II, where gay clubbers headed for eggs and burgers after the bars closed. Or Mr. B's in South City, "Where the Elite Congregate." (In South City, all the restaurants on Grand Avenue are dives. All of them. That's why I love South City.)
And then there was Nation's Giant Hamburgers in San Pablo -- the Mother Store of the Nation's restaurant chain -- for midnight breakfast with three eggs and linguica and hash-browns and a quarter of a fruit pie for dessert. Nation's began as a single dive-y hotdog stand in San Pablo 50 years ago, and they never forgot the dive fundamentals: no frills, low prices, big food.
And I can't ignore about a million little Asian restaurants I ate at over the year: just wide enough for one row of tables and nothing memorable about most of them except that I love a big cheap plate of chicken chow mein or pork chow fun or pad thai or Vietnamese pork. And it's really, really hard to mess up any of those.
Oh, wait, there was the Canton Winter Garden in San Francisco, where they made vegetarian goose dishes out of tofu and the owner always wanted to know if I knew where to buy some kind or another of industrial equipment that his brother back in China was trying to get. Or the Tu Lan, a rundown Vietnamese dive at maybe the most dangerous corner in downtown San Francisco but all we office workers went there for BBQ pork and spring rolls because Julia Child recommended it (and it was good and cheap, and it's still there, and the neighborhood is still dangerous).
So. Now I live in Santa Cruz. And I can't troll for dives like I used to. I'm not so young anymore. I have to watch my waistline (Oh, I can see it fine). And my cholesterol. And anyway Rhumba isn't so enthusiastic about trying every odd hole-in-the-wall restaurant that opens its doors. She has this thing about cleanliness and food poisoning; women, go figure.
But I still keep my eyes open, and Santa Cruz most definitely has its dives, and a lot more than it used to. Heck, 20 years ago there were just two taquerias in town, and only one was any good. Now there are ten. There was only one pizza-by-the-slice joint. Now there are four.
Among the better dives is Los Pinos, a just-barely-more-than-a taqueria-joint on North Pacific. Pacific Avenue is full of restaurants with trendy food and trendy people. Los Pinos is not trendy; it lurks a block or two away from the main action, on the wrong side of Water Street. Los Pinos looks like somebody ripped the carpet out of their Masonite-paneled rec room and set up a restaurant. Half the clientele's from Mexico, many in families: two good signs. The decor is courtesy of the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe -- and beer posters.
Los Pinos make the best overstuffed burrito in town; it's almost too rich for my stomach to handle but it - tastes - so - good. The cooking is Mexican for Mexicans -- the kind where an enchilada is a tortilla stuffed with chicken and laid on its side with some salsa and cheese thrown on top, with a couple of minutes under the broiler. And they have carne asada with french fries, something I haven't seen since the old days at La Rondalla. The salsa fresca is so fresh and good that I drink it from the cup when nobody's looking. And they have all the right beer, and it's cold and not too expensive. And there are no burros on the wall.
Two blocks away people are eating mediocre sushi and mediocre Mediterranean-inspired food in sidewalk restaurants, laughing with their friends, seeing and being seen. In Los Pinos, nobody's being seen. They're just sitting quietly, eating honest food that they can afford. And maybe watching soccer on the flat screen, or a telenovela. And sipping a beer and resting up and gathering a little strength for the next thing that life throws at them. It's a dive, and a good one.
Pleasure Pizza on Mission is another good dive. As far as I can tell it's run by surfers, for surfers, and for anybody else on the Westside who can't afford more than three or four bucks per lunch. The West Side has a lot of people like that, even though it seems like there are two Priuses and a Beemer on every block.
Pleasure is a local chain; the decor is photos of friends and employees glued to the tabletops and stuck to the wall, with the odd surfboard hanging here and there. The help stays behind the counter slinging pizza and cleans off the tables on alternate leap years; whatever you touch is sticky, including the ripped-up vinyl-upholstered booths. They don't even bother with duct tape. If you know what's good for you, and the weather holds, you eat at the tables outside where the sun eventually sterilizes everything.
They make good pizza and they do a lot of to go business, but it's their basically cruddy storefront and cash-strapped pizza-by-the-slice clientele that makes them a true dive. A slice of pizza costs from around $2.00 for cheese to $4.50 or so for a plush meat combo. Old stalwarts like pepperoni or ham and pineapple can be had for $2.75 or $3.00. And they are huge, and I really mean huge: one is a solid lunch for most people, two are more than enough for me, and I measure my weight in fractions of a ton.
And the joint really jumps on Dollar Cheese Slice Tuesdays, especially at lunch. Surfers and twenty-something townies (basically the same people) come out of the walls, and the parking lot's full of pickups covered "WS" (West Side) surfing decals and SLUGS GO HOME bumper stickers.
I even see Latino and Asian mothers lunching there on Dollar Tuesdays, baby carriages parked at the table. Even when money's tight, a buck cheese slice is hard to pass up. Especially when it's HUGE.
And speaking of excessive, does anybody but me remember Pon's Chinese Food, "Home of the Egg Roll on a Stick?" At first, Pon's was out on Soquel Avenue where Tony and Alba's Pizza is now; and when they lost their lease, they moved down the street to another location. Honestly, the food there was bad. You ordered off the menu at your own risk. And most people knew it. In the evenings, the place was like a tomb.
But. Along with the menu items, they had a steam table of a dozen or so ready-cooked dishes at the front counter that you could choose from for a cheap three-item or four-item or even five-item plate. And whoever made those dishes believed in meat. Lots and lots of meat. Guys loved it.
Broccoli beef, curry chicken, sweet and sour pork, chicken chow mein, whatever: the chunks of meat were huge and plentiful. After a minute, the dishes on your combo plate would merge into this sticky mass of sweet-and-sour salty curry szechuan chicken/pork/beer over noodles, rice, and and an occasional vegetable. When you stuck your fork into it you never knew what was going to come out: a cube of breaded pork, a strip of tender beef, a big hunk of salty chicken.
I ran into a friend at the gym once, and I told him I was going to Pon's after. He got it right away. "Meat" he hissed, eyes gleaming. "All that meat." He paused. "I can't ever get my wife to go."
Correct. Nobody could get their wives to go. Rhumba went once, looked at the mess on my plate and shuddered. Ever game, she ordered egg fu yung off the regular menu and, uh, it was disgusting. After that, she sent me off to Pons by myself. "The food's terrible," she'd say. "It'll probably kill you."
"Yes, but ALL THAT MEAT!" I replied, eyes shining.
Pon's eventually folded its tent. Mr. Pon moved up to San Francisco; he and his family make their living selling Egg Roll on a Stick (TM) at county fairs around the western states. He has been called "The Colonel Sanders of Chinese Food;" and while I'm sure it was intended as a compliment, it may not be. All I know is, another good dive bit the dust.
But there are always new ones, as long as there are people who need to make a new start -- and know how to cook.
I'm off the job this week, and I see a taqueria that I never heard of over on Barson got a good review on Yelp.com -- just one review, probably because Barson's in a rough-at-the-edges neighborhood and the college kids and tourists don't go down there. It's a mom and pop hole in the wall; the carnitas are supposed to be killer, and they have Mexican-style chicken-fried steak.
Smells like dive to me. I'm heading out there right now. Who knows? I could find food poisoning -- or the Mother Lode. The hunt never ends.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Molto Bene
It looks like Harold's going to make it.
He's temped around our organization since last November, always with an eye out for a permanent job. But we had very few openings and, though Harold is a good worker, he didn't get any of them.
So he bounced from data entry to reception to receivables and off to the odd-ball division that's kind of off on its own, and hoped. But Harold's last assignment ended a month ago.
So I was pleased to see him this week in the waiting room, wearing his natty interview jacket and waiting to interview for a permanent job with two managers he knew well. He rose to greet me with a big smile.
Now, that part wasn't pleasant. See, Harold has about five teeth in his head; okay, his back teeth might still be there somewhere, out of view. But when he smiles, all you see are four or five brown, crooked lonely pillars of calcium. It's been a long, long time since Harold had dental benefits.
Santa Cruz overflows with people like Harold. They're middle-aged, educated, single or living with someone, and never too far from stony broke.
The Harolds came here when they were younger and living was cheaper and a living wage was easier to come by. Then life got harder. Rents went up. Jobs were fewer, and lower-paying.
But Harold and his peers stay in Santa Cruz -- well, because it's their home now. There's no place more welcoming to a single 50-something with radical political ideas, or an alternative lifestyle, or a singular spiritual path. And, of course, it's beautiful here.
Harold -- my Harold -- used to hold corporate back-office jobs in Santa Cruz and over the hill in San Jose. Regular jobs, with benefits. But they aren't so easy to come by now, not for anybody. And especially not if you're a worn-looking older guy with bad teeth. Or a gray-haired earth mother, or a a thin, gnarled guy with a shaved head and one earring.
You hear about corporations outsourcing software and engineering jobs overseas, but it goes far beyond that now. Accounts Receivable might be in Bangkok. Payables? Buenos Aires. Human Resources? In-house sales support? Replaced by web-based customer portals, with maybe some temps and contractors to pick up the slack.
Office jobs are still to be had in Santa Cruz, but not many good ones: more and more they're temporary, or part-time or both. Low-paying and, it goes without saying, without benefits. When you get toward 50, benefits mean a lot more than when you're 25 and single. There's usually something broken that needs a doctor's care. Harold needs money; but Harold needs benefits just as much.
My employer still offers benefits. And they don't mind if you're older, or a little weird, as long as you get the job done. So overqualified, underfunded, middle-aged Cruzados are beating at the doors to get in. Even though it's a low-paying, pain-in-the-ass place to work. And even though younger workers rarely stay more than a few years. Because you can't raise a family or buy a house on this money.
But Harold's not planning on either of those things. A job here will work for him; he's interested in surviving in Santa Cruz and getting his car fixed, not starting a family dynasty.
And he's going to make it this time. He's interviewing for a job he's done before, and well. He knows the procedures, the software, the jargon, and the people. And though other applicants may have sweeter smiles, there are three (count 'em) openings. He's a shoe-in to nail one of them.
So I hope to see Harold around the office every day, and soon. He's a goofy, friendly guy, and a committed progressive. I'm a goofy, gloomy guy and a committed progressive. We get along well.
And with luck, someday soon some remark I make to him will elicit a big, white smile with all the teeth that God (or Krishna, or Yahweh, or Gaia) intended. Courtesy of modern dentistry. And benes.
He's temped around our organization since last November, always with an eye out for a permanent job. But we had very few openings and, though Harold is a good worker, he didn't get any of them.
So he bounced from data entry to reception to receivables and off to the odd-ball division that's kind of off on its own, and hoped. But Harold's last assignment ended a month ago.
So I was pleased to see him this week in the waiting room, wearing his natty interview jacket and waiting to interview for a permanent job with two managers he knew well. He rose to greet me with a big smile.
Now, that part wasn't pleasant. See, Harold has about five teeth in his head; okay, his back teeth might still be there somewhere, out of view. But when he smiles, all you see are four or five brown, crooked lonely pillars of calcium. It's been a long, long time since Harold had dental benefits.
Santa Cruz overflows with people like Harold. They're middle-aged, educated, single or living with someone, and never too far from stony broke.
The Harolds came here when they were younger and living was cheaper and a living wage was easier to come by. Then life got harder. Rents went up. Jobs were fewer, and lower-paying.
But Harold and his peers stay in Santa Cruz -- well, because it's their home now. There's no place more welcoming to a single 50-something with radical political ideas, or an alternative lifestyle, or a singular spiritual path. And, of course, it's beautiful here.
Harold -- my Harold -- used to hold corporate back-office jobs in Santa Cruz and over the hill in San Jose. Regular jobs, with benefits. But they aren't so easy to come by now, not for anybody. And especially not if you're a worn-looking older guy with bad teeth. Or a gray-haired earth mother, or a a thin, gnarled guy with a shaved head and one earring.
You hear about corporations outsourcing software and engineering jobs overseas, but it goes far beyond that now. Accounts Receivable might be in Bangkok. Payables? Buenos Aires. Human Resources? In-house sales support? Replaced by web-based customer portals, with maybe some temps and contractors to pick up the slack.
Office jobs are still to be had in Santa Cruz, but not many good ones: more and more they're temporary, or part-time or both. Low-paying and, it goes without saying, without benefits. When you get toward 50, benefits mean a lot more than when you're 25 and single. There's usually something broken that needs a doctor's care. Harold needs money; but Harold needs benefits just as much.
My employer still offers benefits. And they don't mind if you're older, or a little weird, as long as you get the job done. So overqualified, underfunded, middle-aged Cruzados are beating at the doors to get in. Even though it's a low-paying, pain-in-the-ass place to work. And even though younger workers rarely stay more than a few years. Because you can't raise a family or buy a house on this money.
But Harold's not planning on either of those things. A job here will work for him; he's interested in surviving in Santa Cruz and getting his car fixed, not starting a family dynasty.
And he's going to make it this time. He's interviewing for a job he's done before, and well. He knows the procedures, the software, the jargon, and the people. And though other applicants may have sweeter smiles, there are three (count 'em) openings. He's a shoe-in to nail one of them.
So I hope to see Harold around the office every day, and soon. He's a goofy, friendly guy, and a committed progressive. I'm a goofy, gloomy guy and a committed progressive. We get along well.
And with luck, someday soon some remark I make to him will elicit a big, white smile with all the teeth that God (or Krishna, or Yahweh, or Gaia) intended. Courtesy of modern dentistry. And benes.
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