Crappy LA Traffic And Dubious Restaurants
October 28th, 2010
I went out last night with my girlfriend to dinner in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. We started in Torrance at about 6:15 and what should have been a 45 minute drive turned into a 2 1/2 hour fiasco. Traffic was stop and go all the way to Hollywood from the end of the express lane on the 110, through downtown and up onto the 101. I got off at Vermont and found traffic there was worse than the freeway. It seems there was a street fair and Vermont was blocked off, crazy on a week night! So I took Melrose Ave to West Hollywood and we were about to settle for Barny's Beanery, but there was no disabled parking and the only parking was valet, I will be damned if I will pay someone to park my car, so we went down Fountain which was empty most of the way until we got past La Brea where stop signs slow down traffic. We went over to Sunset, jammed even at 8pm, but drivable. We finally got to Vermont and turned left into Los Feliz and parked in a handicapped spot behind Skylight books because the spots at the post office were taken.
If you are an Angeleno or have spent any time driving in LA and I have spent years commuting in the worst traffic in the world, except crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge which is a torture I would not wish on anyone. Needless to say I was in a bad mood when I got out of the car. My back was sore and I was really looking forward to something decent to eat since we had come so far. My girlfriend is pretty picky, she doesn't like Indian food or Mexican food, two of my favorites. She likes American fare and Chinese, we had originally decided to go to Mao's Kitchen, a very good Chinese food restaurant on Melrose, but she wasn't in the mood. When we got to Vermont between Hollywood and Franklin, the little restaurant row up there, I was ready to eat.
For some reason she wanted to go to the House of Pies. She didn't like pies, and when we had gone there on Halloween a couple years before she didn't like it. SO I decided we had to find some other compromise, besides we could have gone to Marie Callendars in Torrance and saved the drive. I wanted something quality. After walking past the French place Figaro, walking in and out of the Dresden, looking like it was a bomb shelter left over from WW2, we settled on the Italian place "il Capriccio". It looked unpretentious and bohemian. That was the hook. It was anything but. The people sitting next to us on the patio were `industry types', that should have warned me right off the bat. My pretension meter was not working.
First off we were ignored by the waiters one of whom committed the faux pas of ignoring us while entertaining industry types at the table next to us and the other waitress went and took the order of people who came it long after us within two tables from us. Being already hungry and not having even a menu yet to peruse or bread to munch, I blew my lid and yelled at the passing waitress that we had been there for quite a while and nobody had paid us any attention. Then both waiter and waitress came and made soothing noises and proceeded to ignore us again after depositing the bread and menus.
There was a decent green olive oil dressing for the bread. This was semi classy I thought and was ready to forgive them. But the service was awful and the food when it came was lackluster. We had a homemade pizza for the appetizer which was bland with very little cheese, or sauce and a decent crust. It was fresh and had the taste of ingredients that had been freshly thrown together. The dinner came eventually and was an Italian fish, frozen and then heated with a weak Mariana sauce diluted with one claim, one muscle, two tiny shrimps and a fish that was overcooked and tasted like it had been in a ship for a month or more. This was no fresh flown in from the harbor stuff that I had been accustomed to when I worked in a fancy Provincal-Northern Italian Restaurant. But then that was in Boulder, CO, obviously a higher class town that the semi-elite districts of Los Angeles. My girlfriend was satisfied with her frozen Atlantic salmon, something I would never have, being an advocate of wild caught fresh salmon. Why I chose a frozen Italian fish is beyond me. There were no fresh fish on the menu and I was sick of chicken and pork and still can't bring myself to eat dead cow.
The only advantage was the dessert, it was on the house. I had an apple tort and she had Strawberry Cheesecake. They both had fresh fruit and even though they were out of ice cream, and the tort wasn't exactly warm, it was well made and tasted better than anything else in the meal except the angel hair pasta in olive oil, and the mixed vegetables which were al dente. We got out of there spending $75 including tip. I had a decent Italian dark beer and she had a seven up, they didn't have her preferred sprite or mixed drinks. Other than that this place was no better than Olive Garden, although it had the boho accoutrements that attract the local industry types.
The restaurant seemed to be the kind of place for people who want lots of time to talk, like the industry types and the gay group who got to order before us. But we were there to eat. My girlfriend is a typical LA person who doesn't like to talk about a subject unless it relates to sex or shopping. She is one of the illiterati who sings along with the latest hip hop hit and can explain to me the meaning of lyrics that are obscure or unintelligible for my elder ears. She likes to be looked at. A classic function of youthful LA persons and when she did talk it was about how she cleans her glasses with windex to get them perfectly clean. I tried to talk about my recent studies in Latin but didn't get anywhere. She seemed a bit intimidated by the casual displays of wealth around us. It made me aware of the pretension of the moneyed classes who had taken over this formerly bohemian neighborhood where struggling artists hung out at the local cafes where cheap coffee and pastries were to be found at the Onyx Cafe and Anarchist literature could be found at Skylight Books before Anarchism had become trendy.
It appalls me to see a neighborhood with faux bohemians, wealthy industry types who don't have to wear suits. I could say I was jealous if I wasn't remembering how nice the neighborhood had been when I lived there and when you could get a decent meal for $30 for two at the local Spaghetti joint. Now even a pretentious dive like il Capriccio can get away with charging prices that a serious restaurant used to charge. I would hate to see what a decent place around there charged. I think from now on I will stick to the House of Pies, even though they have a valet now, if I ever go back up there to eat. They still have the only bookstore with serious political literature, and for that reason alone, to go to Skylight Books, I will return from time to time to Los Feliz. It turns out there was a major accident on the 405 and everyone was taking surface streets or the 110-101 to get out of the West side and South bay. Bad timing on my part. Next time I take the train from Long Beach! But my girlfriend won't come with me if I don't drive until they make the train seats more comfortable.
That is my blog for the day, on with the revolution and lets hope there is decent food after the fall of capitalism!
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