Grass Fed | West Coastin’

FOOD
TRAVEL
By PETER MEEHAN
June 29, 2010, 1:43 pm

Cows grazing at Big Sur.

The sun-stunned effects of a California tour-cation have led to a complete breakdown in the interview-transcription machinery here at Grass Fed, so I’m phoning in this week’s entry with what the Dining Section editor Pete Wells once railed against as a grilled cheese blog post: a post about a bunch of stuff I ate. I promise some fine and interesting stuff in the weeks to come, but for now, a litany of things I ate on the West Coast, presented, confusingly enough, in a chronological fashion that follows a little three-show tour my band did: Big Sur, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

I guess we can start with waking up in San Francisco. We stopped at Four Barrel for coffee and snacks to take on the road. The last time I was there, Four Barrel was just a espresso machine on a loading dock in the alley behind what is now the gloriously airy, warehouse-y space. I don’t know why, but I feel like the coffee was better back then, which is not to say that what we got was bad, but it wasn’t as epic as the place’s reputation had led me to expect. We also got a bag of some kind of fancy doughnuts that were over-fried, over-flavored and too soft. Hrrrphm.

On the way to Big Sur, I eyed a pointless chicken-salad sandwich at coffee shop in a minimall complex in Monterey and didn’t eat it. I was more interested in a group of protestors waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and holding signs about Arizona getting it right on immigration. Funny that they were doing it at the intersection of a luxury mall and a road that led more or less only to Big Sur, which is richer and whiter than the intersections they could have found a short drive to the north, in Castroville or Gilroy, two agricultural centers where Mexican laborers pick the artichokes and garlic that are the reasons those towns are famous.

In Big Sur, we breezed through the Big Sur Bakery, where I hoovered down a piece of pizza covered in a thick carpet of stewed greens — maybe too healthy a snack for the mood I was in. (But it led to a conversation in which I learned that the movie “Popeye” is something I really should go back to. Robin Williams scares me, but Altman makes it sound promising.)

Pete Nolan and I played as Spectre Folk, the first of nine bands on the bill at the FolkYeah!!! Woodsist Festival at the Henry Miller Memorial Library. (It was one of the greatest days of my adult life — my girlfriend and our six-month-old and bunch of friends were there — and it was by far the best festival I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending. Every band played a good set, and I was especially into Moon Duo, Kurt Vile, Woods and Real Estate.)

The Ambrosiaburger at Nepenthe; pasta salad at the band dinner; corned beef sandwich at Langer’s.

I was starving after our set and offered to help a girl laying out a backstage spread (and by “backstage” I mean “back porch”; the Henry Miller Library not being such a formal place) spread of Trader Joe’s booty. She sent me to wash the vegetables, and at the sink I met a serious, bearded guy named Leif who was preparing food that would be sold to attendees as well as at the communal dinner for the bands. Leif’s got a blog that details his multifarious dealings in the food world — an agenda of dinners, talks, sojourns and meet-ups that made me feel positively lazy when I eventually checked it out.

The pasta salad he cooked for the band dinner was, against all odds (or at least against the anti-pasta-salad prejudice that I think I picked up from Pete Wells), killer: filling, oily in the right way, piquant in the “refreshingly interesting” sense of the world. I ate two plates.

The next morning we woke up at Deetjen’s, which is one of the finest places on earth I know to wake up at, in part because breakfast there is pitch-perfect: the vibe is friendly and family and warm, the cozy warren of rooms makes every grouping of tables an intimate set, and diners all talk to and smile at each other because everybody knows they’re in the place to be.

Because I like to feel a groaning sense of fullness almost all the time, I went for the two eggs and toast and a side of buttermilk pancakes. I always go with chicken-apple sausage for my morning meat at Deetjen’s, even though I’m usually a sunrise porker. After that it was off to lightly sear ourselves in the sun on the beach at Andrew Molera State Park. I missed lunch, made it up with a vegetarian burrito from a convenience store along Highway 1, and then counted down the hours to dinner at Nepenthe.

You know Nepenthe if you’ve been to Big Sur; it’s perched on a cliff, affording diners a view of the coast to south and the Pacific to the west in a manner that’s so majestic I’m typically reduced to trying to capture it on a crummy camera rather than just breathing it in. Nepenthe’s got a very California menu — New American, I guess would be one way to call it; wandering, another — but, like so many tourists, I go there for the burger.

The burger at Nepenthe is called the Ambrosiaburger, after the “special sauce” that gets slathered on it. (There’s a recipe for it on the restaurant’s site; prepare to be underwhelmed by what goes into brewing up the sauce of the gods.) It’s served on a “French” roll that’s pale and soft enough to make a Frenchman blush. And while that description shouldn’t, in my mind, add up to a great burger, it does at Nepenthe. It might be the beef; the menu notes that it’s from local cows, and while driving to Big Sur, you’ll certainly see herds of them, cows living probably the best cow life possible, grazing wild with the Pacific laid wide open before them. I buy that happy cows taste better.

The next day we set off up the coast, back to San Francisco to play another show. We stopped for a bite at Phil’s Fish Market out on Moss Landing. Phil — I assume the bearded man who had his likeness plastered around the place like Mao at a Warhol show — had apparently had some sort of throwdown with Bobby Flay; most of the television monitors around the restaurant were frozen on a frame of him smiling and shucking, from what I assume was his spotlight moment with Mr. Flay.

The place is the size of an airplane hangar, with a retail operation (offering a surprising amount of East Coast fish) and two seating areas. The girl working the register told me the squid was local, so I ordered calamari, and, like most fried squid, it was good — though I do think the freshness of the squid made a difference. I also got a steamed artichoke, on account of our proximity to Castroville and because I’d had the best steamed artichoke of my life at Nepenthe the night before. Good, but not as good as the artichoke served on a cliff in Big Sur.

Onward to San Francisco. We played a show at the Hemlock that had a bad-acid vibe to it — in a good way? — and friends recommended that we pile out for an after-show meal at a place called Nopa. I had grilled cactus on the mind — I figured Nopa was short for nopales and we’d be eating tacos or burritos — but it turned out to be a fancy-ish, upstanding place with a hostess and nice waiters and a good wine list that happened to be open late. (Nopa is short for “north of the Panhandle” or something.)

I ordered some kind of pizza flatbread that was way too good for the hour, and a plate of fried tiny fish that we probably could have reloaded on at least a couple of times. I nabbed forkfuls of excellent roasted broccoli from my bandmate and a slice of a friend’s rib eye that was perfectly cooked and dressed in a sauce that would have made shoe leather edible. A couple of friends ordered burgers, which seemed appropriate for the hour, but man, the real food was the real deal.

We took off for L.A. the next morning and made it almost all the way down before giving into the highway-food gods with a breakfast burger stop at In-N-Out, a West Coast indulgence I’m not strong enough to deny myself at least once a trip. One of my favorite things about the place is that there’s always something to learn at an In-N-Out. Pete had never had a burger Animal style, so I got to hip him to that. He showed me that the bottom of every cup includes a Bible reference: my soda directed me, like so many men holding signs behind the goalposts at football games, to read John 3:15.

We stopped briefly in Santa Barbara to pick up Pete’s baby and wife and to eat at La Super Rica, which is undoubtedly my favorite Mexican restaurant in the continental United States. (Haters — there is a huge contingent of people who feel the place is hyperbolically overrated — please don’t feel the need to take over the comments on that point. I know you think I’m a sucker, a gringo, a tourist and a sheep.) More on La Super Rica and Santa Barbara here in the future — too much ground to cover in this post. The main thing to remember about La Super Rica is that they have best horchata on the planet and they’re closed on Wednesdays.

We got down to L.A. and hung out for a little while at the Echoplex, where Jeremy Earl and the Woodsist crew were putting on another Woodsist fest. There were a couple of food trucks parked out back — in the future all food in Los Angeles will be served from trucks — one of which was called the Greasy Wiener, which seemed to prompt more passers-by to snicker than to snack, but then again I was there early.

The L.A. show included local bands, like Sun Araw, who I would have loved to catch live, but we had to share a bill with Thurston Moore over at an awesome little art gallery called Synchronicity.

Our show wrapped up around midnight, and nobody was in the mood for trouble. I grabbed a 1 a.m. burrito at a place that called itself a “Mexicatessen”: Burrito King. The vegetarian burrito did not make me sick, but I’m not sure that’s an endorsement.

The tour-cation ended the next morning. I was heading up to Santa Barbara to meet up with my baby and my girl, riding the 2:55 p.m. Amtrak Surfliner up the coast. I had breakfast and coffee at the Chateau Marmont, a hotel that is like Deetjen’s in its transporting charms, though instead of offering a powerful connection with redwoods and nature, it offers the chance for even a breakfast guest to feel like a super Angeleno and scope out Rosario Dawson eating, Famke Janssen walking her dog and Thurston Moore having coffee.

I put a stake in the heart of my hunger for the rest of the day with my (shamefully) first visit to Langer’s, the famous delicatessen. Katz’s was around the corner from my apartment for the last 10 years in New York, so it’s deeply difficult for me to be in any way objective about deli supremacy. But, man. Langer’s is really good. They use bread that doesn’t taste like it was made in a copying machine. Langer’s corned beef melts in the mouth. They dispense meat in portions that do not immediately redirect all the conversations in the place toward coronary health. The servers are hyperfriendly. Is it better than Katz’s?

Oh no! Look how time flies. If I drink another one of these beers out of frosty mugs I’ll never make my train. See you next time.


Food, Music, Travel, Big Sur, Food, Grass Fed, Los Angeles, Peter Meehan, restaurants, San Francisco, Travel


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