Sherrod Brown just joined twitter: @sherrodbrown . If you have Twitter, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE @ him and tell him you want the Cleveland Sandwich Board to be the official sandwich review organization of the United States of America. Just copy this and post it to twitter:
@sherrodbrown I want www.clevelandsandwichboard.com to be the official sandwich review organization of the USA!!!
Thank you America!!!
Best,
Beau Cadiyo
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
From Afar: Hoagie Haven
242 Nassau Street
Princeton, NJ 08542
(609) 921-7723
http://www.hoagiehaven.com/
by Yuri "Grinder" McCarver
It’s 11 AM on a frozen winter day in Princeton, New Jersey. You’re a Freshman in High School – barely fifteen years old - and you are skipping Algebra! You walk to the edge of campus. You look right and spy Frank Kurst, the lacrosse coach who doubles as a Truancy Officer. Kurst rounds a far corner and disappears. You look left. No one there. You step off the sidewalk; and several paces later there you are: just another citizen on the street.
In a few minutes you make it to downtown and enter the workaday world that has been hidden from you for every school day for your entire life: you see scurrying shop owners, Republican businessmen in their too-serious suits, mothers bargaining with toddlers, hungover University students trying to make sense of their day break.
As part of this crowd you push open the door to Hoagie Haven. 1970s vintage refrigeration units with sliding doors stuffed with sodas line the walls. At the front of the shop there is a long counter. Behind the counter are bins of cold cuts, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, hot peppers, and onions, along with a well-seasoned griddle and a deep fryer. Manning this operation is its owner, George, a Greek immigrant with hair the color of stainless steel and a friendly silver moustache.
“What’ll it be, my friend?” George asks.
“Cheese steak, half,” you say with a dry mouth, the adrenaline from your escape still zipping around your chest.
The process begins: George produces rectangles of thin beef slices from the freezer and slaps them on the grill. The meat greets the heat with the sound of a roar from a far away stadium. George slices half of a foot long Italian loaf down the middle; spreads it open and places it beneath the coils of a heating apparatus. He turns the meat with a twist of his wrist and places two slices of American cheese on top. George slides the bread out of the heater. You ask for lettuce, tomatoes, onions and hot peppers with ketchup, hold the mayo. George assembles your hoagie and glides the meat and cheese on top of the vegetation with the finesse of an Atlantic City blackjack dealer. “Salt, pepper, oregano?” George asks. Only, George has asked this question a million times, so the three words cannonball off his tongue in one sound: Sal’pe’pregno!? Sal’pe’pregno?!
“Yes!” you reply and moments later you are sitting outside with your half cheese steak, unwrapping it from its parchment paper. The key to any hoagie is the bread, and the Haven’s Italian loaves are crispy on the outside and soft inside with enough heft to support the fillings. It is impossible to fit the entire width of the cheese steak in your mouth, so you switch between bites of the veggies on the bottom and the unctuous beef and cheese on top, until you reach the far edge of the hoagie. This is the best part, the moisture from the veggies and ketchup and the fat from the meat and cheese have all been absorbed by the end of the bread. This sum of cheese steak accompanies the last of the beef. You punch the entire end into your mouth and chew with your cheeks puffing out.
The rhythm of the Haven becomes the rhythm of your own stumble into adulthood. You eat there several times a week, sometimes twice a day. Sneaking off campus proves to be a non-challenge, but kind of a thrill anyway. You like George, because he is a silent accomplice to your truancy, but also because, in his own way, he is one of the first people to treat you like an adult. Even as a quiet, awkward Freshman, inside the Haven you are an equal with the cusp of college Seniors with their cars. You are one with the evil eating club boys and joyous University girls, the end-of-the-day businessmen and the truck drivers, the Guatemalan laborers and the police officers who George, after much back-and-forth, always insists on feeding for free. Everyone is greeted with the same sincere, “What’ll it be, my friend?”
Over three and a half years you have the opportunity to sample the entire menu. You develop a rotating collection of favorites: there is the chicken parm with its peppery tomato sauce topped by several slices of bubbling provolone cheese; the cheese omelet whose whisked eggs explode from their liquid to solid state upon contact with the grill; the round tin of chicken nuggets and French fries, for just $3.50!
You are at the Haven at all hours and you witness the details of the operation: the repetitious slicing of tomatoes, onions and lettuce. The careful construction of the tomato sauce from scratch each morning. Making a Haven run becomes a requisite part of social activities. Everyone writes down the specifics of their order and hands their dollars to the Haven Runner who returns with a box full of hoagies, stacked like greasy artillery shells.
Soon, you are one of the hooting and hollering Seniors with cars, and you discover that one of George’s other fine attributes is that he is good at talking to drunk people.
Then, you head off to College, and you quickly learn that they do not have places like Hoagie Haven in Southern California. And no, dude! Subway is not the same thing! You return home for Winter break and make your dad take you directly to Hoagie Haven from the airport. “What’ll it be, my friend?” George asks. His silver moustache has specks of white.
Over the breaks and summers of your college years Hoagie Haven becomes a Salon, the place where you encounter all of the people you vaguely knew in High School. George’s tubes of bread, meat, sauce and vegetables remain the fuel for humid summer evenings of Texas Hold ‘Em, three-on-three basketball, rambling conversations, and Yuengling beer.
You graduate from college. The pace of time accelerates. You visit home less often, and no longer recognize most of the faces in Hoagie Haven. You see George’s hair go from stainless steel, to silver, to grey. By your late 20s, your pilgrimage to Hoagie Haven feels obligatory, the way elections must have felt in Communist Russia.
You are thirty years old and hanging out with your old friends during the holidays when they tell you that George has sold Hoagie Haven. It’s still good, but not what it was, they report. “The tomato sauce on the eggplant parm was hearty and spicy,” one woman laments. “Now it’s sweet and cloying.”
You order a cheese steak to see for yourself. There seems to be less meat in the meat-to-bread ratio. The edges of the steak are a bit dry. The veggies, meat and cheese still meld and sing, but there is nothing in the last bite but a trace of ketchup and a few wayward strands of lettuce. The bread is still an inch longer than the meat, but George placed the meat on the bread so that this inch was at the front. The new guy puts it at the end. The evidence is in: profit margins are being expanded, magic is being nickel-and-dimed away.
You peruse the bodies inside Hoagie Haven. They all look like modern versions of the people you recall from your teenage years. They will have their own moments of truant rebellion and inebriated infatuation with their own irreverence inside Hoagie Haven. You realize that in your teenagehood Hoagie Haven was at its apex. Those countless visits when you should have been in class were the peak. Hoagie Haven will never be what it was then, even if this current cohort doesn’t know it.
You ponder how disappointing it is that there are no stupid rules to break as adult. Your life has surfed highs and lows and taken turns that you could not have comprehended when you were fifteen. Yet, your existence has never felt more visceral then it did on those nights when you were a teenager cruising up and down Route One with your friends trying to find a liquor store that would sell you a bottle of Smirnoff. Back then that bottle of liquid poison was a victory. An occasion. Now, it’s Tuesday. And the truth is that you don’t even want to drink on Tuesday. The few rules there are do not hold you back: You have no desire to harm anyone. You don’t even speed on the freeway. Life just isn’t as intense without half-wit lacrosse coaches to outfox on the way to Hoagie Haven.
It’s a damp winter evening in Portland, Oregon. Today your job managed to be both dull and stressful. Because you could only find 20 minutes to work out you spent too little time warming up and exercised too aggressively. The rain soaked your socks on the bike ride home. Your muscles ache. Your mind is split between the convenience of extracting fast food from Burgerville and the effort necessary to convert broccoli, brown rice and chicken thighs into something wholesome at home. Then the memories breathe in the sinew of your being. You cry out, “I could really go for some Hoagie Haven right now”. And the musical sound of George saying “salt, pepper, oregano” ricochets through your brain: “Sal’pe’pregno?!” “Sal’pe’pregno?!” “Sal’pe’pregno?!”
Princeton, NJ 08542
(609) 921-7723
http://www.hoagiehaven.com/
by Yuri "Grinder" McCarver
It’s 11 AM on a frozen winter day in Princeton, New Jersey. You’re a Freshman in High School – barely fifteen years old - and you are skipping Algebra! You walk to the edge of campus. You look right and spy Frank Kurst, the lacrosse coach who doubles as a Truancy Officer. Kurst rounds a far corner and disappears. You look left. No one there. You step off the sidewalk; and several paces later there you are: just another citizen on the street.
In a few minutes you make it to downtown and enter the workaday world that has been hidden from you for every school day for your entire life: you see scurrying shop owners, Republican businessmen in their too-serious suits, mothers bargaining with toddlers, hungover University students trying to make sense of their day break.
As part of this crowd you push open the door to Hoagie Haven. 1970s vintage refrigeration units with sliding doors stuffed with sodas line the walls. At the front of the shop there is a long counter. Behind the counter are bins of cold cuts, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, hot peppers, and onions, along with a well-seasoned griddle and a deep fryer. Manning this operation is its owner, George, a Greek immigrant with hair the color of stainless steel and a friendly silver moustache.
“What’ll it be, my friend?” George asks.
“Cheese steak, half,” you say with a dry mouth, the adrenaline from your escape still zipping around your chest.
The process begins: George produces rectangles of thin beef slices from the freezer and slaps them on the grill. The meat greets the heat with the sound of a roar from a far away stadium. George slices half of a foot long Italian loaf down the middle; spreads it open and places it beneath the coils of a heating apparatus. He turns the meat with a twist of his wrist and places two slices of American cheese on top. George slides the bread out of the heater. You ask for lettuce, tomatoes, onions and hot peppers with ketchup, hold the mayo. George assembles your hoagie and glides the meat and cheese on top of the vegetation with the finesse of an Atlantic City blackjack dealer. “Salt, pepper, oregano?” George asks. Only, George has asked this question a million times, so the three words cannonball off his tongue in one sound: Sal’pe’pregno!? Sal’pe’pregno?!
“Yes!” you reply and moments later you are sitting outside with your half cheese steak, unwrapping it from its parchment paper. The key to any hoagie is the bread, and the Haven’s Italian loaves are crispy on the outside and soft inside with enough heft to support the fillings. It is impossible to fit the entire width of the cheese steak in your mouth, so you switch between bites of the veggies on the bottom and the unctuous beef and cheese on top, until you reach the far edge of the hoagie. This is the best part, the moisture from the veggies and ketchup and the fat from the meat and cheese have all been absorbed by the end of the bread. This sum of cheese steak accompanies the last of the beef. You punch the entire end into your mouth and chew with your cheeks puffing out.
The rhythm of the Haven becomes the rhythm of your own stumble into adulthood. You eat there several times a week, sometimes twice a day. Sneaking off campus proves to be a non-challenge, but kind of a thrill anyway. You like George, because he is a silent accomplice to your truancy, but also because, in his own way, he is one of the first people to treat you like an adult. Even as a quiet, awkward Freshman, inside the Haven you are an equal with the cusp of college Seniors with their cars. You are one with the evil eating club boys and joyous University girls, the end-of-the-day businessmen and the truck drivers, the Guatemalan laborers and the police officers who George, after much back-and-forth, always insists on feeding for free. Everyone is greeted with the same sincere, “What’ll it be, my friend?”
Over three and a half years you have the opportunity to sample the entire menu. You develop a rotating collection of favorites: there is the chicken parm with its peppery tomato sauce topped by several slices of bubbling provolone cheese; the cheese omelet whose whisked eggs explode from their liquid to solid state upon contact with the grill; the round tin of chicken nuggets and French fries, for just $3.50!
You are at the Haven at all hours and you witness the details of the operation: the repetitious slicing of tomatoes, onions and lettuce. The careful construction of the tomato sauce from scratch each morning. Making a Haven run becomes a requisite part of social activities. Everyone writes down the specifics of their order and hands their dollars to the Haven Runner who returns with a box full of hoagies, stacked like greasy artillery shells.
Soon, you are one of the hooting and hollering Seniors with cars, and you discover that one of George’s other fine attributes is that he is good at talking to drunk people.
Then, you head off to College, and you quickly learn that they do not have places like Hoagie Haven in Southern California. And no, dude! Subway is not the same thing! You return home for Winter break and make your dad take you directly to Hoagie Haven from the airport. “What’ll it be, my friend?” George asks. His silver moustache has specks of white.
Over the breaks and summers of your college years Hoagie Haven becomes a Salon, the place where you encounter all of the people you vaguely knew in High School. George’s tubes of bread, meat, sauce and vegetables remain the fuel for humid summer evenings of Texas Hold ‘Em, three-on-three basketball, rambling conversations, and Yuengling beer.
You graduate from college. The pace of time accelerates. You visit home less often, and no longer recognize most of the faces in Hoagie Haven. You see George’s hair go from stainless steel, to silver, to grey. By your late 20s, your pilgrimage to Hoagie Haven feels obligatory, the way elections must have felt in Communist Russia.
You are thirty years old and hanging out with your old friends during the holidays when they tell you that George has sold Hoagie Haven. It’s still good, but not what it was, they report. “The tomato sauce on the eggplant parm was hearty and spicy,” one woman laments. “Now it’s sweet and cloying.”
You order a cheese steak to see for yourself. There seems to be less meat in the meat-to-bread ratio. The edges of the steak are a bit dry. The veggies, meat and cheese still meld and sing, but there is nothing in the last bite but a trace of ketchup and a few wayward strands of lettuce. The bread is still an inch longer than the meat, but George placed the meat on the bread so that this inch was at the front. The new guy puts it at the end. The evidence is in: profit margins are being expanded, magic is being nickel-and-dimed away.
You peruse the bodies inside Hoagie Haven. They all look like modern versions of the people you recall from your teenage years. They will have their own moments of truant rebellion and inebriated infatuation with their own irreverence inside Hoagie Haven. You realize that in your teenagehood Hoagie Haven was at its apex. Those countless visits when you should have been in class were the peak. Hoagie Haven will never be what it was then, even if this current cohort doesn’t know it.
You ponder how disappointing it is that there are no stupid rules to break as adult. Your life has surfed highs and lows and taken turns that you could not have comprehended when you were fifteen. Yet, your existence has never felt more visceral then it did on those nights when you were a teenager cruising up and down Route One with your friends trying to find a liquor store that would sell you a bottle of Smirnoff. Back then that bottle of liquid poison was a victory. An occasion. Now, it’s Tuesday. And the truth is that you don’t even want to drink on Tuesday. The few rules there are do not hold you back: You have no desire to harm anyone. You don’t even speed on the freeway. Life just isn’t as intense without half-wit lacrosse coaches to outfox on the way to Hoagie Haven.
It’s a damp winter evening in Portland, Oregon. Today your job managed to be both dull and stressful. Because you could only find 20 minutes to work out you spent too little time warming up and exercised too aggressively. The rain soaked your socks on the bike ride home. Your muscles ache. Your mind is split between the convenience of extracting fast food from Burgerville and the effort necessary to convert broccoli, brown rice and chicken thighs into something wholesome at home. Then the memories breathe in the sinew of your being. You cry out, “I could really go for some Hoagie Haven right now”. And the musical sound of George saying “salt, pepper, oregano” ricochets through your brain: “Sal’pe’pregno?!” “Sal’pe’pregno?!” “Sal’pe’pregno?!”
Monday, February 15, 2010
Bac Asian American Bistro
2661 West 14th Street
Cleveland, OH 44113
(216) 938-8960
www.bactremont.com/
by Beau Cadiyo
Note: the full review is available HERE.
I ate at Bac Asian American Bistro last week for a "soft" opening in exchange for not reviewing it just yet (which I really wanted to do). Without going into the food details, I really recommend that you go there yourself to make your own judgments! Among other things, Bac has Kobe burgers and Bahn Mis; I'll be posting a review as soon as I can get back during normal business hours.
Cleveland, OH 44113
(216) 938-8960
www.bactremont.com/
by Beau Cadiyo
Note: the full review is available HERE.
I ate at Bac Asian American Bistro last week for a "soft" opening in exchange for not reviewing it just yet (which I really wanted to do). Without going into the food details, I really recommend that you go there yourself to make your own judgments! Among other things, Bac has Kobe burgers and Bahn Mis; I'll be posting a review as soon as I can get back during normal business hours.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Becky’s
1762 E 18th St
Cleveland, OH 44114
(216) 621-0055
by Beau Cadiyo
When I was in the eighth grade my father decided that it would be a good idea if he got me a book of dirty jokes. Even at 13, I was struck at the stupidity of some of the jokes, even in the golden age of Beavis and Butthead farting their way through America. One particularly stupid joke that has stuck with me all these years involves two old men sitting in a park debating about whether it's better to have a really satisfying shit or an orgasm. They see a prostitute that they're both acquainted with, and one suggests that they ask her. "No use," the other man says, "She's had more experience with one than the other!" In my pubescent haze of hormones, it was clear to me that an orgasm of any kind beat sitting on the toilet and smelling yesterday’s groceries.
I’ve been thinking of that joke recently because my dumps have been really unsatisfying. I've been eating a lot of salad and chicken-vegetable soup, occasionally with bread rolls from La Mexicana, and I would have expected this diet to leave as easily as it came in. Regardless, when I sit down on the toilet, it feels like I'm pushing icing out of an icing bag, and I'm never sure when I'm done. Tea and coffee don't help, nor do healthy doses of rice and beans or fruit.
Luckily for me, I met Frank McGarvey at a mixer, and he and his friends invited me to Becky's. (Full disclosure: he is the owner’s son.) I had trouble finding it, as there wasn’t a neon sign on the front or people loitering around outside. Parking was tight, too, which struck me as odd in an area which otherwise looked abandoned. I walked in behind a shorter, older, homeless-looking man, and we both went to the bathrooms in the back. As soon as he entered, he warmly greeted a much younger man in a suit, as if they were drinking buddies, and they chatted awkwardly as men peeing are wont to do.
Back out in the dark bar, work groups conversed around big tables, students laughed and sang along with the jukebox, cops wandered in and shook hands with patrons, a couple on an early date gazed at each other across a table and this writer viewed the scene with bemusement. It felt like a perfect island bar, sans tiki torches: dark yet light. It was helped by the old, original wooden bar, scarred from years of service, and eclectic decorations; one of the bartenders works in theater doing sets, and she brings in bits and pieces from old plays.
Frank McGarvey walked in from the street to join me, and shook twenty hands before we ordered. I got the Becky Burger with Muenster cheese; he ordered chicken tenders, potato skins, sauces and a sirloin steak sandwich for himself.
The chicken tenders were tender, with a hard crust the likes of which I’d never had before. The potato skins were made fresh and had real cheddar, which formed oily pools, and bits of bacon, as if they’d been made by someone’s mother for a high-school study session. The scooped-out potato parts were also cooked and served as half-chips, half-fries, which were amazing in the jerk sauce.
Then I started on the curly fries. It’s been a while since I had curly fries; the last time I can definitely say I had them was when, that eighth-grade summer, my mom dropped Frank Wilcox and me off at the Parkway Plaza mall to meet some girls near the food court. These were similarly amazing, but instead of being seasoned with a newfound freedom, they were washed down with delicious beer.
When I first picked the burger up, I said, “Woaholy shit.” In my hands it was bigger than it looked on the plate, and dense, and just plain heavy. While other places put a square of cheese on top, Becky’s places a giant slice on and melts it so that the cheese completely encompasses the patty like a protective layer. The meat was cooked to a perfect medium; the lettuce was crisp, the tomato cold, the onions pungent and sharp, and the jerk sauce, which I dripped onto the meat, was spicy and tangy and salty and delicious. “You need to bottle this,” said Frank Gasparos about the sauce, and Frank Mcgarvey said that they were thinking about selling it at the West Side Market.
What they shouldn’t do is sell the building, which CSU keeps trying to buy. CSU probably wants to use it for development, or raze it and put in a parking lot. Instead, CSU should buy the land around it and then build a U-shaped graduate student dorm around Becky’s. Students will have a friendly, safe place to go, and Becky’s will do even more business. Maybe CSU can think of the social life of its students and put in a few other bars or restaurants, to help the area thrive and turn it into a social hub – the kind a college close to a major metropolitan area should have. A parking lot, or admin buildings abandoned at night, would only contribute to the decline of the area; it’s already virtually dead as it is, and somehow Becky’s is still doing well. The tented field across the street doesn’t help.
I walked out at 8:40 p.m.; everyone that I’d seen when I came in was still there, at the tables or bars, and it looked like more people had joined them. I drove home, content, and found Frank Hoxha waiting for me at my house; she really likes it when my breath has the primal odor of charred meat and/or alcohol.
The next morning, I shat, and realized that Becky’s had made it glorious. Comparing the two at my age, I still prefer orgasms; however, while my morning excretion wasn't better than those of the previous evening, it was pretty damn satisfying, and that goes for Becky’s itself. We'll see how I feel when I'm sixty.
Cleveland, OH 44114
(216) 621-0055
by Beau Cadiyo
When I was in the eighth grade my father decided that it would be a good idea if he got me a book of dirty jokes. Even at 13, I was struck at the stupidity of some of the jokes, even in the golden age of Beavis and Butthead farting their way through America. One particularly stupid joke that has stuck with me all these years involves two old men sitting in a park debating about whether it's better to have a really satisfying shit or an orgasm. They see a prostitute that they're both acquainted with, and one suggests that they ask her. "No use," the other man says, "She's had more experience with one than the other!" In my pubescent haze of hormones, it was clear to me that an orgasm of any kind beat sitting on the toilet and smelling yesterday’s groceries.
I’ve been thinking of that joke recently because my dumps have been really unsatisfying. I've been eating a lot of salad and chicken-vegetable soup, occasionally with bread rolls from La Mexicana, and I would have expected this diet to leave as easily as it came in. Regardless, when I sit down on the toilet, it feels like I'm pushing icing out of an icing bag, and I'm never sure when I'm done. Tea and coffee don't help, nor do healthy doses of rice and beans or fruit.
Luckily for me, I met Frank McGarvey at a mixer, and he and his friends invited me to Becky's. (Full disclosure: he is the owner’s son.) I had trouble finding it, as there wasn’t a neon sign on the front or people loitering around outside. Parking was tight, too, which struck me as odd in an area which otherwise looked abandoned. I walked in behind a shorter, older, homeless-looking man, and we both went to the bathrooms in the back. As soon as he entered, he warmly greeted a much younger man in a suit, as if they were drinking buddies, and they chatted awkwardly as men peeing are wont to do.
Back out in the dark bar, work groups conversed around big tables, students laughed and sang along with the jukebox, cops wandered in and shook hands with patrons, a couple on an early date gazed at each other across a table and this writer viewed the scene with bemusement. It felt like a perfect island bar, sans tiki torches: dark yet light. It was helped by the old, original wooden bar, scarred from years of service, and eclectic decorations; one of the bartenders works in theater doing sets, and she brings in bits and pieces from old plays.
Frank McGarvey walked in from the street to join me, and shook twenty hands before we ordered. I got the Becky Burger with Muenster cheese; he ordered chicken tenders, potato skins, sauces and a sirloin steak sandwich for himself.
The chicken tenders were tender, with a hard crust the likes of which I’d never had before. The potato skins were made fresh and had real cheddar, which formed oily pools, and bits of bacon, as if they’d been made by someone’s mother for a high-school study session. The scooped-out potato parts were also cooked and served as half-chips, half-fries, which were amazing in the jerk sauce.
Then I started on the curly fries. It’s been a while since I had curly fries; the last time I can definitely say I had them was when, that eighth-grade summer, my mom dropped Frank Wilcox and me off at the Parkway Plaza mall to meet some girls near the food court. These were similarly amazing, but instead of being seasoned with a newfound freedom, they were washed down with delicious beer.
When I first picked the burger up, I said, “Woaholy shit.” In my hands it was bigger than it looked on the plate, and dense, and just plain heavy. While other places put a square of cheese on top, Becky’s places a giant slice on and melts it so that the cheese completely encompasses the patty like a protective layer. The meat was cooked to a perfect medium; the lettuce was crisp, the tomato cold, the onions pungent and sharp, and the jerk sauce, which I dripped onto the meat, was spicy and tangy and salty and delicious. “You need to bottle this,” said Frank Gasparos about the sauce, and Frank Mcgarvey said that they were thinking about selling it at the West Side Market.
What they shouldn’t do is sell the building, which CSU keeps trying to buy. CSU probably wants to use it for development, or raze it and put in a parking lot. Instead, CSU should buy the land around it and then build a U-shaped graduate student dorm around Becky’s. Students will have a friendly, safe place to go, and Becky’s will do even more business. Maybe CSU can think of the social life of its students and put in a few other bars or restaurants, to help the area thrive and turn it into a social hub – the kind a college close to a major metropolitan area should have. A parking lot, or admin buildings abandoned at night, would only contribute to the decline of the area; it’s already virtually dead as it is, and somehow Becky’s is still doing well. The tented field across the street doesn’t help.
I walked out at 8:40 p.m.; everyone that I’d seen when I came in was still there, at the tables or bars, and it looked like more people had joined them. I drove home, content, and found Frank Hoxha waiting for me at my house; she really likes it when my breath has the primal odor of charred meat and/or alcohol.
The next morning, I shat, and realized that Becky’s had made it glorious. Comparing the two at my age, I still prefer orgasms; however, while my morning excretion wasn't better than those of the previous evening, it was pretty damn satisfying, and that goes for Becky’s itself. We'll see how I feel when I'm sixty.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Counter
12117 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 980-0004
www.thecounterburger.com/studiocity/
By Sandwich Koufax
Writing reviews about sandwiches is proving to be harder than I thought it would be. Spearheading the Los Angeles expansion of The Cleveland Sandwich Board seemed like it was going to be so easy. I eat sandwiches all the time (seriously, all the time). I’ve been quoted as saying that the meaning of life is “the pursuit of a better sandwich” and when Beau told me I’d be able to include Cheeseburgers in my missives to the Midwest it felt like the work was already done. All I had to do was sit down and let the descriptions flow and the greatest city in Ohio would begin to learn about the dining options available to a native San Diegan who has converted to the Los Angeles lifestyle. But then I sat down to write about the burger I ate from The Counter and I was stumped. Is my experience as a diner affected by my perspective as a critic? Can I just say that my burger arrived woefully undercooked or does it need to be directed through some sort of prism? These are the questions I wrestled with while writing my first review.
My burger at The Counter arrived woefully undercooked. I asked for it Medium Rare and received it Rare. Ordinarily I wouldn’t complain, but cooking things quickly seems like it might be a problem at this establishment as my colleague’s grilled cheese sandwich arrived with the cheese un-melted, which basically means he ordered a cheese sandwich. (Side note: my colleague is a “Food, Inc.” disciple and does not eat meat at restaurants. This is a craze currently sweeping Los Angeles; I’d be curious to know if it’s spreading).
The burger is a “hot item” in LA at the moment. It seems like there are two or three “must eat” burger joints that have sprung up recently and The Counter is at the top of a lot of people’s list. The Counter’s gimmick is that when you are seated you are given a checklist of everything you can order on your burger. You select your patty, your bun, your toppings, your sides and everything else you could imagine. All told the number of combinations is impressive. For the unimaginative you may also choose a burger that is pre-organized. As I understand it The Counter got its first big jolt when Oprah ate there (Note: this is a rumor I heard, I will not spend a moment verifying it).
Of the LA “hot burgers” (Note: I’m not quoting anybody) The Counter is my least favorite. Ignoring the aforementioned undercooking, I found the meat had very little flavor and the truth is that given so many options it is incredibly easy to go wrong. Sometimes the freedom of choice leads to you combining sun-dried tomato spread with pickles and croutons. I also found the checklist approach to ordering to be impersonal. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always enjoyed the feedback process while ordering. There is nothing more satisfying than a waitress saying something like, “good choice.” Who is going to take the time to scan a checklist and give someone feedback? Certainly not the waitresses at The Counter.
All that being said, I feel like perhaps the pressure of knowing I was going to be writing about the experience tainted the whole thing. I love cheeseburgers, but throughout my consumption of this particular cheeseburger I found myself planning what I would write about it. I can’t honestly say that my feelings about it weren’t affected by my new approach to burgers in general, which leaves me feeling like my reviews aren’t pure. Perhaps it would be best to eat somewhere and then have someone force a written review of it. We could enlist all of America as food critics much like we’ve enlisted them to Jury Duty. Upon exiting a restaurant there would be a chance, one in a ten million, that you would be randomly selected to critique your experience. We might get some differing opinions, but at least the reactions would be pure and untainted by knowing they must be shared upon completion of the meal.
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 980-0004
www.thecounterburger.com/studiocity/
By Sandwich Koufax
Writing reviews about sandwiches is proving to be harder than I thought it would be. Spearheading the Los Angeles expansion of The Cleveland Sandwich Board seemed like it was going to be so easy. I eat sandwiches all the time (seriously, all the time). I’ve been quoted as saying that the meaning of life is “the pursuit of a better sandwich” and when Beau told me I’d be able to include Cheeseburgers in my missives to the Midwest it felt like the work was already done. All I had to do was sit down and let the descriptions flow and the greatest city in Ohio would begin to learn about the dining options available to a native San Diegan who has converted to the Los Angeles lifestyle. But then I sat down to write about the burger I ate from The Counter and I was stumped. Is my experience as a diner affected by my perspective as a critic? Can I just say that my burger arrived woefully undercooked or does it need to be directed through some sort of prism? These are the questions I wrestled with while writing my first review.
My burger at The Counter arrived woefully undercooked. I asked for it Medium Rare and received it Rare. Ordinarily I wouldn’t complain, but cooking things quickly seems like it might be a problem at this establishment as my colleague’s grilled cheese sandwich arrived with the cheese un-melted, which basically means he ordered a cheese sandwich. (Side note: my colleague is a “Food, Inc.” disciple and does not eat meat at restaurants. This is a craze currently sweeping Los Angeles; I’d be curious to know if it’s spreading).
The burger is a “hot item” in LA at the moment. It seems like there are two or three “must eat” burger joints that have sprung up recently and The Counter is at the top of a lot of people’s list. The Counter’s gimmick is that when you are seated you are given a checklist of everything you can order on your burger. You select your patty, your bun, your toppings, your sides and everything else you could imagine. All told the number of combinations is impressive. For the unimaginative you may also choose a burger that is pre-organized. As I understand it The Counter got its first big jolt when Oprah ate there (Note: this is a rumor I heard, I will not spend a moment verifying it).
Of the LA “hot burgers” (Note: I’m not quoting anybody) The Counter is my least favorite. Ignoring the aforementioned undercooking, I found the meat had very little flavor and the truth is that given so many options it is incredibly easy to go wrong. Sometimes the freedom of choice leads to you combining sun-dried tomato spread with pickles and croutons. I also found the checklist approach to ordering to be impersonal. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always enjoyed the feedback process while ordering. There is nothing more satisfying than a waitress saying something like, “good choice.” Who is going to take the time to scan a checklist and give someone feedback? Certainly not the waitresses at The Counter.
All that being said, I feel like perhaps the pressure of knowing I was going to be writing about the experience tainted the whole thing. I love cheeseburgers, but throughout my consumption of this particular cheeseburger I found myself planning what I would write about it. I can’t honestly say that my feelings about it weren’t affected by my new approach to burgers in general, which leaves me feeling like my reviews aren’t pure. Perhaps it would be best to eat somewhere and then have someone force a written review of it. We could enlist all of America as food critics much like we’ve enlisted them to Jury Duty. Upon exiting a restaurant there would be a chance, one in a ten million, that you would be randomly selected to critique your experience. We might get some differing opinions, but at least the reactions would be pure and untainted by knowing they must be shared upon completion of the meal.
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