Category: Eats

Bet you can’t eat just one. Or maybe you’re supposed to smoke ’em.

Sacrificial offering to the pizza oven god.

Train apparently delivering more goodies within a candy store, downtown Nashville. Enough to get sick on.

Lost to the world at The Shake Shack, Crystal Cove, CA.

Jackie, incognito NCIS, at Starbucks.

The passing of Apple founder and genius Steve Jobs leaves a cavernous hole in the unrelenting technological race to be the First and the Best. Pundits question whether Apple will be able to keep cranking out cutting edge creations that others seem only capable of feeble imitation. Time will tell.

Well-deserved accolades honoring Steve Jobs will go on and on.

The rest of us are not Steve Jobs. So how can we leave our own small mark on our world?

Each time I hike from Santa Monica to Venice Beach, I pass the very first Hot Dog on a Stick stand. In 1946, Dave Barham bought the concession stand for $400, money he borrowed from his older brother. He named his new enterprise Party Puffs. Having discovered there were no chain store distributors for corn dogs, he developed the now-famous corn dog, which could easily be eaten while walking the beach. He renamed his enterprise Hot Dog on a Stick around 1960. The unmistakable waitress costumes were designed to invoke familiarity; customers perceived a familiar person each time they were waited on. Their tall caps were meant to suggest Las Vegas showgirls. To push the scale further, his servers stood behind the counter on platforms to appear even taller. Barham died in 1991, at the age of 77, and Fredrica Thode succeeded him as the corporation’s president. Barham had hired her as a receptionist in 1980. Today, the company is an employee-owned corporation with more than 100 locations.

Barham’s governing principle was keeping things simple and making it all entertaining.

A corn dog is no Apple computer. And Dave Barham is no Steve Jobs. But keeping it simple and entertaining are values they both promoted.

When our world seems to become more complex and less fun, there’s probably a lesson there for each of us.

Ha! It’s county fair time again! Time to discover who won this year’s gooseberry jelly first prize! And we’re awestruck by the winner of the formal dining table decor competition: a country music-themed homage featuring a look-alike Brad Paisley hat for the centerpiece, Roy Rogers-inspired silver bullet salt and pepper shakers, and decorative accents honoring Dolly Parton.

We eagerly launch ourselves into the fair’s enormous display halls, searching out our favorite gadgets, hawked by gung-ho purveyors demanding to know how we survive without their trinkets, which, by the way, are seriously discounted–today only–at a Special Fair Price Reduction. How could we fail to take home the orange sponge thing that, with one magic swipe, can absorb a baby elephant’s entire trunkful of water? Or maybe we will choose to purchase one of the countless competing sets of hi-tech cookware, compellingly presented by the non-stick humor and extravagant propaganda of the frying pan merchants—these futuristic copper-cored titanium-clad industrial-strength pots and skillets will present a lifetime of culinary treasures!

Another prime reason for a trip to the fair is the excuse to dump our allegiances to healthy fruits and veggies, long-extinct in this environment. Onward, to sample the fair’s gastronomical fares! We unceremoniously discard restraint, loosen our belts by several notches to accommodate the impending added girth, and the maniacal self-indulgent search for serious fair nosh begins.

The grub is easy to come by. A mound of barbecued tri-tip is squeezed between oversized buns and lathered in sauce. The ensuing energetic consumption sends warm brown goo splashing noses, dripping down chins and sloshing in pools on shirts and shorts. The gigantic Texas Turkey Legs appear large enough to have belonged to a variety of miniature dinosaurs. Oversize hot dogs are smothered in cheese, lathered with chili and accompanied by a combo order of cheese fries and onion rings. The setting is rife for virtual—or actual—heart attacks.

How to choose what to eat? Each would be a perfect choice!

Then our eyes fall onto the Totally Fried vendor’s cart. Totally Fried! What a delight! Our salivary glands cramp at the notion of Totally Fried Chicken Sandwiches accompanied by Totally Fried Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Totally Fried Klondike ice cream bars, Totally Fried Kool-Aid, Totally Fried frog legs, Totally Fried avocados, Totally Fried caramel apples, Totally Fried FryBQ ribs, and Totally Fried Twinkies. How to choose among such treats?

Still, I was mildly troubled by the Totally Fried offerings. Where was the Totally Fried butter I had anticipating sliding down my gullet? Imagine–a butter stick, perfectly fried in, what else—butter—then rolled in cinnamon to create that perfect treat, comprised of 100% saturated fat—what a delight!

There’s time to think over our choices, as the distinct smell of an ill-maintained barnyard drifts our way, demanding our attention. And we’re off! Who could miss the Fairview Farms domestic animal display area, to view the endless milking of bovines, and the eternally cud-chomping goats with staring and unfocused geometrically-challenged pupils.

Where else is there the opportunity to see—and smell—those gargantuan hogs, rubbery snouts buried and rooting in mud, eagerly gorging themselves on anything that will fit into their gaping mouths! As an added bonus, it’s hard to believe our good fortune—last year’s blue ribbon winning hog, “Mighty Mickey,” makes a return showing, this year appearing as the pure-pork pepperoni featured atop Luigi’s Flying Pizza! We hurry over to sample him, to see if he serves up this year on the plate as proudly as he paraded last year on the hoof. Thumbs up. He tastes better than he ever smelled.

After eventually exiting the fair, our waddle to the car in bloated, cholesterol-charged, sweat-drenched bodies reminds us of one obvious fact.

We ourselves are now, unmistakably, Totally Fried. But at least we have a whole year to purge the lard from our bodies and repent from our recalcitrant ways before we try it all again.

When I arrived home from vacation, I discovered two tiny frogs that had glued themselves to the two-step stair I had loaded into the camper, providing them free rides all the way from the campground. They now reside somewhere in my un-mowed grass.

The frogs had stowed away just outside of my normal, non-froggy field of vision, or I would never have given them this free ride, considering the possible hazards to their health.

How much else lies just outside the field of my usual vision? If I tilt my vision by just a hair, sort of cockeyed, there’s no telling everything that I would see.

It’s all a matter the angle of our sight – the tilt of our vision. The gift of Vision is the ability to see cockeyed.

A cockeyed restaurateur with a zany business plan drew my attention. A store had fallen victim to the stressed economy. In its place, a restaurant emerged. Where goods once stood on display in the curved front display windows, patrons of the store-turned-coffee shop now sipped mochas, lounging within their wrap-around glassed-in dining area with a prime view of the street-side happenings.

The cockeyed entrepreneur wasn’t done yet. Tables for two take up a lot of real estate on an outside patio; instead, why not use long, narrow ironing boards with stools? So he did. Folks drifting in to dawdle over coffee need something to read. So he furnished them shelf-fuls of hardcover books tucked in each wall of the shop; there’s always something new to fuel customer imaginations.

A growling stomach demands that a decision be made. Whether to have the “Thoreau” sandwich, featuring hummus, pepper jack cheese and cucumber? Or to indulge with the “Albert Camus” seared tuna, hardboiled egg and new potatoes? It’s a much more refined and cockeyed approach than saying, “I’ll have your Number Three, please.”

Serving lattés in wrap-around display windows and noticing hitchhiking frogs were both outside of my view. Time to tilt the head and enjoy the Cockeyed Vision.

There’s an awkward, skinny breakfast eatery called Louisa’s Place in San Luis Obispo. The restaurant seats 50 people. Like tropical fish in an aquarium, uniformed women with splashy makeup bob to and fro within the waitress station service island, which bisects the length of this long and narrow eating place. If the cheap dishware clinked less loudly, every waitress would be within easy hollering distance from any table.

The diner does one thing exceptionally well: Louisa’s Place does breakfasts. Louisa’s gastronomical evolution has produced a singularly focused harmony of eggs, bacon, biscuits, pancakes and potatoes that has won the county’s “Best Breakfast” award for three years running.

An astonishing 27 varieties of omelets crowd the menu. Conscience-searing breakfasts are so cholesterol-laden that the blood thickens whenever a waitress passes by. The stomach, fearful of being conquered by the massive portions, discharges hydrochloric acid. The heart churns into overdrive, pumping liters of blood while it can still flow. Intestines groan and belch, attempting to advance their contents before the inevitable caloric onslaught. But the nose and tongue hold the trump cards here, silencing all cautions that other organs attempt to send to the brain.

Louisa’s Place successfully maneuvers to fill a niche market that separates it from its rivals. It’s a thin slice. Competitors are on nearly every corner.

So why does Louisa’s flourish? Perhaps it’s the aquarium-like waitress station, unlike any other restaurant layout. Maybe it’s the targeted menu that rewards the desire in each of us to indulgently break our sleep-induced fast after a good night’s slumber.

There are many things that Louisa’s place is not. But that’s what makes it so very good at what it is.

It’s all in discovering and knowing the niche, the microscopic differential that separates one niche from another.

The niche is the thing. A good niche, well done, is a perfect fit.

Succeeding in our life’s journey is all about finding our own niche, discovering the appropriate fit for our nuances, traits, and the singular quirks that will turn us, uniquely and successfully, into our own version of Louisa’s Place: a place unlike any other, where friends come, enjoy camaraderie, and leave, happy to have indulged. And they’ll be back.

Who could ask for more?