Category Archives: Eats

Pizza Buona

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Just saw that Pizza Buona is looking to move. Priced out by rising rent. Sadly inevitable, though it suddenly reminded me of this, probably the closest I ever came to a restaurant review. It wanders off in a series of tangents–music, scenery, a party–and barely mentions the food, which is why I’m me and Jonathan Gold is Jonathan Gold, not to mention better paid. That being said, I did see him play cello in a heavy metal band. But I digress.

So we went to Pizza Buona at Alvarado and Sunset yesterday, per Justin Burrill’s and Lee Joseph’s recommendation. The place is a lot less red than I remembered. She ordered a large Special, crispy, which was perfect. The jukebox in the joint was gloriously unhip. Moon River is so unhip it’s not even ironic. Playing the Andy Williams version might be ironic, but this was the straight Mancini. They had Baby Elephant Walk on there too but I was afraid some hipster might walk in and it would show up on his next album. I dig unhip. There’s nothing unhip in Silver Lake anymore but it’s nice to see pockets remain in Echo Park. Got me a salad and I’d have shown you a picture but I hate it when people take pictures of their food. They invent digital technology and what do you all do with it? Take pictures of cats and salads. In the Polaroid days we didn’t waste precious film on pictures of cats or salads. Well cats, maybe. But not salads. Or cats and salads together.

OK, salad was good, beer was cold (Moretti), meatballs were good (we got meatballs), pizza was Jersey perfect. The vibe was good too (if not as red as it should have been) and the Burrito King across the street looked good. Never eaten there, but it looked good because it’s still there. That corner is pretty much unchanged since the days when Raymond Chandler could have mentioned it  but never did. You used to be able to get brain burritos across the street at the carwash. Wash your car and eat a brain burrito. What is sesos a lady asked. Brains, the guy behind the counter said. Cow brains, I added helpfully. She changed her mind and walked off, suddenly unhungry. I shrugged. The guy laughed. It was a tough town then, full of drive-bys and crack and brains in your burrito. Jonathan Gold probably ate there. Had the brain burrito. Those Pulitzers don’t come easy.

One time a friend showed up at our house for a party with a dozen vegetarian bean burritos from Burrito King and a bottle of Cisco. Cisco looks like Orange Hi-C with a mean hangover. He spent the party out on the steps roaring drunk and digesting loudly. You can only hear a slurred Cisco Kid so many times before it loses its funny edge. The Panther showed up and joined him. They ate vegetarian bean burritos and passed the bottle back and forth and belched front and back. They sang and laughed and made loud jokes without punchlines. They became the best friends a man ever had until the bottle was empty. I’m sure neither remember this now, but I remembered while gazing out the window across Sunset Blvd. We waited for our pizza and I put quarters in the jukebox and listened to Enrico Caruso sing Vesti La Giubba from Pagliacci. He recorded that in 1907. The year before he’d been in San Francisco when the earthquake hit. The city fell down all around him and he didn’t like that one bit. But you can’t tell that hearing this. So I played it again, and the pizza came, and it looked beautiful and smelled delicious and I listened to Caruso in rapt silence. What’s he singing about my wife asked. He’s a clown, he tried to kill his wife and her lover, I think. Were they clowns too? Yes, I said, they were all clowns. Sounds sad for clowns. Yeah, it’s a tragedy. She handed me a slice of the pizza, the music swelled, and we ate in silence, listening.

Caruso

Here’s that same 1907 Recording of Enrico Caruso performing “Vesti la Giubba” from Pagliacci. If you don’t know it by name you’ll recognize the tune after a minute and a half, trust me.

Jay’s Jayburger

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Jay’s, man, how could I forget? It was at Virgil and Santa Monica, across the street from the 7-11 where you’d see crack sold in the open out front (the 7-11 nearby at Normandie and Sunset had ass sold in the open out front), and then on the other corner back a bit was the Garage, the club of the moment. Used to be a bar for the LACC profs, the name of which escapes me, and then a bathhouse called the Bunkhouse–you could still see where the baths had been–but all those guys died and it eventually became a rock’n’roll bar. There’d always be some shit band on the bill somewhere and while they were playing me and the Pope (aka Greg, but known to all as the Pope) would suddenly get the munchies and split across the street for the eats. I always got a burger and two milks, which the Pope found funny. (Milk? Really? A big guy like you?) He got two burgers and a soda. If Fyl was there she got her burger without chile, but everyone else got the chile. Better than Tommy’s, we’d say. Everybody said that. Jonathan Gold said that. It was an old school burger joint with seats on the outside and there was a bit of a gang war going on in the neighborhood and at least once the place was swept with bullets, so you kept an eye out for slow moving cars full of evil types. But then you did that anywhere in LA back then, it was Murder City USA for a few years. Hard to imagine that now.

It’s also hard to imagine a Jay’s now…hamburgers are hip things, upscale, odd.  And the neighborhood is too, mostly. Hard to gangbang when all your neighbors are lawyers and actresses. Sometimes the neighborhood is so safe I feel alienated. I’m not, really, but nostalgia softens edges and bodies in the street become less dead and more just a thing blocking your way to the Coconut Teaszer. (Though it’s harder to forget the hot air leaking out of the bullet hole in the skull into the chilly night air.) But that was in Hollywood, and Jay’s was in Virgil Village, or used to be, it’s all Silver Lake now. Not even Silverlake, but Silver Lake. Two words, as if that upper case L gave it class. I suppose it does, if that’s your thing.

Jay’s went under a long time ago, way back before the recession, when the landlord had some demented idea for a ghastly mini mall. Ugly thing it is, with what used to be Jay’s now a taqueria. The 7-11 is nice now, clean, crack free. The Garage is now a way hip bar the name of which escapes me…sometimes you’ll see nice young people in line outside, waiting to get in. Kids are so nice anymore, so polite. They just had their burger–without chile, sometimes without even meat–at Umami over on Sunset, which is fine. A nice place, tasty, but no Jay’s Jayburger, chile squeezing out from under the bun, a couple hotter than hell peppers, and a milk to settle it all down with. I drive home now late from some jazz spot and sit inevitably at the light there at Virgil and Santa Monica and remember the taste of the burger, the tough guy talk, the laughs, the music loud as hell at the Garage. Scenes are so alive at one point, so vital, it’s like they’ll never end. But they do, with a whimper, never a bang, like they never were. It’s always been like that, and always will be. When all us old geezers gather round some cheap beer we tell tales of those times, a lot of them funny, some even true. None of them important, really, but we tell them anyway, and sometimes I write them down, like this, which makes them history, sort of. I never tell anyone that I’ve written them down, though. Because memories are fun, but being history hurts.

Atomic Cafe

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Found this tucked away in the drafts folder, not sure how old it is. Someone told me the corner is now a hole with a subway in it. I remember the city was trying to sell the building for a dollar. All you had to do was move it. Maybe they were asking too much. 

That Senor Fish on the corner used to be the Atomic Cafe. Had dinner there with Darby Crash. We’d been next door at the Brave Dog. Probably summer of 1980. Darby had the wiener gotcha, a dude in a blue mohawk eating wiener gotcha. My wife got fried chicken. Banquet. I watched the cook open the box. The service was awful, food worse, it was wonderful. Wouldn’t last a week now. Hipsters want only the best food. Jonathan Gold made it impossible for any more Atomic Cafes. No more wiener gotcha. Now it’s overpriced ethno-hipster slop from food trucks. Oh well.

Atomic Cafe

Atomic Café in the daylight. 1980’s. The Brave Dog was this side of the Imports place.