Anger Burger

No.  No.  No.

House hunting is one of my least favorite things ever.  I kind of like moving into a new place, of getting everything settled and learning the way the light moves through the windows at dawn, or how the eaves shake in the wind.  I don’t necessarily want to become familiar with the way the carpet squishes in the toilet dungeon – oh I’m sorry, I mean third bedroom with en suite.

We’ll keep looking.  MEANWHILE!  My mom had a birthday.   An important one, but I guess they all are.

There’s no real explanation, but she wasn’t really feeling her birthday this year.  The winter storm we just experienced was costly for her, having had to hire a professional to come clear her driveway so my stepdad could attempt to get to work and help my grandpa get a massive tree cut up and hauled from his driveway.  I really wish we could have surprised her with an Alaskan cruise or a room full of pug puppies, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen that way.  So what’s a family to do?  Eat at La Tarasca, for starters.  And then Harbor City dim sum for seconders.

And for dessert we tried Olympia’s new Jewish deli, Kitzel’s, which is a source of great drama for generally Jew-free Olympia.  Not the Jewish part, the skimpy-but-expensive-portions part.

My salted herring plate was $9 and actually too much food for me to eat.  Well, specifically too much salt.  Which is unusual.  I need salt like most people need water.  But the herring is magnificently, astonishingly salty, which is why there’s a heap of underseasoned potato salad and two pickled tomatoes on the plate.

My mom and The Viking shared a pastrami sandwich, which at another $10 wasn’t exactly a deal, but was enough food for them to share as a modest lunch.

I do have to call total and utter bullshit on them for charging $1.50 for a bagel (okay, I’ll let it slide) but $3.50 for a bagel with cream cheese.  TWO DOLLARS FOR CREAM CHEESE.  And!  Just when I sort of calmed down about that, I noticed that a bagel with butter was $2.75!  A dollar fucking twenty five for a pat of butter!  Oh ho, oh man.  That.  That is… ballsy.  And insulting.  The show-down at Yelp gives a good idea of the dramz, but the one thing that really irked me has been taken down: Kitzel’s gave themselves a five star review and then sassed back to every bad reviewer about how their prices and servings were the same¹ as elsewhere in town.

I like the sass, but I’d like it backed up with some substance. And by substance, I mean that I’d like to not spend four dollars on a bagel and a schmear.

¹ They are actually more expensive, but who cares, facts are for meshuggeners.

I did not have high hopes for this box of chocolates.  They’d bloomed a little from the heat, and were pretty scuffed up.  There was no lid on the chocolates, just a sheet of plastic wrap.  I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m the one that’s genuinely pleased when Mike the Viking buys me boxes of discount Russel Stover chocolates after Valentine’s Day has passed, but I’m pretty realistic about it.  It’s not the good chocolate, it’s the gobbling chocolate.

Hence my surprise that these Pembertons chocolates from Wales are quite a treat.  Any judgement I may have passed on them evaporated as I came to understand that their battered and scruffy demeanor was due entirely to their packing mishap.

The chocolates themselves are very, very high in cocoa and palm fat, which means that they melt into chocolate sauce the second they hit your tongue.  No waxy Easter chocolates here.  The fillings were all unique, and I have to admit that I’ve never seen a more attractive assortment of chocolates in my life.  The box has turned into my packing reward: I finish a box, I get to cut a chocolate in half and share it with Mike.  I should have thought of this motivational system sooner.

I’m going to cut straight to the chase here and tell you that I won a basket of food as a part of a promotional campaign for Wales.  I have since come to two conclusions:

• As a matter of fact, yes I do want to visit Wales
• Wales’ basket-assembling people need some educating on how to pack gift baskets

First I’d like to thank Su-Lin at Tamarind and Thyme for hosting the contest.  I’m not entirely proud that this was my winning entry:

As an American, Wales means one thing: Sean Connery. Except that I just looked it up on Wikipedia and Connery isn’t from Wales at all, and I’ve been telling people that he is for some years now — it is genuinely one of my favorite pointless facts to bandy about at parties. It just won’t be the same when I inform them that smugly that Ioan Gruffudd is from Wales.

Additionally, it appears that what my boyfriend’s Norwegian/Swedish grandmother called “pikelets” are actually Welsh cakes, and that the word “pikelet” is not Norwegian, Swedish or Welsh at all. It is with a deepening sense of dread that I realize I know nothing at all about Wales other than that they seem to enjoy the letter ‘y’ to an exceptional degree.

It isn’t often that I find myself at a total loss regarding an entire country’s cuisine, and yet here I am. The internet tells me of laverbread, which sounds like something I’d be eating alone and cockles, which I’m pretty sure are made up.

There is little in this world that titillates my ocelot more than boxes full of pantry goods, I tell you what.  DHL on the other hand needs to invest in some sign-reading skills, because this looks all the world like a box that was dropped on it’s damn end, am I right?

I opened it up and was greeted with an ominously sour odor.  But more on that in a minute.  First, look at this!  It’s like a wicker Christmas morning.

Need the tiniest spoon in the world?  Just ask, I’ll loan you mine.

So, let’s talk about that odor.  I’ve tried to think of how to word this, and I even temporarily decided I wasn’t going to talk about it because you know, this is a gift, but also I think that Wales is in all likelihood an awesome place.  But I think we’re all adult enough to understand that this basket does not represent the country of Wales.  That being said: this is exactly how it came “packed”.  It was a mix of paper boxed goods and glass jars loose inside a basket with a thin layer of shredded paper on the bottom.  More than one thing was quite effectively smashed to pieces.

Most sadly – and I’m dead serious here, I was actually depressed for the better part of an hour – the three jars of peculiar pickled things – PICKLED THINGS!  – were ruined.  All three jars’ seals were popped, and two of the jars had leaked juice all over the basket.  It was with a deeply heavy heart that I dropped them into the trash, untasted.

It is possible that this was all cleverly set up to lure me to Wales with promises of condiments, and if so, it’s working.  Or as the Welsh call them, cyndymynts.  Meanwhile a lot of tasty bites survived the journey, but more on that later.  I need a moment of silence for the plum conserve, ginger chutney and farmhouse piccalilli.

When we first moved to Los Angeles we fell prey to what I briefly and angrily called “Mexican Fake-Outs.”  They would appear to be Mexican restaurants, and with names like “Los Burritos” you’d be a fool not to expect burritos, right?  But of course not.  Inside you’d find a sort of peculiar, vaguely Mexican breakfast and burger joint.  A diner, sort of.  With some Mexican foods on the menu of course, and staffed by Mexican people, and frequented by Mexican patrons.  But if you actually wanted to eat Mexican food, you would not pick these places.

It wasn’t until Mike the Viking christened them “dinerias” that my brain re-oriented itself.

They are not Mexican restaurants.  They are diners run by Mexicans.  And they are everywhere.  They are more prevalent than 7-11s.  They are the bodegas of Los Angeles, except you can’t buy cigarettes or beer or anything.  But you can get pastrami burritos.  I swear it!  I’ve never ordered one, but almost every dineria has them.  Also what many of them refer to as “California Burritos” which are burritos with french fries inside.  Mike swears by these, but I still have dignity so I haven’t eaten one.

Anyway, the menus are expansive and confusing and it’s often best to order without even looking at them.  Our favorite of the dinerias is Tom’s #7, also referred to by us as “Crash Test Tom’s.”

Their menu says that you can only have breakfast until noon, but we know better.  Last time Mike was there in the afternoon he ordered a burger, turned around to leave and saw a man eating a delicious-looking chicken-fried steak.  Aghast, Mike asked the man “You can order breakfast after noon?!” and the man shrugged and said, “I did, yeah.  I drove all the way¹ from Studio City for their chicken-fried steak!”  Mike says he didn’t even remember how his burger tasted because he was so sad he didn’t know he could get chicken-fried steak.

It may look a little pedestrian, but it’s a solid specimen.  The gravy is not gluey-tasting, but sausagey, peppery and milky.  The eggs were perfectly cooked, the hashbrowns good enough, and the steak itself was very tender.  It had a cornmeal crust on it that I found disappointing because I dislike cornmeal crust, but Mike enjoyed it and that’s really what matters.

His hot sauce application cracks me up.

My avocado burger was excellent.  It’s nothing special, but it was precisely how I like it.  The bun was perfectly toasted, there was just the right amount of sauce and there was at least a half an avocado on the thing.  I have simple wants when it comes to avocado burgers, and that’s it.

It’s a great relief knowing that Tom’s #7 exists.  Anyone who has ever had a hangover knows that nothing cures like having both huevos rancheros and a chocolate milkshake in the same place at the same time.
¹ “All the way” makes us laugh because Studio City is maybe 4 miles away, but Angelinos are funny about distances.

In the land of “authentic Mexican,” sometimes it’s hard to find some solid Whitey Mexican.  Our beloved taco truck shut down and we mourned in the way that Caucasians mourn, which is to tirelessly search the internet for some sort of replacement while spending money on increasingly expensive and crappy Mexican restaurants hoping that one of these goddamn Yelpers isn’t a fucking nutbag.

Seriously, is there no goopy, cheesy Combo Plate mecca to be had in this town?!  And then my friends Zied and Hatherly casually mention: Oh, you’ve never been to Salsa and Beer?

Perhaps foremost, it should be known that Salsa and Beer sets down a plate of fresh, hot tortilla chips and a small bowl of cheese and bean dip, gratis.  The rumor is that they’ll keep refilling it, but our food soon came and we had trouble focusing on anything but our own plates after that.

I haven’t ordered a combination plate of anything since I was a kid, I think, and I’m the sadder for it.  Unable to decide between enchiladas, floutas and chile rellenos, I had all three on the same plate.  When did I start thinking that was a bad idea?  Probably around the same time I decided that I was going to “follow my dreams” and not bother getting a useful college degree.

Mike the Viking ordered some sort of meat pile (hidden below there under some grilled onions and jalapenos) and was pleased as glögg to sit and form himself little steak-bit-burritos for an hour.

My dad, on the other hand, ordered a vegetarian burrito which apparently saddened the cooks sufficiently that they decided to make it the size of a healthy newborn baby.  I’m not sure if the photo below conveys the size of this thing, but the otherwise robust server’s arm shook as he lowered it to the table.

My dad killed half of it before we all decided that eating any more would be flirting with his health insurance’s out-of-state ER visit policy.

There’s really little more I can say about it.  It was precisely what we wanted, and I’m not ashamed to say that what we wanted was a feeding trough of cheese and sauces.  I’m somewhat more ashamed to say that the elastic waistband of my skirt is cutting into my skin a little.

There are some popular and populated bakeries on the main drag in Cannon Beach, but the smart bet is Waves of Grain, home of the One-Eyed Willie (named after exactly what you think).  The idea turned me off entirely: a massive biscuit with a plug of jam and a coating of cinnamon sugar.  That’s a lot of damn carbohydrate to be putting into my piehole first thing in the morning.

I was, of course, totally wrong.  The biscuit is ethereally light, and the exterior is thin and crispy.  The choice of jam “eyes” changes daily, and we chose apple butter.  I thought it’d be plenty to share between four people (with uh, three other large pastries) but it was the first thing to get gobbled down.

Even with the One-Eyed Willie, I retained doubts about the bran muffin and the cinnamon roll, which of course was stupid because they were rad.  The bran muffin killed us; with a chewy, almost crispy espresso glaze, the top tasted like a darkly cooked caramel and the muffin itself was perfectly moist.  The cinnamon roll disappointed my mother and sister for being too sweet, but I liked it just fine and was very impressed with the texture of the roll dough – so often cinnamon rolls are dry, but Waves of Grain’s wasn’t.

(my mom’s contribution to the breakfast was an entire stick of butter there in the foreground)

Lunch was cheese, meat, olive tapanade and a fresh baguette from Waves of Grain.  They don’t make their bread until between 10 and 11 in the morning and will sell out by mid-afternoon, but do as we do and place an order.  They don’t require being pre-paid and it may be the only way you can secure yourself a baguette or seven.

Dinner finds us at Ecola Seafood, where the fish and chips absolutely do not fuck around.  I was deeply distracted by this display case as we entered (there was also a case of gorgeous fresh seafood over to the left, but I couldn’t even process this added attraction), full of shrimp and crab cocktails, smoked mussels, squid salad and multiple varieties of smoked salmon.  But my mother had been here before and kept me on target.

Captain’s Platter.

My sister and her daughter shared a cod and chips dinner.

My mother and I, being Captains, shared this platter of battered oysters, scallops, shrimp, salmon and cod.  And it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.  At one point my sister asked me “Were you hungry?” which is how my family politely says “You’re a terrifying pig monster.”

Walking back to our room, we saw this house:

And I was awash in another fresh wave of Anger Burger.  Why do I not live in this perfect house three blocks away from Ecola Seafood?  Why are all of you not here with me to share in this?  Where is justice?

This is about a restaurant, but it also isn’t.  In fact, it mostly isn’t.

Friends of mine are soon moving to Olympia from Texas, and I’ve been walking around town with fresh eyes these last few days.  I wonder if everyone views their own hometowns with the eye of retrospect.  Was it better 10, 15 years ago?  It would take me weeks to draft only the beginning of a rant about this town’s charms and flaws, but the older I get the more I find myself not caring as strongly as I used to.  It’s just a town.  Full of busybodies.  It is familiar to me and therefore comforting.

An entire microcosm of this was walking to Old School Pizza with my dad on a recent evening.  I’m sure my friend who owns OSP would be horrified to see me tell you that I’ve been eating at Old School since I was 15 years old, but there it is: for 17 years, this pizza has been my pizza of choice.

There’s a lot of legitimate dislike for OSP, and not even because of the pizza.  The restaurant is loud, visually cluttered and occasionally sticky to the touch. The young workers behind the counter are too cool for school and are likely to pop their gum in your face.  Woe is to any poor bastard who needs to use the restroom.

But none of that really matters, because there is pizza.

Not just any pizza.  The pizza that for whatever reason, floats my boat.  I know plenty of locals whose boat is decidedly not floated by this pizza, and I respect that in the distant way of people who fancy themselves fair and thoughful but are actually judgemental.  I’ve had a lot of really excellent pizza in my life, but none of it has filled the space where Oldschool goes.  Nothing else has the hot summer afternoons, the unfulfilled crushes, the woozy bar-breaks, the rainy day depressions, the sudden and total need to leave the shop before your heart breaks under the brittle but relentless weight of all time that has passed.

But, shake it off.  Because there is pizza.

See that cheese pizza up there?  It irritated me because the slice on the right was unusually small and slightly under-cheesed.  And I hesitated at the counter for a moment, holding it, wondering if I should say something before realizing, this is just the way it is.  Just because I revere this as an unmoving monument to my own adolesence doesn’t mean it’s without reproach.  In fact, the opposite may be true: that little runty slice is there to slap some sense into me.  Don’t be such a shmoopy old lady, it says.  Quit it with the rosy watercolor memories.

Because there is pizza!

This is going to be one of those times I ask naysayers to politely step off.  Not that we get naysayers much around here at Anger Burger – or rather, we’re all naysayers, so it doesn’t seem strange. I might ask yaysayers to step off.

I have an opinion about burgers.  And I have an opinion about the ambiance of where a person might procure a burger.  And these two points collide in a sleepy, desaturated Washington State logging town called Shelton.  Internet, I’m telling you about Nita’s.  It’s sort of a secret, but it’s alright if you know.  If Guy Fieri shows up someone is going to get a shiv in the kidney, and by someone I mean Guy.  And not that anyone at Nita’s would do that!  I mean that I’d fly all the way back from Los Angeles to take care of it.

First, you should know that my mom’s mom took her here as a child, and that Nita was cooking the burgers then.  And still is.  In other words, we were trying to politely guess Nita’s age and settled on “around her 70′s.”  From there, you should be able to guess the rest.

Mike the Viking ordered a Coke and was asked, “Small or large?” and he answered, “Small.”  I’m not sure if you can comprehend this, but:

That’s like 6oz of soda.  Which is AWESOME.  I’m totally serious here: do you know how often I want this much soda?  Often.  More than this?  Almost never.  I just can’t even express my joy that basically three big sips of Coca-Cola is an option.

And whenever I order, this is was I am distracted by as I sit at the bar:

Hot chocolate with ice cream?   I want it!  And it never seems like the right time to get it.  Next time for sure.

But we’re talking about burgers.  Mike ordered a Nita’s Special, which is a bacon cheeseburger served with fries – the hilarious thing is that I think this is the only burger that gets served with fries – all others get potato chips.  You can order a side of fries, but their presence next to a burger like this is an anomaly.

Here’s my cheeseburger:

First: Nita cut it in half for me.  Without my asking.  Secondly: slices of pickled beet and an olive as a garnish.  Third: this burger is perfection.  You can see a little better on Mike’s burger, but the patties are hand formed of fairly thinly-patted, but loosely packed ground beef.  The grind is pretty big, it tastes like 80/20 to me, and is seasoned with salt and pepper.  They’re cooked until just cooked through – no pink – but very juicy.  All burgers are served with mayonnaise and “relish” which is red and very finely chopped.  To me it tastes like a sweet relish with a little ketchup in it — I’ve never seen anything like it in a store, but I’m also not sure they make it themselves.

Viewed from afar and with a clinical eye, this burger should not be a contender for anything, in any way.  And yet, and Mike can now swear, there’s a heart-skipping level of magical happening on those old mismatched plates.  The buns are perfectly soft, the beef patties are cooked just so, the condiments are expertly proportioned, and every little old-fashioned courtesy  from the pickled beets to the halved burger is just perfect. Words cannot convey my love for this burger.  I JUST WANT TO GRAB SOMEONE BY THE COLLAR AND SHAKE THEM.

Nita also makes pies every day, and today was raspberry (which I often make at home) and peanut butter (which I have never made).  Peanut butter it is.

What the hey now?  I was expecting a fluffy peanut butter pie, but what was got was a peanut butter pudding pie, and I gotta tell you it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

I mean, it was just vanilla pudding with some peanut butter mixed in, dropped onto a baked pie crust and then topped with some Cool Whip.  Don’t overthink this.  The pie was sweet enough without being cloying, just a little salty, not at all too peanut-buttery (I’m sure that peanut butter monsters would find it insipid) and I can’t hate on whip topping presented in this manner.

If you miss your grandma’s cooking, or if you never knew your grandmother or she was an awful cook, don’t despair.  Nita is your grandma now, and she’s gonna blow you right outta the kitchen and onto the street, dazed, full of affection and joy and wondering where you lost $20.

I’m not the kind of girl that likes old things for old things’ sake.  Vintage hot rods are cool, but I’d rather use a transporter beam.  I find mid-century kitsch to be saccharine and twee.  Homesteading sounds awesome, provided I can retire to a hot shower and some Netflix in the evening.

But I find that as a general rule, if a restaurant has been around for more than two generations, it’s probably got something figured out.

We’ve driven by Chili John’s probably a dozen times, remarking each time that the place had some kind of somethin’ about it, a je ne sais quoi of flaking paint and weird kerning.  And you know: chili!  Mike the Viking famously does not allow anything resembling soup to be in his presence, but since he considers chili to be “meat sauce” we were golden.  And by “golden” I mean he didn’t hack my braid off.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, the place was dead empty, but we were told that lunch and dinner were generally packed.  By the time we left at 4:30 the place was half full.  I’ve no doubt that by 5:30 there was a line to sit.

This is the kind of place where after admitting you’re a noob, the young man working brings you a sample of each flavor of chili to taste.  Now, I have to admit the shame of reading Yelp reviews before going to Chili John’s, something I immediately regretted because you know, haters gonna hate.  Most complaints fell into two categories: price, and oiliness.

I’ll address the price first:   There is no factory.   That tiny kitchen back there?  That’s where one guy – in all likelihood, the young man who is serving you – made the chili from scratch.  The cost of ingredients in some cases has doubled in the last year alone.   Each dollar you spend at Chili John’s is quite likely to not just stay in California, but stay in Burbank.  I bet you money that each of these misers bitching about their $7 bowl of chili is down at the farmer’s market each weekend falling all over themselves to pay triple cost for organic potatoes shipped in from 150 miles away.  So, you know, they can fuck off.

Which leaves a semi-legitimate complaint: oiliness.  The chili is unabashedly floating in oil, and folks working at Chili John’s will happily and quickly explain to you why it’s so oily.  It’s because they add leaf lard, that gorgeous, flavorful, clean clear lard that surrounds the kidneys and makes the best flaky pie crust in all the lands.  It carries flavor.  It’s healthier than butter, if you want to know, and while not as good for you as a glug of olive oil, no one ever said the chili was health food.  So once again: to the Yelper that whined about spooning out a giant puddle of oil onto a plate in an attempt to eat around it: please just go to Chipotle.  Or Panera, if the presence of salsa frightens you.

Mike ordered half-and-half spicy chicken and spicy beef chili over spaghetti, and quietly and steadily polished it off.  This is the Viking equivalent of two thumbs up.

I ordered a half-and-half chili dog, a delightful absurdity with a bun that soon disappears under the pressure of so much chili, and a very sturdy, rather large hot dog.  I switched back and forth between the chicken and beef sides, each declaring “I like the chicken the best,” and then,  “Wait no – I like the beef the best.”  Eventually there were no more sides to switch between.

Just as I unbuttoned my jeans to make room for the last few bites, the guy working asked if we maybe wanted a slice of lemon or pineapple pie?

Pineapple pie?  Uh.  Yes?

I really can’t even begin to describe this to you other than so say: it’s like an old-fashioned fruit and cream salad?  There’s no crust that I could detect, and the pie itself is definitely a creamy, custardy base.  It’s topped with what seemed to be real whipped cream, though to be honest at that point I was sort of half-conscious.  And on top of that?  Graham crumbs.  But here’s the strangest part: the pineapple custard was crunchy.  Not the fibrous texture you’d expect from canned pineapple, but downright crunchiness.  The Viking nailed it when he whispered to me “Is it frozen?”  I have no idea!  It may have been partially frozen, it may not have been.  All I know is that the “crust” was soft, the “filling” was crunchy, and the whole thing was only lightly sweet.  Despite being painfully full, I had to stop myself from pressing my face straight into the pie, open-mouthed.

I’m going to go take a nap now.

I’ll make this short because I’m sure no one wants to read about a shitty diner.

The first fail is admittedly nit-pickety and I’m not proud of it, but I’m always disappointed to see a side of some kind of dipping sauce come out in a plastic container.  Disposable containers are for take-out.

The Viking’s chicken-fried steak was borderline inedible.  I mean, it was alright I guess.  But with chicken-fried steak I feel like it’s gotta be great and anything else is borderline inedible.  Clearly I’m going to have to make some from scratch this week to wash this one out of our memories.  But honestly: if you’re going to be frying up a steak that was obviously previously frozen, maybe put in some effort to have the gravy on top not be a congealed cap of glue before it even gets to the table?  Yes?  No?

And lastly and worstly, one of the worst milkshakes I’ve ever had.  And by “had” I mean took one sip of and then pushed aside.  It was one of the few times in my life I’ve wondered if I should send something back to the kitchen.  In this instance, I knew if I said something along the lines of “This is basically a big glass full of luke-warm Carnation Instant Breakfast and I don’t want it,” then the waitress would offer to make another one, and I’d have to say “No thanks, I’m not crazy about spitshakes, either.”

Also there was no cherry.

The Viking and I really wanted to find a good greasy spoon – I’m not saying a fancy cafe here, I’m saying a reliable diner where food isn’t fried from frozen and then kept under a hotlamp (including the milkshakes).  Los Angeles is lousy with diners, but so far in the Valley it appears that Bob’s Big Boy is the place to beat.