(Click here for Part I, or continue reading)

It’s a recurring fantasy of mine–one that pops into my head every time I endure a restaurant’s bad food, clueless service, or incompetent management–that Gordon Ramsay is eating at the table with me. How sweet it would be to have the chef who picks apart failing kitchens up and down the whole of Britain on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares unleash his blunt, unnerving and devastatingly accurate appraisals on some of Los Angeles’ more egregious offenders. The morons at Memphis would never know what hit them. The children playing “restaurant” over at Lincoln would cry in their smoked mac & cheese. And the douche bags at Geisha House wouldn’t hear a word because the DJ’s phat beats have made them oblivious to any criticism of their tasteless, gummy food.

If Ramsay mouthed off to Sang Yoon, the surly chef-owner of Father’s Office in Santa Monica, Sang would no doubt want to smack the Scotsman in the head with a ketchup bottle. Unfortunately, because of Sang’s tyrannical barring of all condiments from his restaurant, he’d find himself empty-handed. (In a street fight, the smart money would be on Ramsay anyway.)

Asking myself, “What would Gordon say about this place?” has proved to be an illuminating exercise. I can almost hear his voice reprimanding an indifferent manager or frantic chef:

“Get your starters out in ten minutes.”

“Give customers a good, inexpensive lunch”–one that showcases a few highlights from the dinner menu–”and they’ll come back for dinner.”

Sound advice. Anyone who has seen even a few episodes of Kitchen Nightmares picks up a couple of Ramsay’s main bullet points because so many of the kitchens he investigates suffer from identical problems. The restaurants of Los Angeles are no different. We have chefs who have lost control of their kitchens and chefs who never learned to cook. We have owners who hate their staff and managers who hate people. We have cooks who are drunk, waiters who steal and bartenders who want to be anywhere else but behind a bar. So in the interest of promoting the idea that Los Angeles has finally earned the right to be called “A great restaurant town,” I’ve served up a few of the rules laid out by Ramsay and pointed them at restaurants that should take heed.

Simplify the menu. Simplify the dishes. The menu is almost always the first problem that Ramsay identifies in a struggling restaurant. Too often a kitchen simply can’t keep up with the demands of preparing a menu that is too intricate and too extensive. He gets them to trim their daring, multi-page menus to a single sheet. Better to do a few things very well than a bunch of things badly. As for local places that should pay attention, Señor Fred’s 31-page, leather-bound, 3-ring binder looks like something found in a law library rather than a Mexican restaurant. Some streamlining is in order. Lose the blackened salmon, forget the shrimp cocktail shooters and work on perfecting your crab enchiladas.

But the biggest perpetrator of the over-ambitious menu (aside from the comically vast offerings of Jerry’s Deli) has got to be Boneyard Bistro in Sherman Oaks. Their challenging menu, coupled with their stunning inability to execute it, led to a thorough thrashing months ago on this website. Chef/co-owner Aaron Robins trained under top chefs Albert Tordjman, Arnold Wong and Charlie Trotter. About half the menu reflects this pedigree, featuring inventive small plates like wok-seared fiddlehead ferns and pork dumplings in beurre blanc sauce. The other half is dedicated to Robins’ passion: traditional barbeque. Sound incongruous? Well, nothing puts me in the mood for a rack of babyback ribs like some Thai-spiced calamari or herb goat cheese crostini. It’s a bunch of busy silliness. I haven’t mustered the courage–or the interest–to go back, but a check of their website shows a menu that has not contracted, but grown, now encompassing an array of artisan cheeses. The ambition of the menu alone is not a problem. Nor is Robins’ ability to cook it. The problem was that when I ate there, chef Robins was more interested in glad-handing customers and basking in the front of house than in the preparation and assembly of his fussy dishes. That task was left to the restaurant’s anonymous cooks, who clearly weren’t up to it. As Gordon would put it…

A chef belongs in the kitchen. A maître d’ belongs in the dining room. One has no business in the other’s domain during service. There’s plenty of time to compare notes and discuss what went wrong after the final dish has been served and the last bill has been paid. Had chef Robins been a little more concerned with the food coming out his kitchen, I might not have been served a rancid helping of baked beans. Ramsay runs a tight kitchen in his own restaurants. He is addressed as “chef.” All the cooks under him know what the food is supposed to look, taste and smell like. In one sagging kitchen on Kitchen Nightmares, he took Polaroids of the dishes when they were finally made properly and posted them for the staff to use as a guide. Photographs of food may look tacky on a menu, but serve an invaluable function on the walls of a kitchen.

This goes hand in hand with another rule that seems obvious, but is woefully neglected: Taste your food. Often. That’s right, stick a spoon in there and check that what you are making tastes (A) good; and (B) like it’s supposed to. In one of the greatest moments of Kitchen Nightmares, a young chef in Yorkshire made his signature dish for Gordon without noticing that the scallops had gone off. The result sent Ramsay vomiting out the back door. The chef confessed that he almost never tastes his food. Sadly, he is not alone. It goes without saying that no one in the kitchen bothered to taste the beans I had at Boneyard. That privilege was left for me alone.

It’s usually around this point on the program that Gordon is forced to bust out a cooking lesson. For the Yorkshire restaurant, that meant having the chef and second chef each make a plain omelet. While the assistant’s attempt resembled an omelet, the head chef’s looked as if an eight-year-old had tried to surprise mom with breakfast in bed. Before conning your way into a head chef position, know how to cook. It seems a reasonable requirement for handling a kitchen. Also, don’t run before you can walk. This kid was gunning straight for elegant and sophisticated creations without knowing the basics, like how to make a roux. Or scramble an egg. (Note: In a terrible act of commerce, the omelet incident was edited out of the American broadcast. I watched the show in its original form while visiting in England.)

The young chef also committed a horrible misjudgment of his target market. The restaurant was in Silsden, West Yorkshire–a blue collar town, filled with hungry appetites for simple well-prepared fare, not for the likes of his signature dish: scallops on black pudding with hollandaise sauce and Parma ham, which I must point out, sounds fucking awful. Know your customers. Know if you are in a place where value is prized over sophistication, or risk being branded an over-priced twat. For years, this was usually the case in the San Fernando Valley. The most interesting chefs in Los Angeles opted for West Hollywood, Beverly Hills or Santa Monica. To open a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, even in Studio City or Sherman Oaks, was to resign a business to a fate of large portions, unchallenging menu items, and dependency on the 5 P.M. blue-hair crowd or the 6:30 screaming children brigade as a customer base. If you stayed open past 9 on a weeknight it was either a miracle or because some hungry people had gotten lost on their way home from Magic Mountain.

Things have changed for the better, but there is still much room for improvement. The stretch of valley from Studio City to Tarzana is ready, willing and eager to support many more top-quality restaurants than are currently on offer. And Stanley’s, Café Bizzou, La Frite and Mistral don’t count. They’re still content with the blue-hairs, which is a pity, because revamping the menus, hiring new chefs and overhauling their images could bring in a much more lucrative batch of discerning locals.

On the matter of image, Ramsay is unequivocal: keep your restaurant, your kitchen and yourself clean. This isn’t just a health issue. A clean environment removes distraction, increases working space and demonstrates a sense of pride. From pride comes confidence and confidence, in turn, breeds respect. A chef with soiled whites or dirty fingernails is about as reassuring as a dentist with blood on her shirt. Many restaurants on Ramsay’s show start their big turnaround with a much needed top-to-bottom scrub-down and a new coat of paint–a cheap and amazingly effective solution to help set things right. This, of course, is after he’s forced them to purge their refrigerators of the slime and fuzz-coated mysteries that the staff thought they could ignore into oblivion.

Fans of a drunken, late night slice from Damiano’s on Fairfax should be grateful the lights are kept so low. I once ate there when they had inexplicably turned the lights up bright. The memory of the splattered walls and creepy-crawly floor is not an easy one to shake. You know how the stunning detail of hi-def cameras accentuates the low-budget production values of a Telemundo sit-com set or the frightening plastic surgeries of certain thrifty celebrities? Well, many restaurants hope the obfuscation of dim lighting, screens and planters deflects roaming eyes from a multitude of sanitary shortcomings.

Get rid of dead weight. A chef is the most important employee, but the rest of the staff can make or break a restaurant. Kitchen Nightmares gives the slackers and malcontents nowhere to hide. The appalling conditions of the chosen restaurant are achingly clear in the first two minutes. Gordon wastes no time in corralling the entire staff and pointing out the direness of the situation. Inevitably, Ramsay is the only person taking things seriously from the start. The first person to see the light is usually the owner, because that’s who stands to lose not just his business, but often his house, car and credit rating as well. The rest of the staff starts to come around in an order based directly on their dedication, ability and respect for the business. The ones still giggling, or smirking or rolling their eyes as the chef begins to regain his authority–well, there’s your dead weight.

On a similar note, it is patently proved on the show that friends, family members, and former lovers make terrible employees. Boyfriends, girlfriends and best mates are even worse. It’s hard to crack heads and bust ass with people you have to see outside of work. A restaurant must have authority. It must have someone firmly in charge. If your flight-attendant girlfriend designed the décor, and your restaurant now looks like one of the Embassy Suites coffee shops she frequents while criss-crossing the nation, then it’s up to you to do something about it, even if it hurts her feelings. Losing your business hurts a lot more.

The L.A. Times printed a story in the Food section recently spotlighting a few husband-wife teams that are running some hot restaurants right now. Almost without exception, those partnerships (Hatfield’s, Fraîche, Marché Modern) involved the husband as head chef and the wife as pastry chef. This goes against the old European model of husband in the kitchen and wife running front of house. But the chefs in the Times piece share a crucial distinction from the ones featured on Ramsay’s show–they all have their shit together. It makes a difference.

When a restaurant is failing, the owners–who are not always the greatest business people–get a call from the accountant saying things are critical. The accountant’s suggestion, which desperate owners are too timid to refute, is to raise prices. Unfortunately, raising prices doesn’t fix problems, it only pisses off your few remaining customers, because they’re paying top-tier prices for a subpar experience. Another way Ramsay suggests cutting overhead is to forget frozen and buy fresh. Fresh is cheaper anyway. Many restaurants resort to outsourcing food in order to compensate for a struggling kitchen–pre-made ravioli, store-bought cakes, even frozen bread. But it is so much cheaper to buy fresh produce and large, inexpensive cuts of meats–like a gorgeous ham–that can yield dozens of portions and a variety of menu options. This doesn’t substitute for steaks and lamb chops, but it takes some of the pressure off the kitchen.

Last plate goes out like the first, and vice versa. And if the chef starts to find her legs again and reasserts control of her kitchen, she won’t want the crutch of those frozen ingredients anymore. She’ll learn that the more care and effort that goes into food, the more it hurts when it goes wrong.

Finally, and although he’s never said it exactly, don’t open a restaurant that looks like this:

…but considering he’s chastised restaurants that look like tombs, dry cleaners, youth hostels and porn theaters, I don’t think Gordon would disagree.

* “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares”, BBC America, Thursdays 8pm E.D.T. New season starts in July. — Fox network has announced they’ll be screwing up an American version starting in the fall.

———-
Note: The eyesore in the photo is Romanov Steakhouse and not, as I thought during its recent construction, a full-service carwash/rug bazaar. It is also the subject of an upcoming story on The Wreckoning. Stay tuned…

The French chef was lying. Everyone watching at home could see that. All of the kitchen employees, milling about with eyes cast downward, knew it too. It wasn’t just that the Frenchman, the head chef of a dismal, failing restaurant in Essex, England, was lying on national television–which was pathetic enough–it was that he was lying to his boss, which is unconscionable. The restaurant’s owner, a Mexican-born entrepreneur, had his doubts. He was reasonably sure that the trays of potatoes laid out before him had been cooked in the deep fryer, rather than oven-roasted as earlier agreed upon. Although the evidence said otherwise, the owner was inclined to take his most valued employee at his word. Unfortunately for the Frenchman, there was another man standing next to his boss, a real chef–and not just any chef, the most famous chef in England–in his trademark short-sleeved whites. And he was having none of it. Gordon Ramsay picked up one of the shriveled, dehydrated, deep-fried nuggets and summed up the scene with his typical sailor-mouthed sagacity.

“You’re talking to a professional chef, big boy. And as long as I’ve got a hole in my butt, those fucking potatoes have been in the deep-fat fryer. Don’t fucking lie.” The Frenchman’s lame but honest confession was soon to follow.

There is only one food-related show that I have my DVR combing the farthest reaches of basic cable to locate. And it’s the only show on television that can regularly bring me to tears. It is a British import called Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares that, until recently, BBC America had banished to an inexplicable 5:00 A.M. timeslot on Saturday mornings.

To Americans who recognize the name, Gordon Ramsay is the shouting, belligerent tyrant from Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen. To New Yorkers and restaurant junkies, he is the latest celebrity chef to open a Manhattan eatery (to puzzlingly mixed reviews). To the British, he is a bona fide superstar, ubiquitous on tabloid covers, cookbooks, and multiple TV shows.

He is a former professional footballer (a fact no writer, including this one, seems capable of leaving unmentioned) whose blunt, raw demeanor makes him perfect for reality television, or at least perfect for the Fox network. But anyone who has seen Hell’s Kitchen has seen only the abusive, insulting, over-the-top Gordon. It’s as if you can hear the Fox executives telling him to “Amp up the Gordon” until he is a raging parody of himself in the same way that The Donald’s persona on The Apprentice was a crotchety, combed over, catch-phrase spewing caricature of the real Trump. And to anyone who thinks that icy school-matron, Anne Robinson, of The Weakest Link acts like that when she’s kicking back at home, I have some exciting real estate opportunities in Florida I’d like to talk to you about.

To clarify the football thing–Ramsay showed promise as a junior and, in his teens, kicked around the lower squads of the Glasgow Rangers. A leg injury ended Ramsay’s soccer career when he was sixteen. Since then, he’s dedicated himself to the culinary world full-time. Ramsay’s credentials speak for themselves. Only in his early forties, his family of London restaurants, anchored by the flagship Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s Hotel (where Gordon is still the head chef), has garnered an amazing seven Michelin stars.

The reason is simple. He knows how to run a kitchen, and therefore knows how to run a restaurant, and therefore, a business. The incompetence, laziness, disrespect and poor communication that get him so riled up on both TV programs have long been eradicated in Ramsay’s kitchens. Troublemakers don’t last long enough to mutter more than a few surly words on their way out the door.

But Kitchen Nightmares takes Gordon out of his own well run, successful restaurant and drops him into businesses that are on the verge of collapse. Indeed, the restaurants he visits are in dire straits. Invariably, they are at their wits’ end, desperate to try anything that will save them from shuttering, including letting the country’s top chef publicly inspect their nasty underbellies. The pride-swallowing that transpires on RKN is staggering and inevitable, even if Ramsay has to force it down their throats with handfuls of their own dreadful croque monsieur. The truth is, owners apply to have their restaurants featured on the show. They’ll submit to a smack-down from a master, even on television, if it means avoiding bankruptcy and realizing a dream of owning a restaurant.

Dreamers. That’s how restaurant owners start. By the time Ramsay gets to them, they have segued from the world of pragmatists to that of survivalists. This is rock bottom. Ramsay is the intervention.

The format of the show is simple and winning. Every week, Ramsay visits a new restaurant that is on the brink of failure. Normally we find him striding through the freezing streets of Blackpool or Essex or Glasgow recounting to the camera a little backstory of the restaurant he is about to enter. The situation is always critical. Either the owners are about to lose their lives’ savings or the bank is threatening to put the place in receivership (or sometimes, both). Ramsay walks in the front door, usually during the (non-existent) lunch rush, shakes hands with the owners, chitchats for a bit, then dashes into the kitchen to meet the chef and kitchen staff. He doesn’t linger. The only way to judge a restaurant is by eating there, so that’s what he does. Gordon sits down in the dining room, places a framed photo of his wife across the table and orders up whatever the chef or owners feels are the restaurant’s best dishes. The results are unfailingly grim–salmon with strawberries (strawberries?), rubbery shrimp, rancid scallops (which sent Gordon puking into the alley), a dizzying mess of reheated soul food, and a liquidy crème brulée have been some of the lowlights.

More often than not he sends the food back, speaking in a low voice about what’s wrong with a certain dish so as not to frighten actual paying customers who might be dining nearby. He’s not being a food snob when he offers his appraisals; the food looks positively awful most times. For the mound of American soul food, however, the dishes were tasty, but presented in an unappetizing heap and supported by frozen or pre-packaged ingredients. The chefs are always appalled when the food comes back barely eaten and you wonder how on earth they could be. Typically, the chef feels that the food he sent out to England’s top chef was up to the usual standards if not better. Sure they are nervous; Ramsay is a star after all. And here Gordon gets his first sense of where the problems lie.

The two biggest culprits, of course, are either the chef or the owner. In the case of Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, owner and chef were the same person, even though Momma employed a full-time head chef to stand idly about the kitchen, plating and defrosting, while Momma, an American immigrant, ran about the kitchen, delegating poorly and trying to be everyone’s friend.

After a few episodes, you start to see how Ramsay operates. One of the first questions he asks when he enters the kitchen with the owner, chef and staff gathered about him is, “Who is in charge here?” Instead of a response, what comes is a wave of nervous smiles, uncertainty and half-answers. Okay, now we’re starting to get somewhere.

A kitchen runs like a ship. The chef is captain. Substitute “Yes, sir” for “Yes, chef” and you have 90% of the conversation that takes place in one of Ramsay’s kitchens. The chain of command is unquestioned. Roles are clearly defined. The mood is efficient and relaxed because people know what to do, and when they don’t, the reproachful, confident voice of the captain tells them. The kitchens on RKN are either noisy, disorderly places or tensely silent because no one is communicating.

But in most cases, captains do not own the ships in their charge. They collect paychecks just like the rest of the crew. That is where the owners come in. The restaurant owner, at the end of the day, is the boss. But she hires her chef to run her kitchen, write the menu and in the best cases, present food that uses all of his skills and expertise to put the period on a statement that she’s already started writing. Ramsay has a gift for showing them the power of this synthesis. When the two most powerful forces in a restaurant support each other (often by not interfering in the other’s domain and only intervening when necessary) an amazing thing happens. Confidence is born.

Many of the restaurants on the show suffer from similar problems: menus that are far too elaborate and extensive, apathetic employees, internal bickering and dismal communication, but if there is one single malady that lies at the heart of each case from which all other problems are born, it is that somewhere along the way, somebody, usually the chef, has lost confidence. Gordon helps them find it again. He helps them find the joy of cooking that got them into the kitchen in the first place–the simple satisfaction of preparing something delicious and saying, “Here, taste this.” And this is usually the point in the show when my eyes mist over.

If Entourage is aspirational, then Kitchen Nightmares is positively life-affirming. Momma Cherri’s chef, Brian, had wrestled control of the kitchen away from Momma by the end of the episode in order to save the business. The results were extraordinary. Gone was the frozen food that Momma had being preparing ahead of time–sometimes two weeks ahead–to survive a hectic dinner rush. In fact, gone were the freezers entirely, all thirteen of them. In their place was enough counter space to make meals fresh to order, and enough fresh (and less expensive) produce to let Momma’s excellent, but neglected recipes shine. Brian, it turns out, has been working in restaurants as long as Ramsay has, but because Momma would do most of the cooking ahead of time to save money, he treated his position as “head chef” as just another job–showing up a half hour late and grinning and moonwalking about the kitchen while Momma tried to do everything.

It is shocking how often cooks laugh and giggle when Gordon is dishing out an instructional reprimand. It’s happened on numerous episodes; and it infuriates Ramsay to no end. Rightly so. Too often, Ramsay’s diagnosis is that staff are treating their place of work as a laid back place to chill-out, serve up a few dishes, and collect a paycheck. In this case, it’s the owners who have lost confidence, and therefore, lost the respect of the people they employ.

“In my kitchen, if you’re thirty minutes late, you’re at home for the day, looking for a new job,” Gordon tells Brian, who had trouble finding a babysitter. But the person really at fault here is Momma, for allowing this behavior to become the norm. So Ramsay bans her from the kitchen during service. She has to stay on the dining room floor, and again, something amazing happens. She soars. Her personable, charismatic nature makes her the perfect host, while her intimate relationship with the food makes her an excellent ambassador for a cuisine that might occasionally need some explaining to the people of Brighton.

Ramsay only stays for a week in each restaurant. So the real test of whether or not anyone has taken his advice to heart comes on his surprise return visit, which he makes a few months, even a year, after his initial week. In the case of Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack, the return was a triumph. Momma was working the front of house with the confidence of a business owner who is turning a profit. The waitresses were showing up early so as to be dressed and ready for their shifts on the dot. You got the sense that they didn’t dare do otherwise; Momma was too on her game now. Bookings were rolling in. And amazingly, the new efficiency had allowed Momma to trim the staff, rather than expand it. In the kitchen, Brian was handling all the mid-week cooking himself, and thriving on the responsibility.

Momma Cherri’s Soul Food Shack represents a success story. Sadly, however, most of Ramsay’s return visits find that old habits are hard to break, and that people, despite a temporary enthusiasm to do otherwise, rarely change. The show is a stark reminder of the harsh realities facing small businesses. When he returned to a place called D-Place in Essex, he found that all the progress he had made, including teaching the chef how to make a club sandwich (seriously), was erased when the loan company showed up a few weeks later, demanded the keys and barred the owners from returning. The only staff member remaining from Ramsay’s initial visit was the incompetent chef, who informs him that the club sandwich is now their best seller.

On one episode, Gordon noticed a quick and sudden decline in the food quality about two hours into the dinner service each night. What Ramsay finally discovered, was that the diluted fruit punch the chef kept sipping wasn’t cut with water, but booze. By the end of the week, the commis chefs were forced to hold down the kitchen because the head chef had been hospitalized with liver failure. When Ramsay returned several months later, the restaurant was hanging on, and the chef, thankfully, was in rehab.

In the next installment of The Wreckoning, I’ll examine how some restaurants that I’ve written about, and a few that I haven’t, could benefit from Ramsay’s advice.

Gordon Ramsay. The restaurants of Los Angeles could learn
a thing or two from the man in short sleeves.

As for BBC America’s bizarre viewing time, that seems to be changing. A “new” season (probably the series that ran last year in the UK) premieres on Thursday, July 12, at 8:00 P.M. Until then, repeats of earlier episodes are keeping the timeslot warm. The Saturday morning broadcast appears to be over with, thank heavens. And this fall, Fox will unleash the American version, with Gordon bringing his spot-on observations and sailor’s mouth to dismal restaurants here at home. One hopes the network will let Gordon be Gordon this time.

Coming soon: Part Two…

Posted by Aaron Black at 5:43 PM

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I always welcome your comments at The Wreckoning and have now made it easier for you to let us know how you feel by adding a “comments” link at the bottom of every post. Even entries previously posted now allow for comments. If you think I’ve been unfair (I have), or just want to let me know that I’m a douche bag (you do), then feel free to post a comment. I will post just about everything you write, as long as it isn’t spam or those pictures of me doing naked cannon balls in Palm Springs last summer. Dan, seriously, delete those.

Take a browse through the archives. If Craftsteak is your favorite restaurant, if you really enjoyed your chemical peel from Señor Fred, or if you think I am just missing the cultural importance of the $12 creamsicle martini, simply click the “comments” link and take your best shot.

I will try to respond personally to as many as I can.

Posted by Aaron Black at 12:46 AM

“I’ll Have the Taco Platter and the Mini-Facial To Go…” A reasonable request at Señor Fred.

Señor Fred Restaurant. (Valet in blue.)

Where in Los Angeles can you open a menu and have your choice of taquitos, ensalada de pollo and a custom leather couch? The answer is Señor Fred, a dungeon of a Mexican restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Owner Andre Guerrero, the man behind nearby Cal-Asian mainstay, Max, has continued his steady take-over of the neighborhood by opening this high-end alternative to its chief rival, the Teflon-coated juggernaut that is Casa Vega. But despite Casa Vega’s mediocre food, indifferent service and inexplicable crowds, that place at least bears some measure of authenticity. Señor Fred is pure confection. At Casa Vega, the servers are Mexican men in their forties who have probably been working there for many years. And why not? The joint is always packed. At Señor Fred, your servers will be white kids in their twenties, possibly with headshots.

Everything at Señor Fred seems forced and created, right down to its name, which is borrowed from Guerrero’s son, Fred. I have no idea if the younger Guerrero is of Mexican heritage, but one wonders if the link between namesake and cuisine is any more tenuous than that of Andre Guerrero’s other son, “Max” to his eponymous, Asian outpost further down Ventura.

Señor Fred offers updated versions of traditional Mexican fare. But in today’s restaurant parlance, “updated” means “toned down for white people.” Sometimes, of course, this isn’t such bad thing. In the case of Chinese food, toned down is a prudent move. Perhaps it was the bowl of boiled chicken feet dumped casually in front of me like a basket of tortilla chips on my last trip to China that made me realize this. Señor Fred is authentic Mexican food like P.F. Chang is real Chinese.

The décor defies description, but I shall try. In a style possibly called “torture-chamber chic,” heavy iron chandeliers hang from the pitch-black ceiling like Medieval confinement cages. Snake plants slither up the blood-red walls of the bar. The booths are deep pits that stress inescapability over intimacy. The walls in the dining room appear to have once been gilded gold leaf that’s given way to a fuzzy shroud of moss and mold–hardly a wallpaper choice that inspires the appetite–but there are so many bad choices on display at Señor Fred that listing them all feels gratuitous. I only know about the slap-dash tile mosaics on the back wall because I’ve read about them. In truth, the main dining room is so fucking dark you end up pawing around for your food like a famished raccoon feeling his way through an upturned trash bin. I’m not sure why some Mexican restaurants are compelled to make their customers feel like they are dining in caves. Is this to remind us of some bandits’ hideout in the Mexican mountains? Did we go spelunking and stumble upon El Dorado? Turn the damn lights up and let me see how much you over-cooked my enchiladas! Perhaps the seriously cheap IKEA lights that stretch across the ceiling don’t get that bright. I wish Señor Fred, Casa Vega, Mexicali and El Coyote took all the money they save on electricity and put it into hiring some valets who won’t mess with my stereo buttons.

The lights at Señor Fred are set so low that I couldn’t fully appreciate the joint’s most egregious display of phoniness until I got home. The menu, all two and a half pounds of it, stands as one of the tackiest, most intrusive and self-defeating offenses I have ever witnessed from a restaurant that isn’t The Cheesecake Factory. The thick red binder is so bulky that my friend could barely get it down his pants so that I could properly study it under some decent halogens. On the back of each heavily laminated page is a glossy advertisement for, well, let’s have a look…Here’s one for reverse mortgages from Wells Fargo which pairs nicely with the dessert selections.

A crippling interest payment, the perfect ending to any meal.

Choosing a wine is always a contemplative process, but add the possibility of getting hair extensions at 20% off and the whole endeavor proved entirely daunting.

Hmmm…red, white or platinum blonde?

But when it came time to choosing between the salmon, the tamales or having my entire house cleaned, I was simply flummoxed.

Apparently this isn’t an escort service, but I called anyway.

Not only is the very presence of these ads an abhorrent transgression, but the ads themselves reek with cheese, desperation and bad taste. Headshots anyone?

I can’t decide which photo is creepier. Please note the “special offer” above the website.

Three of the ads belong to local realtors stressing their personal touch and flashing American Idol levels of teeth bleaching. But Monty “The Iceman” Iceman takes the cake with his shout-out to the Hollywood set.

Don’t you want Monty working your special area? I emphatically do not.

What is so perplexing about the decision to subject customers to shameless, glossy advertisements at a supposedly classy restaurant is why the owners chose to stop with the menus. How about ads on the placemats? Why not put up a few plasma flatscreens to run spots for local merchants? That would cover the lease in no time. Or better yet, scrap the uniforms and put all the servers in T-shirts sporting the name of the local car wash or Tokyo massage. Hasta la commerce!

Señor Fred, a cave in Sherman Oaks. Decent Mexican food, fantastic skin peels, so-so jewelry repair. No prices listed on the tequila page–man, that pisses me off.

Posted by Aaron Black at 3:01 PM

The only thing crazier than writing three pieces about the same horrible restaurant, as I’ve done with Memphis, would be eating there again, which I’m doing on Friday. I hope my enormous fan base appreciates the punishment I endure for the entertainment of others. Drug addicts and compulsive gamblers might feel terrible on the come-down, but at least they get to enjoy their highs. I am miserable when I indulge my vice–enduring snotty attitude and dismal food in order to write about it–and can only eek out my modest endorphin kick by excoriating the offenders afterwards.

Eating at Memphis again took some encouragement.

I should point out that: A) I am going to Memphis as someone’s guest, and B) my friend who lives in the building next door to the restaurant is having a party afterwards. Thus, for convenience’s sake (and to torture me), dinner at Memphis makes sense. The truth is, I’ve got little else to say about Memphis. I emptied the tank on my earlier posts. At this point, eating there is for sheer entertainment value. I’ll tell you about it anyway…

Posted by Aaron Black at 11:32 PM

The Abbey, at least part of it.

The Abbey is coming to get you. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, young or old, hungry or thirsty, famous or infamous; The Abbey has something to offer, as long as you don’t mind standing.

I remember when The Abbey was across the street, at the place that is now Bossa Nova. It was a little coffeehouse, tucked just far enough off the main drag to be inconvenient, with an ominous, full-sized cross against the back wall. At least I think the cross was there. This was fifteen years ago. Memories fade, especially ones blanketed by alcohol. This would’ve been in my amateur drinking days, my kamikaze-on-the-rocks days. I would only go to the original Abbey to sober up before driving home, and only then–these were also my broke days–if my endless search for free parking hours earlier had spiraled me out to the far western edge of Weho. Back then, coffeehouses were anomalies with a touch of the Bohemian, not the home bases of ubiquitous familiarity that they are today. And The Abbey was second-tier anyway. All the action was down in the real heart of West Hollywood, the intersection of San Vicente and Santa Monica. Six Gallery was the coffee shop of the moment. And Rage, a few doors down, ruled the bar scene.

A broad generalization that carried more than a little truth was that if you were underage, or were with friends who were, you went to the Six Gallery. Those who were over 21 went to Rage, or at least started the night there. Rage was famous. It was the one gay bar all out-of-towners knew by name.

How things have changed. The Abbey crossed the street. Free parking in West Hollywood became as hard to find as a Catholic Church (there is one). And that sleepy tail end of Robertson Boulevard where it now lives is the main drag. A traffic bottleneck is de rigueur in front of The Abbey and the businesses that survive on its spillover. Rage is a shell of its former self. And Six Gallery? Closed, years ago. Courtesy of The Abbey.

When The Abbey moved, it started to grow. It grew up. It grew out. It is still growing. I am part of a generation who grew up with it. My taste for sugary cocktails like the Kamikaze went the way of my Ace of Base CD. I’m a Scotch man now. (Although I can still slam the occasional vodka-Red Bull to jump-start an evening.)

The Abbey’s location change was a savvy move for owner David Cooley, and it started to pay dividends immediately. The old place was cramped and uncomfortable. No wonder I never like eating at Bossa Nova. The new digs were spacious with a large, inviting patio where you could chat with friends and people-watch. As The Abbey became more popular, the people-watching got better. The adjoining statuary store, Terra Cotta, shared the patio during daylight hours. Stone Romanesque busts and chiseled likenesses of Saint Francis interspersed among The Abbey’s tables added character, instead of being in the way. But by night, the patio was strictly Abbey territory.

ABOVE: The Abbey, circa 1994.

BELOW: The author, around the same time.

It was a great place to congregate, to start or end a pub-crawl. It was the staging area for bigger adventures and the green room of the club scene. It was also a great place to sober up. The coffee has always been good, and the bakery treats recall the years before ‘carb’ was a dirty word. I once threw up not so much “at” The Abbey, but all over it–inside and out. My roommate promptly covered his backseat with free copies of Frontiers magazine and drove me home.

There was a time, in the mid-90s, when I could walk into The Abbey and know twenty, even thirty people by name. It was good cheap fun and everyone knew it. There was no hesitation in going out by yourself, because a hilariously random group of friends would be waiting for you at The Abbey.

Now, I’m lucky if I know a soul. The Abbey is too big, too powerful. It’s a brand name now, and if Mr. Cooley has his way, one that will be cropping up in other cities. One couple I spoke to on a recent Friday night had driven in–from Victorville–just to hit The Abbey. They’d heard about it on cable television’s depot of faggotry, Logo. And while The Abbey manages to be many things to many people, cheap is no longer one of them. Drinks are at London or New York prices. There are no drink specials. There is no happy hour. There doesn’t have to be. On a weekend, there’s a line to get inside that stretches down Robertson Boulevard. But that line could just as easily be there on a Thursday.

If there is a single defining moment that marks The Abbey’s adulthood, it is undisputedly the day it got its liquor license. That is when everything changed. The first expansion went out the back. Before that, The Abbey had a large room in the rear that seemed to lack purpose. The cross stood there for a while, then disappeared. Now the only cross associated with The Abbey is the one on its logo. The pool table era failed to inspire. And filling the room with second-hand sofas led to little more than a not-so-secret place to make-out, or a refuge from the city’s annual ten days of rain.

But the liquor license gave Mr. Cooley a mission. The first bar sprung up. The lightly colored back room was redesigned with dark woods and dim lighting. The sliver of open space behind the building became the now famous bungalows (Or are they cabanas? In truth, the cozy nests are somewhere in between the two). The little structures, however, are exclusive. Unless you’re famous. Or willing to submit to the greatest rip-off ever foisted on a clueless public: bottle service. Anyone for a $300 bottle of Stoli? It comes with an endless supply of lemons!

A second bar, this one on the patio, followed some time later. The walk to get a drink became even shorter. The line of people waiting at the coffee counter got shorter too, because with the liquor license came the laws that went with it. The under 21 crowd was welcome…during the daytime only. It was as though Fagin had sent his band of sticky-fingered urchins out to pick some pockets and bolted the door behind them forever. An entire generation of gay kids must’ve wandered aimlessly through the city’s streets until the invention of the Iced Blended brought them to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf like moths to a flame.

The young crowd had nowhere to go.

True Abbey story: having just knocked back my third berry martini, I struck up a conversation with a man and woman at the next table, one boozy Sunday afternoon a few years ago. They didn’t seem like a couple, more like a gay guy and his best gal-pal. The girl mentioned that she liked my jeans and that she wished she could try them on. I told her she could. And what possessed me to say the next thing I’ll never know. “If I can try on yours.”

She paused and said, “Okay.” We got up and marched toward the bathrooms. On the way she offered, “I should tell you, I’m not wearing any underwear.”

“Then I guess we’re using the same stall,” I said. We blew past the attendant in the men’s room and piled into a stall. She was telling the truth about the underwear, which meant, at least from a hygienic standpoint, cramming my business into the tight jeans of a smaller woman might not have been the brightest idea. But at this point, the three martinis had become four.

Now in each other’s jeans, we headed back to our table. It was my first and only time in women’s trousers. Too loose in a few places and too tight in many more. Way too tight. But the loss of circulation kept my mind from being gay-bar paranoid about the four-inch floods and top button that wouldn’t close.

It was then she announced, “My husband will love this!” I froze. It was too late to turn back. We were at the table presented to my friends and her husband for their amusement. But I was just waiting for the punch. “What do you think, honey?” she asked her husband.

He looked at me, then at her, then back at me…”Cool, man.” Of course everything was cool. This was The Abbey. The girl and I went back to the men’s room and swapped into our own clothes, again in the same stall, only this time, a little more sheepishly.

The Abbey’s ascent to the top was rapid and uncontested. Now with bars inside and out, it was ready to dominate West Hollywood. Only one obstacle remained: Having to share space with Terra Cotta probably felt like going on the hottest date of your life and having to bring your kid brother along.

I don’t know the specifics of the deal. I don’t know if Terra Cotta simply went under and Cooley snapped it up, or if there were more underhanded matters at work. There is always the smell of decaying flesh whenever I cut through the park next door to The Abbey. I’m sure it’s coincidence.

However it happened, The Abbey took over Terra Cotta and the result was more space than it knew what to do with. So, it built a third bar and then a fourth one a while later. Try to think of another establishment–club, restaurant, concert hall, you name it—that has four bars in Los Angeles. Let’s see, there’s the Staples Center (if you count the American Airlines VIP lounge) and Dodger Stadium (if you include the Stadium Club and the moveable beer carts). So relative to its size against those behemoths, The Abbey stands alone. And the bars at The Abbey aren’t small. There’s enough combined counter space to challenge all of Silverlake to a game of beer pong.

The Abbey, from space.

As with any self-respecting bar, the opportunity to sell booze brought with it the chance to assert an identity with the creation of signature cocktails. The Abbey staked its claim with various vodka martinis. There is nothing revolutionary about an apple martini these days, but seven or eight years ago the drink was positively cutting edge. The first one I ever had was at The Abbey. The apple martini branched into caramel apple, red apple and Washington apple, while the berry family has spawned such current Abbey offerings as chocolate raspberry, raspberry lemon drop and wild berry. There are no fewer than five banana variations on the menu as well.

The rest of the martini list reads like a dessert menu: white chocolate, Key lime pie, Butterfinger, dulce de leche and Creamsicle, the last of which is impossible to order with a straight face. But there is nothing straight about this flouncy collection of cocktails. Nor are they quick to prepare, which isn’t such a bad thing. At $12 apiece, it’s nice to see a little workmanship. All the garnishes are thick chunks of fruit that take more than a single bite to finish. The martinis are made with Effen vodka, a company that cut a deal with the devil Abbey to be their principal provider. Should you wish a different vodka in your drink, say Stolichnaya, Absolut or even lowly Smirnoff, The Abbey charges you an additional $2 for hurting Effen’s feelings.

I’ve been hitting The Abbey a lot lately in preparation for this piece. It was starting to break me. Oddly, the beers are reasonably priced (for West Hollywood) at around $6. On a recent Friday night, our bartender was noticeably annoyed when my friend asked what beers they had. This friend was (quite understandably) expecting to see either a beer list on the wall by the martini, mojito and caipirinhas varietals, or a line-up display of the bottles as is done in most bars. Finding none of these, he asked the bartender.

“What? Beers?…They’re right over there,” he scoffed, motioning to the end of the bar, as if it were obvious. It should be pointed out that A) this friend is visiting from Europe and therefore not an Abbey regular and B) the bartender is a douchebag. What he was motioning to was a tiny fridge at the far end of the bar and a few inches from the ground. The window of this little beer prison was so frosted over that what it contained was anybody’s guess. After we pointed out said fact, the bartender grudgingly rattled off the beer list as best as he could remember.

The Abbey’s beer fridge.

Beer, real beer that is not the gutless water that Bud Light or Coors Light (Nazi piss) call beer, has been anathema in abs-obsessed West Hollywood for years. Might as well step up to the bar and order a Big Mac. But at The Abbey, the sense is more that the annoyance comes from cutting into the profit margin.

Greed could be the undoing of The Abbey. There’s a can’t-miss sign that now hangs by the bar register that states, and I’m paraphrasing, that any customer neglecting to close out his or her credit card tab at the end of the night will be charged an 18% fuck-you fee by the management. Twelve dollar drinks don’t bring in young people, and young people are what fuel the L.A. bar scene, gay or straight. Perhaps Mr. Cooley doesn’t care. Older, more established folks have more money. I’m in my mid-thirties. I went to The Abbey last weekend and felt like the youngest person in the room. The Abbey grew up years ago and is now in danger of growing old.

Lazy afternoon at The Abbey.

Has The Abbey reached middle age or just its mid-life crisis? Club music pounds from its speakers all day and night. Plasma TV screens flash meaningless images (along with some advertising) to a balding, graying clientele. But on any given night, or afternoon for that matter, the crowd at The Abbey can look like an open casting call for One Tree Hill. The place is bulletproof, Teflon-coated, and amazingly resilient. Like the giant room that used to be Terra Cotta, The Abbey can shift and morph into whatever is needed at the moment–dance floor, private area, sit-down restaurant or story time by the fireplace.

The irony of The Abbey is also its greatest accomplishment. It reigns as the undisputed epicenter of gay life in West Hollywood, and by extension, all of Los Angeles, while managing to be the acceptable, cool and non-threatening alternative for straight people to have a drink in Gaytown. Ask your straight friends to join you at the Mother Lode? Fuck no. Trunks? Too scary. Mickey’s? Too many strippers. But The Abbey? Oh, I’ve heard that place is cool.

Jennifer Love Hewitt “hosted” an Oscar party at The Abbey. Openly gay celebrities, all six of them, feel they can relax there. Mercifully, the paparazzi leave the place alone. It’s the one gay establishment recently-out basketballer John Ameachi admitted to visiting during his playing days. It’s an interesting fact not because it is scandalous, but because it is decidedly not. Seeing a famous actor–gay, straight or miscellaneous–at The Abbey is hardly news at all, because The Abbey is for everyone. Now, you run into that same actor at Cuffs in Silverlake? That’s a different story.

Here’s a question: What is the only bar in West Hollywood where you can stand at the bar and light up? That’s right, The Abbey is smoker-friendly. Either of the two outdoor bars allows smoking, yet the patio is so large that not once have I been annoyed by someone’s smoke. And I hate smoke. It’s just another way The Abbey has figured out how to be all things to all people. The tiny smokers’ patio at Rage looks like a depressing holding cage where gay men go to die.

Several afternoons in a row at The Abbey I saw tables of moms with little kids and strollers. There was a group of suits having a business lunch. In the shade sat pretentious guy with laptop, sipping a latte. It’s the same scene you might find at any outdoor patio in Brentwood, Sherman Oaks or Larchmont Village, except the music is considerably more obnoxious. If there’s a reason The Abbey chooses to play bumping house music at 11 A.M. it’s beyond me. Do they expect people to throw down right then and there? Forget the chopped salad. Let’s dance!

Here we stumble upon another key to The Abbey’s conquering of West Hollywood. It kills every other bar in town by the fact that it is even open at that hour. The sun never sets on The Abbey and rarely does the moon. Technically, The Abbey is a restaurant, at least in the daytime, which is why folks of all ages are welcome. And by staying true to its coffeehouse roots, its being open for breakfast doesn’t even seem strange. Only between the hours of 2 A.M. and 8 A.M. is The Abbey not able to take your money. But if there’s a way around that one, I’m sure Mr. Cooley is working on it.

It’s the gay bar you can bring your mom to. In fact many gay kids, eager to show their concerned mothers that being gay doesn’t mean re-enacting scenes from Cruising, have done just that. Other bars and clubs might be hotter on a given night of the week, but The Abbey has a decent-to-packed crowd seven nights a week.

Sundays are clearly a goldmine. Gays have already elevated brunching to an art form, so the early crowd fills the tables and gets the Mimosas flowing. But Sunday afternoons are a popular time for socializing and alcohol, so as the brunchers are paying their bills, the languid afternoon crowd begins to take over the tables. Late afternoons are a great time at The Abbey, providing the managers are willing to unfurl the umbrellas, which often times they inexplicably are not. The light is good. The liquor is flowing. The prospect of an easy night on the sofa lies ahead. These are the moments where Los Angeles is truly glorious.

And as the sun is going down, the club next door, Here, is gearing up for its biggest night of the week. The Abbey, of course, is happy to take the run-off.

Having brunch, or any proper meal at The Abbey, however, is a bit like going to Matsuhisa for the décor–it’s just not what the place is known for. I’ve forced myself to eat at The Abbey several times in the last few months, and every time I’ve been amazed at its persistent ability to screw up even the simplest of dishes. The breakfast potatoes disappoint stunningly while the chicken Caesar salad is on par with what you might get at an airport. The menu bills itself as “modern American comfort food”, and thankfully, there’s nothing that strives to be too ambitious. Fine dining, this is not. The Muy Grande Weho burrito, while hilarious to say, is both misconceived and poorly executed.

If the food seems like an afterthought, no wonder. The Abbey clings to its restaurant appellation the way Scientology holds onto “church”–it’s the secret of its success. Without serving food–not bags of chips or beernuts, but proper sit-down fare with china and flatware–The Abbey is just a bar. And that means different laws, stricter regulations, and remaining closed until after noon or later. All of which are serious threats to the bottom line.

It’s easy to bash on The Abbey now; it’s always easy to snipe at the one on top. But it’s even easier to love it for what it is, for what it’s become, and for what it was. When I travel to other cities and fancy a night on the town, I’ll often ask the concierge for a suggestion of where to go. I don’t dance around the issue anymore. I don’t get cute or coy. “What do you have that’s like The Abbey?”

Amazingly, I never have to elaborate. The meek little man behind the counter always knows exactly what I’m talking about. Invariably, he’ll sigh, and with sadness in his voice say, “Nothing. But I’ll do the best I can…”

The Abbey: located in West Hollywood at the north end of Robertson Blvd. atop a giant pile of money. Shitty food. Good cocktails, but expensive, except during Pride Weekend when they’re really expensive.

Posted by Aaron Black at 2:12 PM

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I’ve been back to Memphis restaurant three times since the shockingly bad meal I endured there a few months ago–an experience so dire it hastened the birth of this site. The reasons for my return visits were not born out of guilt at having thrashed the place for its cunting attitude nor out of some curiosity to see if it had improved. I had written Memphis off and was happy to never step foot in the joint again. But my friends got to me.

Those same guys who suffered side by side with me and shared in my boiling resentment had now softened in their hatred. We had all survived the same plane crash, and after sufficient recovery, they were ready to fly again, while I was content to wallow in my newfound preoccupation with Amtrak routes and bus schedules. I asked myself how I could return to a restaurant that I had so thoroughly excoriated in writing. I would be a traitor to my own self-respect. The basic tenets of customers’ rights were at stake here. Treating people badly, and expecting them to pay through the nose for the privilege, is behavior that should never be rewarded. So what swayed me? Someone offered to pay for me. I don’t say that flippantly; it’s how I justified it to myself. As long as it wasn’t my own dollars I was giving to Memphis, my integrity would survive. Turning down an invitation to be someone’s guest for dinner because I didn’t like the choice of restaurant seemed boorish and petty. So I gave in.

Upon seeing the place completely dead at the peak of dinner hour, I must cop to the wave of Schadenfreude that came over me on my first return visit. But when I discovered just how empty the restaurant really was, any nasty delight I felt at its misfortune turned unavoidably into pity. It was as though a school bully had received a punishment of blindness or mutilation, far more severe than was appropriate for a legacy of pantsings, noogies and swirlies. The situation at Memphis was critical. Our party of six was the only occupied table on the outside patio. There were four glum people at the bar inside. The entire upstairs dining area was dark and roped-off. This was at 8:30 on a Thursday night. At this rate, the life expectancy of the place could be counted in weeks, possibly even days.

The service was considerably more affable, though not as attentive as one would think, given the circumstances. A low customer turnout calls for a trimmed-down staff, but in this case the owners had done such a hatchet-job on the schedule that one valiant server was saddled with the entire restaurant. The leg-work alone–from bar to kitchen to patio–kept her hustling. She handled our party admirably, but it was clear the moment a party of two arrived and took up a table across the huge patio that she was stretched too thin. Expecting a lone server to cover that much real estate is asking for trouble.

The rest of the staff isn’t much for taking up the slack. An irritating fact that has been confirmed with every visit to Memphis is that its busboys are useless for anything other than clearing off tables. They stare stone-faced at any request or declaration other than “finished”, and are doggedly determined to refill any empty beer or cocktail glass, regardless of its shape, with either water or iced tea. This is odd in a city where, more often than not, the bussers are usually the one element of a restaurant’s staff you can count on. As for the managers–there always seem to be at least two of them milling officiously about the hosting podium–they seem haughtily above assisting their servers, even in a crunch. I’ve got to hand it to Memphis; even when you can shoot a cannonball through the joint without hitting anybody, the snooty armor remains unchinked.

Memphis, during dinner rush.

The same group of us went back to Memphis about two weeks later. All the patio tables had been removed in favor of cushy sofas and low coffee tables. It seemed on this night that someone had chosen to emphasize the lounge quotient of the lounge-bar-restaurant triumvirate that is boasted on its website. It looked like a promising move. The patio-restaurant idea clearly wasn’t working. Time to mix things up. Velvet ropes around many of the (still empty) sofas lent an air of tingling expectation. A DJ set up his board and prepared to get things bumping. It wasn’t busy yet, but you could just tell that in no time it would be guest lists and exorbitant bottle-service aplenty. This left the upstairs area as the main dining room, which works out fairly well. Our large party hunkered down at a long, well-lighted table. Our server, a plucky blonde, became our new best friend and admirably escorted our first-timers through the menu.

I should mention why I never talk about the food. The reason is simple. Ragging on the food at Memphis is sort of like beating up a crippled kid; it’s just too easy. While there’s a much-labored aesthetic guiding the theory of Memphis, the execution of said aesthetic seems like an afterthought. The fare is Californianized Cajun. This means lots of fried stuff and shrimp-over-rice. That the city of Memphis has about as much to do with Cajun cuisine as, say, Muncie, seems to be of little consequence. My friends like the fried chicken. As an adopted South Carolinian, I find Memphis’s fried chicken, its signature dish, hardly worth mentioning. First of all, fried chicken has bones. It also is made with white and dark pieces alike. But at Memphis, the dish is served as two gargantuan boneless breasts. The problem with this choice is that huge chicken breasts are hard to cook properly. Big pieces of anything need sufficient cooking time, but white meat dries out easily. So chefs really have to know what they’re doing to pull it off. They also have to care about what they’re doing, and at Memphis, caring about anything other than making money or looking cool doesn’t appear to be a priority.

The pork ribs are good, and so is the fried calamari. But you see a pattern here. All the food at Memphis is really heavy. If I have to do an extra 20 minutes on the elliptical trainer tomorrow, those better be some damn good crab cakes. But the dishes all taste remarkably the same and uniformly unspecial. I took a Pepcid AC for this? The more daring items, like the tuna tartar appetizer, are experiments that should never have been allowed out of the laboratory. And while a good beer seems the perfect accompaniment to this type of fare, the beer list at Memphis, which no server on any of my four visits could accurately recite, is shamefully neglected. Way too much attention is put on the pricey wine list and overly-adventurous cocktails. Furthermore, I find Memphis’s practice of slapping a $40 per-person minimum on parties of six or more and a 20% mandatory gratuity on parties of eight or more so out of line with the rest of the city and so egregiously rude that I am compelled to point it out once more.

As the evening wore on, the music from downstairs got progressively louder. Scattered voices became a thick, indistinct din that boiled up the stairs. My friend’s companion for the evening excused himself for a restroom break. He was gone for nearly thirty minutes. Normally, a spectacularly-gay 19-year old Marine, on his first trip to LA, wandering off to make trouble on his two-day leave from his intelligence job at a Texas airbase wouldn’t come as a surprise. But something seemed off here. When he finally returned, he had that glazed, shattered look common to some of his post-combat colleagues. (This kid hasn’t seen real combat, thank God. Blessedly, some leatherneck brass has realized that dropping this pixie into Sadr City would be about as insane as putting that fancy 12-year old from Ugly Betty on the Colts’ offensive line.)

As it turns out, all the kid had been trying to do was use the restroom. In the hour since we had arrived, the situation downstairs had become such a scrum that even the simple act of moving from point A to point B had proved arduous. The bar, entry area, and most of the patio were now a solid mass of people. The slight, unassuming Marine had been patiently waiting his turn outside one of the two unisex, single person lavatories behind the host station, when an aggressive hostess smacked two hastily scrawled “women only” signs on each of the doors and ordered him, with a vague wave, to a far-off “other men’s room” somewhere outside the restaurant. Accustomed to following orders, he soldiered off to pee.

But what she neglected to tell him was that using said “other men’s room”, which turned out to be in the side alley, required him to re-enter the restaurant via the front steps. This meant dealing with the massive, clipboard-wielding doorman of an establishment that was well beyond capacity. Just getting up to the doorman through the crush was a chore. And once he got there, the World’s Gayest Marine had no idea whose name our reservation was under and had to convince the doorman he was a member of a party already eating inside and not, all evidence to the contrary, Perez Hilton.

Waiting to use the restroom.

I sat listening to the kid’s story and decided I needed to investigate. The scene downstairs was just as he had described. There was a line ten-people deep for the restrooms. It was only after waiting ten minutes that I was close enough to see the hand-written “women only” signs that hadn’t been there when I arrived an hour before. This, it seems, was management’s meager attempt at crowd control. I was at the head of the line when the hostess came by and announced “Women only,” but without any real conviction in her voice and without seeming to address me directly. She must’ve sensed my resolve. With a bladder full of Pilsner Urquell, there was little chance of my starting over in a different queue.

I am all for unisex restrooms. There’s something wonderfully democratic about them. But don’t lose confidence in the idea just because your place gets crowded. It was illogical and unfair to ask half the customers to deal with the enormous inconvenience of trying to figure out where they are suppose to go and fighting a massive crowd the entire way just to take a leak. Women face discrimination everyday, but here it was the men who were being punished for, I don’t know, being men, I guess. By the time I emerged from the lavatory, my friends were in their coats and waiting by the front door to leave.

As we walked down the promenade toward the valet stand, the thumping beat and glittery chit-chat began to fade into the night. I remember thinking that for better or for worse, Memphis may have become what it had brazenly set out to become when it opened a year ago. It was chock-full of beautiful people drinking expensive liquor and being treated rudely and even more folks clamoring to get inside to experience the same. It was, at least on this night, the cool place to be. And the quest for cool is what makes club promoters climb out of bed every afternoon.

While it was abundantly clear that this was a place I never needed to visit again, I drove away feeling that a gross imbalance had at least begun to fall back into alignment. Since day one, Memphis has made a point to remind its patrons that they are lucky to get past the front door and even luckier to get a table. And management has clung to this resolve with grandiloquent delusion, even when the whole establishment had fewer paying customers than a midnight screening of Herbie: Fully Loaded.

Leaving Memphis.

It is a distressing fact: demand destroys customer service. If yours is the place to be, if the beautiful people and those who wish to touch them are knocking on your doors night after night, then the compulsion to be gracious and accommodating goes out the window. There was a time–not decades ago, but years–when the stellar treatment a customer would receive was one of the reasons to eat out.

Amazing food has never been the driving force behind the success of Musso and Frank. It doesn’t need to be. At that bullet-proof establishment, just a few blocks down the boulevard from Memphis, professional waiters–not young beauties hired from headshots that they hope will one day carry them from hell of waiting tables onto the hell of the CW network–serve cocktails carefully made-to-order, under the watchful eye of confident and dedicated management. It’s a formula that has worked for 90 years. How long will Memphis, Geisha House and Sterling be around? If it’s two years or five, the difference hardly matters. The investors will simply resurface in some other snatch-and-grab job endeavor designed to exploit the pop-culture zeitgeist at top-dollar prices.

All my speculation proved irrelevant, however, when our third return to Memphis a few weeks later was like re-entering a ghost town. Save for our party and a lone couple finishing their desserts in the corner, the place was completely empty at the height of dinner hour. It was as though the jam-packed cluster-fuck of a few weeks earlier had been a mirage. The sofas and velvet ropes were ephemera. Back in place were the sturdy, familiar tables and chairs of a sadly unsuccessful restaurant. Nothing had changed. Memphis is on life-support. It’s possible that its steep prices manage to keep it barely above water with a minimum of customers. But what is even more likely is that its steely, unshakable belief in its own greatness will keep Memphis from pulling the plug on itself until it is long past dead.

I have a good friend who lives in the building next door to Memphis. His balcony overlooks the restaurant’s patio and he swears to me that place is absolutely “going off” every week. I press him to be more specific.

“How many nights per week?” I ask.

My friend thinks. “One,” he says finally.

One night a week. Sounds like it could be a great club. Why not drop everything else–the pretense, the absurd menu, the whole restaurant for that matter–and be that? Of course it’s not quite that simple. There are obstacles, such as covering the lease payment with a bar that’s only open a few nights per week. But the greatest obstacle, no doubt, is Memphis itself.

Memphis restaurant: Miraculously still alive on Hollywood Blvd. Free iced tea and water, strictly enforced. Visits from your server are rare, so don’t squander them. Do all of your ordering in one shot–starters, desserts, drinks, everything. Warning for men only: Hold it till you get home.

Posted by Aaron Black at 2:35 PM

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I’ve been told by a few people that I haven’t been blogging correctly. I’m OK with that. The Wreckoning is shaping up more as a column–a column without a periodical, mind you–than a place for unchecked punditry or self-indulgent diary entries about my cat’s eating habits (Kitty is in week two of the great Deli-Cat boycott of ‘07). My purpose–to call upon the carpet the perpetrators of ignorance, disrespect and corruption, however egregious–was a righteous, yet limiting, one. Coming up with subjects for a hailstorm of derision proved to harder than I thought. The truth is, I’m just not that pissed off.

Until last week’s meeting of the Wednesday Night Supper Club, that is. The convening of this venerable institution (founded, oh, about a month ago by three of my buddies in order to get out of the house, eat plates of meat and sample the corkage fees of the best restaurants Ventura Boulevard has to offer) is one of the few engagements that will get me to drop the drawbridge, leave the castle and traverse down the mountain to the dirty silverware and surly waiters of civilization.

Our destination, The Boneyard Bistro, was a place I’d been wanting to try, not because I’d heard good things, but because I’d heard raves and condemnations in equal numbers. For a joint so close to the castle, I had to investigate. I attempted to eat there a few times in the past months as a walk-in, and was always told with an arrogant chuckle that my guest and I could not be seated that night; all booked up, I’m afraid. Fair enough, the place was full and it was probably 8 o’clock on a Thursday or some such. As for the snooty attitude, I decided then that Boneyard better have the food, service and atmosphere to warrant Beverly Boulevard assholery.

Two of us arrived together and on-time on Wednesday, having walked from the castle on a chilly, windy night. A full rack of hot babyback ribs in a comfy booth was sounding pretty good about then, when the host said, “Right, we have your table outside.” I asked to be seated inside, where there wasn’t a biting wind and rainstorm, and the host informed me that one of our party had specifically requested a patio table in an unnecessary attempt to accommodate our one smoker. In fact, the reservation maker in our party confirmed that not only did he request an outside table, but the restaurant called him that day to make sure he really wanted to sit outside. Ok, so this one was the supper club’s fault. The host led us out to our table in the corner of the covered patio, where I noticed the second annoyance of the evening: a party at an adjacent table had stacked up all of their to go containers on our table. What the fuck is wrong with people? Am I the only one who finds this entirely rude? Only slightly worse is passing one’s used plates onto a nearby table when said plates’ presence in front of one becomes too disgusting. I wouldn’t do this at the Chili’s in Pacoima, much less in a respectable restaurant. So I have now been annoyed twice and it still hasn’t been the restaurant’s fault. Until the other two club members arrive ten minutes late. Turns out they showed up early, but were waiting in the valet line all that time. Having a single valet attendant on the busiest restaurant stretch of the valley is inexcusable. And cheap.

The name Boneyard Bistro is meant to be ironic–half the menu is dedicated to a promising cavalcade of BBQ items: babyback or St. Louis pork ribs, pulled pork, beef ribs and tri-tip, plus an array of traditional sides: slaw, baked beans, fries and a few tinkered-with favorites, such as fried mac-and-cheese. The other half of the menu is comically ambitious: buffalo tartar, mussels with chorizo (chorizo?), pork dumplings, duck spring rolls, porcini-crusted salmon, the list goes on and on. Talk about trying to be all things to all people; it’s as if Wolfgang Puck tried to fuck Mr. Chow over a meat smoker. I was wary of the bistro side of the menu, opting for a sampler of tri-tip, pulled pork and pork ribs with beans and fries as the sides. My only daring move: the spinach salad with blue cheese and crispy onions as a starter. The moment our first course arrived, chef and co-owner Aaron Robins, meaninglessly mentored, I’ve read, by Chicago legend Charlie Trotter, made the first of several appearances at our table to ask us, smugly, “How is everything?” Without a bite of food to yet cross our lips, we meekly nodded and said, “Great.” My salad turned out to be surprisingly awful, considering the simplicity of the ingredients: the blue cheese was gummy and lifeless and the overabundance of dressing rendered the once-crispy fried onions pointlessly soaked. My friend Michael went for the buffalo tartar starter, which arrived like some sort of viscous, bloated hubcap, suffering beneath a weakly fried quail egg. I suppressed my gag reflex and bravely tried a bite. Lewis and Clark didn’t eat food this gamey. Entirely inedible. The duck spring rolls and pulled pork dumplings arrived cold, soggy and unloved. The four of us were thoroughly ready for our entrees.

If you’re going to do BBQ, do it right. The Boneyard fails miserably. The ribs were dry. The sauce was uninspired. Only the tri-tip proved worthy, albeit cold. But really nothing overcomes the assault–the unforgivability–of the beans. They were positively rancid. I made friend Ryan try them for a second opinion. He spit the mouthful into his napkin. I tried his beans and they were fine. But mine, it seems, were from such depths of the barrel that I think they must’ve been days, not hours, old. Which brings me to the greatest offensive of the restaurant: it is as though Mr. Robins and his chefs have long since tired, or no longer realize the importance, of actually tasting the food–often, several times a night. Mr. Robins is far too busy preening for his customers to get a hold of his kitchen. He needs to take the advice of grumpy, but always-right uberchef Gordon Ramsay: simplify the menu, lose the ridiculous bistro items and concentrate on making a few things well. All the glad-handing in the world can’t overcome a kitchen that doesn’t care. And if the chef doesn’t care, why should anyone else?

Boneyard Bistro: Somewhere in Sherman Oaks, CA. Look for the valet line snaking around the corner. Eat first. $$$

Posted by Aaron Black at 8:15 AM

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Read Part 1 of “The Craftsteak Bloodbath” here.

Seeing that we weren’t going to bite on the Kobe hook, Miranda turned our attention to the rest of the menu. Marty asked about the differences between the grilled and roasted meats. The answer we got from Miranda was more shocking than Marty’s miracle, sharpener-fueled, single-number roulette win the night before.

“That’s done to make things easier for our kitchen. They really don’t like getting too crazy in there–trying to make everyone’s grilled steaks come out perfectly every time.” Yes, of course, because not taxing your kitchen staff who are paid to be here is really my top fucking priority, too. Thank God you’re not a steakhouse or anything!

Miranda explained that the roasted meats were cooked longer and slower.
Oh, you mean as in “roasted”?

I wasn’t interested, but Marty, who likes his cheese orange, his mustard yellow and his meats decidedly un-pink, ordered the roasted rib-eye and a Caesar salad. I went with the grilled New York and the arugula salad. I asked Miranda which glass of red she recommended and without a beat she pointed to the $27 whopper at the bottom of the wine list. Oh, the one that’s ten bucks more than the next most expensive? What a great fucking idea. On a wine list with ten items listed, you actively dislike nine of them. You’ve now gone straight for the jugular twice in three minutes. I was unaware that “taking care of your kid” meant that I, personally, would be seeding his college fund.

Out of pure spite, I ordered the cheapest cabernet on the list. And at $15 a pop it was fantastic. Miranda brought the bottle to our table and laid a long, heavy pour into each of our glasses. Marty, the former bartender, was delighted. I, the former Kinko’s quality-control inspector, noted how the year on the bottle was two years younger than what was posted on the wine list, 2005 instead of a 2003. “Dude, she just gave us half a bottle,” Marty said. “Who the fuck cares?” Clearly, value over substance is what the people want at Craftsteak. This meal was no exception.

The salads arrived. Marty grimaced. I don’t understand the decision to serve Caesar salad with the Romaine leaves left in their unmanageable, whole form. Is the chef somehow elevating an already perfect dish to a new level or is this just another absurd affectation of sophistication and unnecessary creative meddling? To make matters worse, the Craftsteak creation is served on an impossibly small plate. So not only are you required to work just to get your salad into shape, you aren’t given adequate space to do so. Marty was flummoxed. Having slaved as a busboy for years before getting beaten down at Kinko’s, I was all too acquainted with the inoffensive practice of sending a salad, or anything else, back to the kitchen for a quick chop-up from the professionals. After all, they’re the ones with the good knives. Marty was all too happy to know that such a move wouldn’t boil the blood of the kitchen staff. I was starting not to care if it did. He politely explained his desire to Miranda, and also asked if he could have it on a bigger dish after it was chopped. Miranda nodded and whisked his salad off for a makeover.

“Do you still want me to put it on a bigger plate for you?” she said as she returned with his salad. Oh, you mean like you said you would? Gee, if it wouldn’t be too much fucking trouble! But again I held my tongue. Marty seemed pleased enough with the chop-job. I, however, was thoroughly grim-faced by my arugula salad. The peppery crispness I was hoping for was so overpowered by the mammoth helping of vinaigrette that the poor leaves slithered down my throat with nary a crunch. Was this dressing-drowning another example of middle-America’s quantity-over-quality habit? I always order salad dressing on the side–when I’m at Ruby Tuesdays!–but in a supposedly top-shelf restaurant, part of what I’m paying for is the freedom to trust the kitchen. On this night the boys in white were letting us down. Two salads. Two mistakes. I caught Miranda’s watchful eye. In my most contrite tone, I apologized for not asking for the dressing on the side and asked if the salad could possibly be remade with half the dressing. My request seemed to puzzle her, but then she nodded and drifted away with my plate.

I took the opportunity to check out the restroom, which wasn’t so bad that I wouldn’t consider lifting (and thereby touching) the toilet seat, but wasn’t nearly nice enough to make me mind if I dribbled a few drops. This was a hotel bathroom–somewhere between Embassy Suites and Beverly Hills Hotel. On my way back to the table, I decided to investigate the main dining room. Like a glowing orange terrarium, it beckoned me from the end of the bar. Bright and cheery, but still tastefully subdued, there was an air of conviviality permeating the room. In the soft, burnt umber light the diners there seemed happier, more successful and more entitled than those of us in the murky hinterland of the bar. I knew then what those passengers in steerage must’ve felt when they were stopped, awe-struck, by the gilded opulence of the first-class accommodations on their desperate sprint to the lifeboats aboard the fateful Titanic. It was only when I remembered that the diners in this room were being serviced by the same kitchen staff as I was, that I felt secure enough to peel myself away and shuffle back to my lawn chair.

The moment arrived. Miranda and busboy, tray in hand, swept up to our table and officiously set up the tray stand. Two gorgeous copper pans stood sizzling atop the tray. At least I thought they were sizzling. Turns out they weren’t even fizzling. With a flash of her smile, Miranda was gone, no doubt certain that, as we were about to be wowed by our glorious entrees, her work was, at least for now, done. What she’d left us with were two slabs of beef in stone-cold copper pans. As my friend Jon pointed out when I recounted the story later (Craftsteak is one of his favorite restaurants), a hot pan would continue cooking the beef beyond its desired temperature. Yes, I know that, Jon. I went to friggin’ college. But at least if the pan were warm, my steak wouldn’t taste like it had been sitting on the counter top for two fucking hours.

To make matters worse–and for Marty, unrecoverable–the sauce, under which our beef was served, was, to put it gently, a beef reduction. “Served in its own juices!” if one wanted to be less duplicitous. But let’s face it: this was blood. Room-temperature, uncooked raw beef run-off. I let the word slip out. Blood. Marty looked up at me, mortified. I saw in his eyes that guileless, crest-fallen face a child might have upon learning that there is no Santa Claus.

“It’s not really blood, is it?” Marty asked the question with such desperation, such plaintive disbelief that a restaurant could commit such a horrifying offense, that I looked him squarely in the eye…and lied.

“Of course not,” I said, laughing off my spot-on observation as a joke. No Marty, it’s not blood. There’s no blood in beef. In fact, there’s no blood in cows. In fact, the cattle we eat come from some mystical, joyful summer camp for bloodless bovines.

It turns out, had I told the truth, Marty would’ve walked out of the restaurant, gone straight to In-and-Out and enjoyed his dinner a whole lot more. The roasted option was just awful, so bad that I felt guilty choking down my passable, un-warm grilled selection. More wine, that was the answer. Marty picked and nibbled his way through his dinner most admirably. Any mom would’ve been proud. But it was a crushingly disappointing meal.

I’ve since learned that Tom Colicchio has left Gramercy Tavern in order to concentrate on improving the Craftsteak brand. Here’s hoping it works, because much work is needed. Here’s hoping also that “improving” doesn’t just mean “expanding”, but I know there is a Century City outpost coming to the LA area next year. Sadly, I suspect that the once great artist has been irrevocably seduced by the chef-as-franchise phenomenon that Las Vegas has cultured.

We said “no” to dessert, again, out of spite. Covering our dinner bill would require some daring moves at the gaming tables. But we were in Las Vegas, the land of hope and dreams. We walked out into the night brimming with the inescapable sense of promise, the energizing flutter of uncertainty that comes with impending good fortune. There was only one thing we knew for sure: two hours from now, we’d be eating taquitos.

Craftsteak. Somewhere in the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas. Recommendations: Win big at the tables. Stick with beer or drink ahead of time. Stay away from anything roasted.

My friend Marty and I recently discovered the three-day weekend–the mid-week three day weekend, Wednesday to Friday, perfect for a $39 Burbank to McCarron special on JetBlue. Some craps, a lot of poker, a complete disregard for my “no drinking before six unless it’s a weekend, holiday or baseball game” rule. This was just the restful getaway I needed from my absurdly under-stressed daily routine. It would also be a chance to sample from the most recent round of restaurants freshly poached from other cities by the great Sin City vortex. Keenly aware that Marty can eat Mexican food four days in a row by accident, I decided to put myself in charge of dinner reservations. Leaving it to Marty would entail the two of us hopping into a cab, stopping at the first orange and black sign we come to–no doubt at some strip mall near the corner of Koval and Trop–and telling myself that my dismal taquitos are really the rabbit symphony ravioli from Le Cirque, barely a mile away.

I had heard only raves about Craftsteak, MGM Grand’s latest entry in the city’s never-ending competition for the best $30 piece of meat. It’s a contest that will never have a winner. The only thing that’s been decided so far is that $30 became $40, and $40 is now $50. Not content with half a Franklin for a 16 oz ribeye, Craftsteak, among others, has found a way to double that, but I get ahead of myself. The restaurant certainly satisfied Marty’s only directive to me, “Steaks at a big, fancy, dress-up place.” Having been friends for enough years, he didn’t have to remind me of his other, personalized requirements–Nothing weird, raw or remotely Asian. Steaks, it would be.

The pedigree of Craftsteak had me instantly hooked. Owner and super-chef Tom Colicchio’s highly-rated Gramercy Tavern in New York was the site of the best meal of my life. Twice. My meals there weren’t simple (Craftsteak’s mantra), or cheap (Craftsteak’s anathema) but embodied such care, confidence and attention to detail–paired with sublime wine recommendations and flawless service–that the experiences have become, in my mind, the benchmarks to which all other restaurants are held.

The Craftsteak reservation–party of 3, 8:30 P.M., Thursday, was easy enough to get, even on two days notice. Cause for alarm? Probably not, just a slow week in Vegas between cage fights and conventions. No matter, Marty and I were going to have fun. This wasn’t gearing up to be one of those “I want to be snorting a line off the small of a hooker’s back by ten-thirty” kind of trips, but whatever is just below that is what we were up for. The flight out of Burbank was a good primer for the coming days. We were free-wheelin’ men of means, dammit. I decided to check my bag (an amateur’s move, I know. But no way in hell was I flying to Vegas for a mid-week three-day weekend without cologne, hair gel and fuck-lube. (Curiously, the TSA recently announced that up to 4oz of “personal lubricant” was permissible in carry-on luggage. For the volume-challenged, that’s roughly the amount of lubrication required to squeeze a German Shepard, or a German, through a basketball hoop.) Marty informed me as we neared security that he was a) financing at least part of his getaway with months’ worth of collected spare change, and that b) said coins were currently stuffed in a sock in the bottom of his backpack. A sock full of coins? Through security? Okay, maybe it’s a bit ghetto, even a tad Damon Runyon, but a sock o’ coins is a weapon, no matter how you swing it. I had panicked visions of Marty’s imminent arrest, strip search and banishment to the draconian no-fly list. Of course the federalized, no-nonsense bag peekers would confiscate this item. The effects would ripple through the whole world of transportation–coins would be banned on all flights! Wait, that’s ridiculous. The government can’t ban coins. They’d just put a limit on the number of coins, say, ten total, that you could carry, regardless of denomination. I was proud of the security compromise I had just drafted, passed and ratified in my head when I saw the TSA man asked Marty, “Is this your bag?”

I slipped my shoes back on and tried to recall my lawyer’s cell phone number from memory. The agent rescanned Marty’s bag, promptly removed the offending sock–and proceeded to press, squeeze and jiggle it to make sure there was nothing naughty hidden inside the mound of change! Satisfied that there was not a Derringer or a tarantula lurking among the dimes and nickels–yeah, like Marty has quarters–he handed Marty his sock back and sent him on his way with a smile. “Boy, you can take the boy out of the trailer,” Marty said of himself as he strolled up to where I was sweating, “But you can’t….” He didn’t need to finish. He reached his hand into his pocket and absent-mindedly pulled out his I Luv NY cigarette lighter. Good to know our airways are in capable hands. It wasn’t until we tried boarding the flight home from Las Vegas that the agents there discovered Marty’s corkscrew (complete with two-inch foil knife) that had been in the bag the whole time.

Thursday arrived in a hung-over haze and dinner was in jeopardy. At 4 P.M. Marty was up several hundred dollars at the Bellagio’s $10-20 limit Hold ‘em table and I was holding my own at the $6-12 game. He drifted over every now and then to eye my stack and finally asked if I was still serious about “this dinner thing.” I told him that it was important to me, and there was a sudden, awkward silence between us at the utterance of the single gayest thing ever said in a poker room. Our meeting instantly dissolved as though we didn’t know each other. I had to pound an afternoon Michelob just to rediscover my balls.

But an hour later we had reconvened at the sports bar for a quick conference that set me back $60, thanks to the tightest video poker bank this side of that egregious shit-hole known as Mandalay Bay. Marty and I had jackhammered our livers rather hard the night before. Now we were both hungry and Marty needed a nap. We decided to see if we could move our dinner reservation up an hour to 7:30. I figured it was a long shot at a dazzling new star like Craftsteak. But I had the dutiful assistant make the call anyhow, reminding him to be contrite and humble, and to be sure to mention that we would only be two people instead of three, as a sort of bargaining chip. I even found myself giving him the sample dialogue to see if “there was any possible way, on such terribly short notice….” He called back two minutes later to say it was no problem. The restaurant would be happy to have us early.

Seriously? Since when does that happen among the uber-hip joints? Bad sign. Storm clouds rising.

We split up–Marty to nap and I to find a liquor store that sold rolling papers–a corkscrew wasn’t the only contraband to have crossed into the Silver State. My mission, however, was sidetracked by a dwarf with a booming, amplified voice outside, of all places, O’Sheas Hotel and Casino. His commanding voice was irresistible–a tiny black hole within a city that itself is an all-powerful vortex from which not light nor innocence nor a stray hundred dollar bill can escape. I happily threw down three crisp Benjamins at the $5 blackjack table–which at O’Sheas makes you a very big spender, worthy of a “How you doing, sir?” from the floor man. In twelve straight hands I was expertly fleeced of my chips and never lost the smile on my face. I was too enthralled by the little person, now standing atop the bar, blowing his coach’s whistle and pouring shots of what appeared to be Simple Green All Purpose Cleaner down the throats of anyone willing to cough up a few singles for the privilege. Ladies got the added bonus of a kiss dead on the mouth. Even the guys playing the worst-odds-in-the-casino big wheel game by the front door seemed to be enjoying themselves.  It was 5 P.M. on a Thursday. The mercury was well into three digits and everyone at O’Sheas, I mean everyone, was having a party. Who knew?

Ninety minutes later I had showered, used one of the rolling papers, called the boyfriend, found my way into a collared shirt and negotiated the Mirage cabstand. From the Strip, The MGM Grand gleamed like an enormous teal Winnebago in the waning autumn light. Somehow I navigated, unaided, the sprawling floor space of the City of Entertainment and strolled into Craftsteak at 7:31. The hostess said our table was ready when we were, but I told her we’d have a drink first. Marty was there at the bar. We took a moment to approve one another’s sartorial selections–spiffy on both counts–and ordered a sharpener. This nickname for a Red Bull and Vodka comes with two rules: 1) you must have this drink as the very first cocktail of what you expect to be a long evening and 2) you can drink only one–unless you have bail money.

Sufficiently sharpened, I buzzed over to the hostess stand and asked to be seated. The hostess plucked two menus from the rack and led us cheerfully…right back into the bar. She pulled back the chair at a bar table no more than three feet from where we had just been standing. A bar table. Now the ease with which we were able to change our reservation made perfect sense. There’s nothing like being seated at a bar table to wipe away the patina of a good restaurant and the exhilaration that goes with it. You’re a second-class citizen at best, marginally better than the poor folks eating at the bar itself, which Hemingway said no man could do with dignity, but still on the outside looking in. I scanned Marty’s face for a reaction; I was only going to ask for a better table if sitting bar-side was going to kill our enjoyment of the meal. A ripple of disappointment flittered across his face, but quickly subsided. This was a Tom Colicchio establishment, held to the highest standards by a master of the trade. Certainly such a restaurateur would not allow bar patrons to feel neglected. I bit my tongue and sat down. Fortunately for me, I had the chair, which carried with it the feel of being in the main dining room, but Marty fell back into a cushy sofa that enveloped his 6-2 frame. The disappointment, now heartier, returned. Dinner on the couch. Turn on the Lakers’ game and it’s like we never left home. The woman next to Marty on the sofa was a full half hour smarter than we were and quickly saved the day by showing him how to use the mountain of throw pillows that divided their respective ends of the couch as lumbar support. He tucked a few pillows under his lower back and was a new man.

While Marty started on the wine list, I perused the menu. The meats are divided into two sections, roasted and grilled.  Roasted meats aren’t common on steakhouse menus; I found it a daring choice…and a bit suspect. It took Marty less than two minutes close the wine list, deeming it prohibitively expensive. I didn’t have to look at it myself to know that he was right. If the menu prices were any indication, and they were, then one would be hard-pressed to find anything on the wine list under three digits. A big believer in wines by the glass–especially when I’m getting a fish starter and a meat main course, or vice versa–I tossed the idea out to Marty and he jumped on board. It’s been said many times that a good way to judge a restaurant is by the soup. Bathrooms are also a great indicator. Does the restaurant’s design, ambience, and customer care stop at the washroom door or does it carry on into the stalls? A dirty, neglected or uninviting privy demonstrates a certain fuck you to the customer that says hurry up and piss so you can get back out to the table and spend some more money! Many great sushi spots in the San Fernando Valley have a habit of negating the effects of their excellent food by then subjecting diners to a third-world shitter. The by-the-glass selection also says a great deal about the restaurant. The prices on Craftsteak’s by-the-glass menu read like the full bottle prices of a moderately priced restaurant, ranging from $15 to $27.

Enter Miranda to sort it all out for us. Our waitress was a lovely, mocha-skinned woman who knew her way around the menu, but whose professionalism had been diminished by Las Vegas’s endless supply of uninformed customers and a management eager to exploit them. There were no specials, she announced. The menu was the special. That’s a line I’d be perfectly happy to never hear again. She asked if we’d been here before and when I said that we were first-timers, I felt our bill rise by an additional twenty percent. Miranda was strikingly beautiful in the low, forgiving light of the bar. Marty cast one into the wind. “What brings you to Las Vegas? he asked her.

“Just taking care of my kid,” she said, borrowing a line normally used by hookers. Miranda deflected our attention back to the meal. “Well, what we are really known for is our Kobe beef,” she said, directing us to the outlined box in the center of the menu. It was a box I had noticed, smiled at, and promptly ignored a few minutes earlier. For anywhere from $80 to $100, you got a 6oz. portion–roughly the size of a Snickers bar–of Americanized, thoroughly un-Japanese beef that would melt in your mouth only slightly more that the regular filet at half the price. Knowing all too well what Kobe beef is, and in America, what it isn’t, I decided to hear her pitch anyway. “It’s the yummiest, most tender beef on Earth,” she said.  ”It’s from Japan.”

“And where is yours from?” I asked.

“Idaho.”

“I see.”

Undeterred, she went for the knock-out punch. “But if you really want the complete experience, we offer the ’silver selection’ of Kobe beef. It’s the best, most authentic Kobe beef you can get and it’s $120 for a 4oz. serving.”

“Where’s it from?”

“Australia.”

So let me get this straight: Craftsteak offers really expensive Kobe beef from the land of famous potatoes or really, really Kobe expensive beef from the home of the Scotch filet. And not one bite of Kobe beef from, well, Kobe. Keep in mind, the menu didn’t feature quotes around the word Kobe, or even refer to the selections as Kobe-style. They were just flat out calling it Kobe beef.

More important, here we see the perfect demonstration of what I consider one of the great fuck-yous in all of restaurantdom: forcibly steering a customer to the most expensive thing on the menu.  This isn’t just my post-Great Depression, WASPy, Southern roots talking. Even if the item being suggested really is what the joint is known for (and please, no place in America is known for Kobe beef), don’t treat me like an asshole by making it twice as expensive as everything else on the menu, you stupid cow….Okay, kid, calm down. She’s just doing was she’s been told to do. No need to pull out the daggers just yet. Take a breath. Give her a chance.

End of Part I. Next time: We order.