Downtown Beds is located at the butt end of a 17th-century palace. It’s got its own three-story space with a sub-courtyard. Jesters, black sheep aristocrats, and shackled infidels probably lived and died back here.
The hostel offers free bicycles to use during the day (bring your own lock).
Cooler, 20 to 30-something crowd, and more local vibe.
I got my own room for 99% of the time until an employee wanted to take a siesta in a bed next to mine.
Since it’s connected to an ultra-deluxe hotel, the hot water stays hot!
Cool main room with long futon couches and projector.
Sadly operated by Hostelling International, which kind of standardizes (Americanizes) the hotel’s offerings. It comes with the typical H.I. breakfast fare of jam, bread, coffee, and bananas. They also offer Jumex juices.
The Spaniards must have been scared of Indian arrow attacks because these 17th-century walls will survive a dozen apocalypses and still be left standing; the building is heavily fortified with solid concrete, brick and rock so the wifi is impossible to penetrate any of the rooms outside of the main room.
Beware of establishments in Mexico offering private car services in lieu of taxis! They have their own private car service. I asked the front desk for a taxi and they gave me a private car. It was 200 pesos to ride to the airport from here in one of their private red cars. If you’re not afraid of using their taxis, it would be at least 100 pesos cheaper to go outside and hail a taxi.
Weird disconnection between the ultra-fancy hotel, restaurant, shops, and this hostel. I felt like a peasant on board the Titanic!
Casbah Café – CLOSED
$$ Coffee & Tea
3900 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90029
I really detest this place. The decor is annoying and the drinks are pricey but taste like cheap instant versions of the drinks that they’re supposed to be.
Looks:
2/5
The decor has a washed-out pastel-like motif of what North Africa is supposed to look like. The colors are horrendous and the furniture constitutes mismatched cheap or tattered tables/shelves to hold other things on, primarily their store items. Their store items are so random and out of place and look like a bunch of colorful stuff from a swap meet gloriously thrown on a table for everyone waiting to go to the bathroom to shrug at while waiting to go to the bathroom. The crevices and scratches in the concrete are black and dirty. The high ceiling probably saves this place from smelling musty. A possible one extra star, but I decided against it. The wobbly lightweight metal outdoor tables have very poor balance underneath their dying vine caves on the slant of a hill going upwards.
Drinks:
1/5
For the area, I’m surprised they can get away with serving the poor drinks that they do. I’d expect poor quality drinks in a gas station town, not Silver Lake.
The chai constitutes an overly sweet instant chai powder and is about a dollar more expensive than the price listed on the wall, which I asked about. I guess the disparity of price is part of the disorganized motif. The sweet powdered chai with heated milk is about the same price as a freshly brewed chai at Intelligentsia next door.
The iced coffee is so incredibly bad, I couldn’t drink it. Given the benefit of the doubt that this isn’t brewed Folger’s instant coffee, the coffee has an aftertaste as if the grind is stale or lackluster. It was incredibly hard to drink. I tried even drinking and swallowing this drink really fast to not let the aftertaste attack my taste buds like they were. I left most of the drink behind which I rarely do.
Overall, I hate this place. I hate it being located in an area I pass by all the time. Please close down, please close down!
Dana Hills Year Book Staff
Education
San Juan Capistrano, CA 92675
You know everyone in school so you’re really surprised you lost the ASU election to that airhead Michelle; you dropped all your AP science classes and now you’re on the verge of being rejected to UCSB. Although you are an efficient vice president of Key Club and you’ve played soccer since 8th grade, you are untrustworthy beneath your smooth facade. You worry about your goals so you wait in line to talk to the school counselor.
The counselor advises you to join DHHS yearbook because of your grades in AP Literature and Comp. Of course, you didn’t tell your counselor you plagiarized virtually every essay you’ve ever written including the one you are about to hand in on “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. You really don’t know how to write well, but you do know everyone in school. So you join.
People pity the yearbook that year. Michelle is spelled “Michael,” quotes are missing and baby pictures are transposed so the football player who got a scholarship to Cal is mistaken for the girl with Alopecia who lives at a “dirty” apartment in the Clem. But your stint on the yearbook got you accepted to UCSB! You go on to play soccer for the team and everyone will remember you. You’re smiling on Facebook. You’re satisfied and your hair got lighter. Go, Gauchos!
Por Siempre
$ Tacos, Vegan
Calle de Chiapas 169
06700 Ciudad de México, CDMX
Mexico
It’s been years since I have been so excited about writing a review. As far as vegan street tacos are concerned, Por Siempre (Forever) crushes all other taco places I’ve ever been before and I can’t ever look at tacos the same way again.
For one, this is a NIGHTTIME street taco place. I came to the Roma Norte during the day to find this place closed. I was so bummed out, I had to come back later at night. I knew a place like this would be busy, so I came back shortly after they opened at 6:45 p.m. and there were already about ten people waiting for their food.
I got the Big Bebe and the Al Pastor, both of which are incredible. But the Big Bebe, however, is unbelievable; it has like so many flavors of spice, that I don’t think I could do justice describing what was going on on top of my tongue. I believe both came with seitan/trigo and not soy, but I am not sure what kind of fake meat was in that big baby. I want to go back tomorrow, so I might write an update. They also offer free salsa, nopals/nopales/cactus, and potatoes to put on top of the tacos.
I am glad that there are so many soyrizo fans, as then I know they won’t run out of the options that I am into if I ever stay in the DF again. I am not against soyrizo per se, it’s just that every place in LA seems to offer it and it tastes like a boca burger, chili, and Worcestershire sauce blended together.
Posh South Beach Hostel
Hostels
820 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL 33139
This place is Fascist Summer Camp.
I had artwork up at this event for Art Basel and decided to stay in Miami Beach. If you read my reviews, I stay at A LOT of hostels all over the world. I usually like to stay at the nicer ones with cool amenities, like the beautiful pool on this one sold me quickly. The atmosphere in the kitchen area is great and the ice cold pool is at least as beautiful as it looks!
However, the rest of this place somewhat sucked.
I booked this place back in August because I knew Art Basel would sell everything out fast. They have a requests section after you pay $50 a night for this hostel. I requested a bottom bunk because I am kinda old now and don’t have the monkey-like flexibility of climbing up and down ladders as I did 15 years ago. And that’s actually exacerbated by having a somewhat awful back due to a bad bike accident that has seen three chiropractors and a year’s worth of physical therapy.
When I got here, the first thing I sensed was that this place was insanely understaffed during Art Basel week. The guy who helped me was really busy. I had to wait about fifteen minutes for him to finish up as he was working the front of the hotel this was connected to. An older couple came in after me to check in to the hotel part of the building and he helped them out first since I’m steerage. Eventually, he signaled me to follow him upstairs. I told him I requested a bottom bunk and without hesitation, he unapologetically responded “it was a request – and we don’t have any.” I could forgive if they’re just insanely busy because of Art Basel and if they’re understaffed. But what’s the point of having the requests section listed on the website if no effort is made to fulfill them? Sin esfuerzo! It’s a beautiful place but just the entire first impression made me feel like I was staying at a $15/night public youth hostel. I was paying almost $250 on their glitchy and outdated credit card machine with a loose wire while signing a long waiver with two pages worth of rules: ‘NO SEX – that’s what a hotel is for!’
When he finished, he rushed me downstairs through a long and winding series of beds. My first reaction is that it looks like a Turkish refugee camp. All the blankets, towels, feet, heads, clothing, and shoes hanging from almost 50 beds in one large room were a bit overwhelming. I was almost running to keep up with him! This is the first hostel I’ve ever stayed at that doesn’t have individual rooms. I am not against this idea but its execution is a bit crazy. I hope their Haitian cleaner gets paid well to keep up with all of this, as she was doing quite a good job for how insanely busy it was.
Since it was one large room and we still have two primary genders, they have a guard with a flashlight doing the rounds every night to ensure there is one clothed person per bed. There are no curtains on the bed unlike some hostels with large rooms. And there is basically a lot of security protocol at the entrance and pool area for that very same reason. If you want to have sex here, the best bet is the showers all the way to the back.
Breakfast is awful coffee, hot water, earl grey tea, orange juice that tastes a bit like Tang mixed with actual orange juice, very low grade processed white bread, cream cheese, butter, jams with high fructose corn syrup, apples (sometimes) and it comes with styrofoam plates and cups and no recycling bin for them.
Posh is a misnomer and pricey for what it is not. But at least it’s clean, incredibly located near South Beach, and has an awesome pool and kitchen/tv area. The management/workers are a bit mean but I appreciate that they’re not pushovers and they need to be tough because the sheer size of their one large room of beds must be insane to control at all times. The lack of private dorm rooms perhaps is a problem too.
Useful: 5 Funny: 2 Cool: 0
12/7/2016
Comment from Indira G. of Posh South Beach Hostel Business Owner
Hello, hello Chris G.! Thanks for taking the time to write out all of your thoughts and observations on Posh Hostel! We value your opinion. It’s a bummer some of our policies were not what you were expecting when choosing Posh Hostel. We do have strict rules that all guests must abide, as we want everyone to enjoy their time here in Miami and with us here at Posh! We’re sorry your time wasn’t the glowing 5 star one our guests so often write to us, raving about. Kind regards,
Ruby’s Diner
$$ Diners, American (Traditional), Venues & Event Spaces
30622 S Coast Hwy
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
Things to think about:
The kitchen is all the way on the left hand side of the diner, while the seats are all the way on the right side (or upstairs.) The food will be cooler than other Ruby’s locations because of the sheer breeze of walking the food from the kitchen to the tables.
If you complain about the coolness of the food that was whisked in the breeze, there is a microwave located between the kitchen and the tables. The microwave cannot be seen from the tables, except for the horrible table that’s located next to the bathrooms and the servers doors. I pity anyone who has to sit there.
There was never a golden age of this Ruby’s location! I laugh at all of the other reviewers that claim it was sometime eons ago, before late 2000s. I worked here in the 90s and people were still complaining.
Most of the servers are confused teenagers. The prettier ones get better tips.
When you see long lines and waits, do not act condescending when a confused teenage server as indicated in #4 takes longer than 5 minutes to ring in your burger order with complicated modifications. Guacomole burger with no guacomole, anyone?
Ruby’s is not a 50s diner. It is a 40s diner.
I’m not sure if Ruby is still alive, but the real one once visited this location. I saw her when I worked here over a decade ago and she looked like an old lady from an Alfred Hitchcock film. But there was another old lady that pretended to be her at this location, too. She looked more hipsterish (in old lady standards) and always wore a beret and was always hanging out her with her 50-year-old son or lover. She was bipolar and either extremely nice or mean.
Due to the sheer volume of people that come here at any given time, I made more money in tips here than anyone else I knew when I was 17. I often got out of work at 12 or 1 a.m on a Sunday morning with $$$ and smelling and looking like grease, while my friends were in the middle of having fun and partying. It was awesome, um.
The London Particular
££ Cafes
399 New Cross Road
London SE14 6LA
United Kingdom
I don’t make enough money to eat here, but I make enough money to drink here!
London Particular offers my favorite lattes in all of London. I don’t know what it is about it, but their brew is incredibly good, strong; and goes well with soya and their lattes are delicious. It looks like an amazing coffee shop but is more of an eating place. The ambience is incredibly nice. If they could bulldoze the fish and chips shop next door, they should. They’ve got one huge communal table in the middle, with two or three tinier high tables that seat two, barely any seating. There is outside seating, which is nice in the afternoons when the sun comes in. Granted their wifi is free but it isn’t really a place to write an epic novel in, as it gets busy fast. It’s a good place to sit for 30 minutes. I’ve often bypassed coming here because of how busy it was, but I’d certainly come more often stay here longer if it had more seating!
Casbah Café – CLOSED
$$ Coffee & Tea
3900 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90029
I really detest this place. The decor is annoying and the drinks are pricey but taste like cheap instant versions of the drinks that they’re supposed to be.
Looks:
2/5
The decor has a washed out pastel-like motif of what North Africa is supposed to look like. The colors are horrendous and the furniture constitutes mismatched cheap or tattered tables/shelves to hold other things on, primarily their store items. Their store items are so random and out of place and looks like a bunch of colorful stuff from a swap meet gloriously thrown on a table for everyone waiting to go to the bathroom to shrug at, while waiting to go to the bathroom. The crevices and scratches in the concrete are black and dirty. The high ceiling probably saves this place from smelling musty. A possible one extra star, but I decided against it. The wobbly lightweight metal outdoor tables have very poor balance underneath their dying vine caves on the slant of a hill going upwards.
Drinks:
1/5
For the area, I’m surprised they can get away with serving the poor drinks that they do. I’d expect poor quality drinks in a gas station town, not Silver Lake.
The chai constitutes an overly sweet instant chai powder and is about a dollar more expensive than the price listed on the wall, which I asked about. I guess the disparity of price is part of the disorganized motif. The sweet powdered chai with heated milk is about the same price as a freshly brewed chai at Intelligentsia next door.
The iced coffee is so incredibly bad, I couldn’t drink it. Given the benefit of the doubt that this isn’t brewed Folger’s instant coffee, the coffee has an aftertaste as if the grind is stale or lackluster. It was incredibly hard to drink. I tried even drinking and swallowing this drink really fast to not let the aftertaste attack my taste buds like they were. I left most of the drink behind which I rarely do.
Overall, I hate this place. I hate it being located in an area I pass by all the time. Please close down, please close down!
Pansophie Personality & Color
Life Coach
2033 SE Harrison St
Milwaukie, OR 97222
Alex Hall and I are not friends anymore because she flaked on me the morning of my 12/14/16 gay wedding. She requested that her review be given 5 stars after having 4 stars, but I am going down to 3 stars because I still have no idea what the fuck she was doing.
Alex Hall does not see dead people but she knows how colors that emanate from the body correspond to personality types. The wizard behind the curtain and her powder pink shop of color therapy mostly help balance people who have health or psychological issues with assessing their chakra colors and suggesting practical solutions, but going to Pansophie is also a good way of helping anyone else who is in need of a color consultation. So what does that mean?
Keywords:
Holistic Fashion Consultant
Holistic Interior Designer
Holistic Life Coach
Holistic Etc.
While getting a color consultation here suggests a need for the participant to believe mysterious chakra colors are floating in front of him or her, the chakra colors are really only a method of assessing the personality types and issues through a mixture of these colors. You take an online test first. The result of the online test is then translated to what you should do with that information through a consolation with the person who runs this shop. I believe the consultation is crucial in understanding the assessment. This kind of stuff is not ‘new age’ but follows ancient methods of assessing personalities and diseases through the constitution of the body. Think along the lines of the ancient Greek and Roman doctors and philosophers assessing personalities and diseases through the four humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. It worked on ancient people for hundreds of years.
Alex Hall will not assess your bile but upon purchasing an exam and consultation through her website, you take an exam that you answer the best possible answer from two questions that it poses. The store section of her website is actually a little difficult to navigate because the site manager is apparently lazy (cough) but you can call Alex Hall and she can direct you on how to find and purchase the exam. The issue I have with the exam, and like most psychology consultations and classes I have taken, is that it seemingly ascribes to the dualist approach of talking with people. If you are an atheist/humanist or physicalist who believes that it is not possible for a body to coexist with a soul or within a spiritual realm, you will think this test is biased. However Alex Hall said that the exam actually has a balance of questions that will not affect one’s results based on the answers they give. Since I believe we access everything in our unconscious through things we interact with, watch and know in the present, my violet is very low. These questions that assess the level of violet in the body, for example, depend on the subject believing that one accesses his or her knowledge or creativity from some kind of higher power. If you have taken many years of psychotherapy and/or are overly self-absorbed like me, being submissive to a higher power seems to be very limiting, except sometimes in sexual play.
A day after I took the online test, I received my phone consultation. Alex Hall went through a general description of all of the chakra types. The seven colors that constitute one’s chakra system include red, green, orange, blue, violet, indigo and yellow. If you have general knowledge of chakras, the descriptions of the colors she gives are not very different. However, the new thing I learned about colors that each of the chakras has negative qualities on top of their general attributes. The ‘negative’ attributes are low functioning aspects of each color like anger, bitterness, PTSD, etc. I received a personalized chart in a PDF file that constitutes the percentages of how open each aura is after I had taken the online test. I also received a percentage of how much of the negative colors constitute the openness of each aura. It was a percentage within a percentage! Hall thoroughly went through each of the seven types for about 40 minutes with a focus on my own percentages. Having someone spend that much time with someone else is always a rewarding experience. Since I learned my green is also very low (lower than my violet), the best thing about this consultation was being suggested that:
I should always use, wear and imagine more turquoise.
Get more shoulder rubs.
Use pine oil.
Write more love poetry.
My life probably won’t change much until I boost my green chakra but I feel like buying a turquoise t-shirt and writing a love poem may actually be a very wise investment.
Vons
$$ Grocery
4520 Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Their ‘world class’ customer service is laughable!
So their cashier-slash-bagger Michael didn’t give me one of the three groceries I’ve purchased with my friend. I had to call into the store and see if they had the pasta that Michael apparently put into another bag that he didn’t give us. It was irritating. Why put two items in one bag and one item into a whole new bag? My friend biked back to retrieve the third item. And I complained to Vons’ online customer service about the incident.
Vons Customer Service Team wrote me back:
Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding items left at the checkstand. We apologize for any dissatisfaction this may have caused you and appreciate the opportunity to respond.
You expressed your concerns regarding the cashier, Michael. At Vons we strive for world class customer service and a positive shopping environment. This incident certainly does not reflect our standards to this commitment.
At your earliest convenience, please return to the store with the receipt and speak with a Store Associate at the Customer Service Booth. We will be happy to rectify the situation.
I come in. The store associate guy at the Customer Service Booth, like, shrugged. “Uh, you got your bag back, and he probably was really busy.”
Rectification from ‘world class’ customer service team:
Straight to The Point Professional Piercing
$$ Piercing, Jewelry
2807 E Speedway Blvd
Tucson, AZ 85716
I waited two months to review my nipple piercing experience. I found the results are great! In fact, I am seriously considering posting a picture of my new 14g stainless steel barbells to show how good they look but only so few people would want to see detailed pictures of hairy pierced man nipples.
I was biking up and down Speedway Blvd in Tucson and stumbled upon this shop. The guy who owns this shop was eating lunch and I inquired to him about piercing my nipples. He said he can do this and to come back in a few hours. I did. The entire procedure took fifteen maybe twenty minutes and it cost less than or about $100, which was more than other places but worth it. The place felt like a sterile doctor’s office with zen-like quietness and minimal furniture. The experience of piercing my nipples was not as painful as I’d expect either.
I am impressed with his method of piercing with a type of plastic surgical tubing that heals up faster than the more traditional surgical steel. Everything healed up within a month of him putting them in because things heal faster with plastic!
While the piercer/owner from Portland was nice enough and I received a thank-you card (which was accidentally mailed to my neighbor who then knew of my piercings), it is perhaps in my cynicism to be averse to receiving advice from a self-proclaimed ‘life coach’.
Since we were physically close to each other as he would need to be when piercing, we struck up a conversation. We talked about why I was there (academic reasons) and like most people who have recently finished their college or postgrad degrees, I was confused about what to do next and told him I was working the same exact music venue kind of job I did at 18 before I went to college. This is when the life-coaching began to shine through…
He took a patronizing stance that sounded antagonistic about going to college and it getting in the way often with what people really want to do in life. While I can agree with this position in essence, thanks for reinforcing this fear I already have that I wasted ten years on my life! He didn’t get his degree and told me he went on to be a successful shopkeep while making tons of money, but sticking to his passion of piercing. I mean, fuck… It made me feel like I didn’t have my life together, but at least I got nice piercings!
Alchemy Tattoo
$$ Tattoo
2854 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
I have officially completed my left arm sleeve at this place!
I work with people who worked with Mike (“Burns-y”) who worked at my work prior to me and subsequently became a tattoo artist who now works at this shop. If that wasn’t confusing: the tattoo I got was simple, clean, sharp, and good. Everyone who doesn’t like morbid things says it’s their favorite tattoo of mine.
I come to the shop one day. Mike wasn’t in but a ton of other tattoo artists and the owner were. They were scrambling to come up to the front and greet me. I told them I was looking for Mike. Everyone in the shop let out an exasperated “…oh” as if hopes for making a tattoo sale were just mashed. I came in about four times after, never formally, to look for Mike. I finally saw Mike the second time I came in and we talked about a ship tattoo. He seemed interested but asked me to come in sometime in the coming week to talk more about it. Afterward, the 3rd and 4th times I came in and he wasn’t there. I ask the owner of the tattoo shop about his whereabouts and he shrugged and told me to come in later or to email him and he’ll email Mike. He told me he didn’t have his cell number (possibly he didn’t want to give it to me). I then just got it from a coworker. We finally met up on a Friday. He was less enthusiastic about the ship idea on my chest and having anxiety about it actually. He said that it would look weird, he couldn’t do it, it would take too long and asymmetrical things (I wanted an asymmetrical ship) wouldn’t work on the chest. His reluctance kind of freaked me out, so being a friend-of-a-friend kind of person that he was, I didn’t want to just leave him with nothing. I thought about other nautical-related things and decided upon a compass on my top arm/shoulder area, next to my chest. It worked out for him (he’s a symmetry nerd, something very architectural about how he works), and was happy. He began drawing up the tattoo on the flash and we began tattooing about an hour later.
Things I would like to point out as I waited to get tattooed: The owner of the shopping complex, an older Asian woman, is really hyper-vigilant in an unnecessary way. I was hanging out in the back parking lot on my cellphone and she harped asking who am I and what I was doing there? “Uh, I am just loitering. Mind if I lay on your open tarp and tan for a fucking bit?” And if that isn’t enough, I believe it was she who has a parrot that also similarly harps. I thought it was a schizophrenic girl until one of the tattoo artists pointed out that it actually wasn’t.
The tattoo on the flash and the initial layout was unsurprisingly crisp. He used a very fine gun needle to tattoo me, which was the first time someone used something so crisp. It was almost like a lithographic print. He got extremely upset because I am jittery and my arm sometimes twitches almost spastically, not in a dramatic way, but in a way that his precise drawing became somewhat flawed when he added additional details to the tattoo that weren’t being traced from the flash. Don’t blame me if you can’t hold my spastic arm tight enough and make a mistake when free-hand tattooing. In any event, I came in and got some ink. It’s imperfect but it is crisp and looks like what it was meant to be. Good!
Saigon Sandwich
$ Vietnamese, Sandwiches
560 Larkin St
San Francisco, CA 94102
All of you Tenderloinians who wrote about how huge this $3.75 bahn mi sandwich is must collectively weigh 100 pounds! ‘Large’ is an overstatement and my ability to eat three of these amazing sandwiches would prove it.
I am from Texas. Just kidding. But this sandwich is definitely not from Texas, nor is it underwhelming nor small in any way. It is a perfect hefty size.
Hefty might be defined in terms of thickness versus length. Saigon Sandwich’s bahn mi sandwich is larger than a burger and a little smaller than half a sub from Subway. Unlike a Subway sub, it makes up in VOLUME. While VOLUME, in phallic terms, is very important, the same holds true with sandwiches. You can have a really long veggie-filled baguette with delicious innards but if the sandwich isn’t thick, I mean PACKED, spilling out from every angle, you can certainly enjoy it but it wouldn’t be very impressive. I prefer both though. Like, the same holds true with the best of the best burritos. I want to hold a burrito the size of my foot and feel almost uncomfortable at the end. With this bahn mi, I want to have to catch every leaf, carrot, daikon, tofu spilling out and me catching it with my mouth and have sauce dripping all over because I don’t feel uncomfortable at the end. There’s no way a pickled veggie sandwich, unlike a burrito, can ever do this to me.
The freshly prepared and amazingly tasty fried tofu is something I cannot get enough of, as well as the incredibly fresh vegetables. The service is very fast too. The lady working there made five different sandwiches for five people in less than two minutes.
My Village Café
£ Vegetarian, Vegan
37 Chalk Farm Road
London NW1 8AJ
United Kingdom
If it was MY village, there wouldn’t be so many cows in it. This is literally the cheesiest vegetarian restaurant I’ve ever been in. Who puts cheese over falafels? KURDS.
Well maybe not, I’ve never been to the border area of Western Asia and the Middle East so I am not for certain how much cheese exists there. I once I had a dream I was in these parts. I was wearing the wrong traditional hat and clothes, and everyone was laughing at me at border inspection when my little plane landed.
Anyway, this Kurdish vegetarian restaurant was perhaps more interesting in an ethnographic sense – the decor was very effectively un-western in a way that appeared actually authentic. I last went here about a year ago and the servers/workers were wearing headscarfs and traditional garb, similar in a way that seemed like something that they’d wear any day of the week.
But the food, the food had something left to be desired – it was cheese-filled (not printed on the menu) and jejune, I actually felt like nothing from this village came into existence outside of a plastic container at Sainsbury’s. It was very, in American terms, blah.
But really, I will keep in mind to ask for a falafel with no cheese if I find myself in Northern Iraq.
Photofusion Gallery
£ Art Galleries
17A 17a Electric Lane
London SW9 8LA
United Kingdom
Photofusion is an upstairs photo gallery and printing place with a buzzer to keep the local buzzards out. Let’s step in the time-traveling dome back to 2011 when I had four art prints printed at Photofusion. Hello? I said to the buzzer. We’re not open. Then I say something, something, something. Then the words “buy”, “purchase”, and “spend money” released the lock to the door and got me upstairs.
I walk upstairs to an empty receptionist table beside an empty gallery with boxes for an upcoming exhibition (see next paragraph). An older woman walks over to sit at the receptionist table three or four minutes later and points me over to the back printing room, which was in a hallway. The quality of the matte prints with mounting was incredible and the price was incredible(-y high). Oh boy, did I drop £££ for prints that sold for ££ from a coffee shop a few months later. Even with my Goldsmiths student ID, discount was negligible.
Photofusion hosted a Vivian Maier exhibition that showcased a good portion of her work in 2011 and was her formal debut to the UK. Vivian Maier was an American street photographer who was ‘discovered’ after some dude who had purchased a ton of her negatives began pimping out digital scans of her negatives on Flickr and various websites until NPR did a story about her. Then she became famous for a hot minute. They showed many of the prints done in black and white from the 50s and some later ones from the 70s in colour. Their staff photo hipster, who seemed forced to be put on wine duty, was so standoffish, she acted appalled that you didn’t pour your own drink, would pour a drink at her end of the table, which was a wide table, and left it there.
Rating:
3.5-ish – somewhere between “A-OK” and “Yay I’m a fan.”
Gabriella Cafe
$$ American (New)
910 Cedar St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
There’s an Aphex Twin song called ‘Come to Daddy’ that reminds me of this reaction I have when they finally delivered my food. I was anticipating a vegan requested plate that had I emailed the chef a few days before and about fifteen minutes after my friend got his food, mine had cheese smothered all over this damn plate.
This was after forty minutes of initial waiting. Before I reacted, the awful server disappeared back into the mood lighting atmosphere, forever. I was running around this empty establishment with the plate in my hand wanting to kick tables, lamps and the decorative bric-a-brac and the few old-timers dining here. I found someone, not the server, either in or near the kitchen almost looking at me as if I landed at the front of the kitchen from Mars. I was irate but polite enough to bite my tongue. It took another fifteen minutes to either de-cheese this $30 vegan-requested pasta option or boil more pasta, sauté more vegetables and drizzle olive oil on top of it.
Paul Cocking, the cook or manager here at the time who probably resonates with his last name, wrote me a few days before that a vegan option can be provided before I booked a reservation on Open Table. I don’t like to make people go out of their way to provide something BASIC but warn them to have something available, as the guy emails me in caps that the “CHEF CAME FROM MILLENIUM AND WILL PROVIDE.” I was unaware that the “chef from Millennium” would provide a Barilla pasta with sautéed vegetables and olive oil and then dump cheese on it. EVEN AS SELF-PROFESSED HORRENDOUS COOK, I COULD HAVE MADE THIS AND IN LESS AMOUNT OF TIME! Whether it was lack of preparation or not in accommodating me, I would be willing to entertain eating an expensive $30 gourmet Barilla vegetable pasta with olive oil had everything else not happened because I was here with someone else for a birthday dinner. Watching one person eat while two people are hungry kills the mood for both people.
This was quite a while ago and I don’t think I have ever been more repulsed by a restaurant’s existence, ever. I wrote about this bad experience on Open Table, and their lack of response reified never directly writing reviews to people who don’t care to read them. In summary, the two plates not only took a long time to arrive, they came at different times, they were small, one was messed up, nothing extravagant and pricey as hell. We went to Saturn Cafe after this $65 joke meal and had taquitos and milk shakes delivered at the same time and for about 1/10th the price, and that were actually filling.
The Refinery – CLOSED
$ Coffee & Tea, Cafes
413 Santa Monica Blvd
Santa Monica, CA 90401
The Refinery is a large grey cube amongst the obnoxiousness of the gaudy shops along the Promenade-adjacent Santa Monica Blvd.
Omg, you are next to the beach, have a panini, have a smoothie, have a diving fin?!
No, you don’t care that you are four blocks away from the most touristy part of Santa Monica Beach and next to the massive amount of foot traffic due to the Downtown to Santa Monica 704 Bus Stop because you are THE REFINERY.
I think of an industrial NIMBY on SimCity when I think of the word ‘refinery’ and I see the smokestacks and refining crude oil and chemicals billowing smoke to create a haze, an atmospheric change when I come inside.
Your cold brew is perfect, your foreboding roominess, lack of a crowd, and sumptuous large empty spaces are amazingly sobering. This is what drinking coffee should make me feel like, and you succeed in sucking out all of the electric atmosphere out of your surroundings. I feel like a cold industrial complex, ready to battle the waves on my surfboard.
Groundwork Coffee Co.
$ Coffee & Tea, Breakfast & Brunch, Caterers
1501 N Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Smoking is for melancholic people who smell bad. And somewhere in the 400-year-old European tradition of smoking and public houses came a place to hold the spittoons of black bile. It was called the PATIO. The Spaniards called it el PATIO.
There’s zombie-like and bloodthirsty desperation that smokers have to light a cigarette on the patio, and they will interrupt your conversation, rip your pocket open and throw quarters at you to light upon the patio. I am on a patio almost every day and there is a ring of being let down when the cigarette ends. The problems that are released with the smoke don’t quite fully make it out of the throat and stay stuck in it. The friends want to go home, people are being kicked out and coffee doesn’t quite resolve it. But why the patio is important is that it is kind of an abject and quiet object, a place to let the collective stream of smoke and hubbub be released. So it helps until it doesn’t.
Groundwork USED to have a patio, two patios, sort of. One at the side of the window along Sunset and one in front at Cahuenga. Up until about a year ago, it was good. Then they got rid of the tables on Sunset, then the tables on Cahuenga disappeared. Maybe homeless people used to take over the areas more than the baristas at Groundwork would like, but things were mellow when the homeless weren’t kicked out. No schizos spitting at people behind the windows (there’s a guy on Sunset who spits at the window if he sees you in it), no threats of arson, no flailing milk carts. But now the chairs were replaced with an empty windowsill, no more sitting outside, no more gazing at Sunset and Cahuenga Blvd. No incredibly hot, beating light.
I got seasonal affective disorder having to be inside. All of the windows at Groundwork want me to be outside. And while I could still see everything outside, I can’t interact with it! I enjoy drinking their Venice blend (the medium one). But the strong roast is good too. And I can deal with a lot of metamorphic changes that they made to simplify their look, but the disappearance of the patio and the pour-your-own-coffee bar feels like they threw the baby out with the bath water.
‘Keeping it simple stupid’ is a very zen concept and I do like that sometimes they leave containers of their salads, wraps or sandwiches that didn’t sell on the windowsills at night. As I was biking away on Sunset one night, I told some homeless guy asking for change that there were salads in front of this place and he was completely unimpressed with the idea of having to walk two blocks for a container of salad and didn’t move. Hollywood.
Masa of Echo Park
$$ Pizza
1800 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
A couple of weeks ago there was a drunk driver that made a sudden turn from Sunset to Lemoyne and slammed into the sidewalk area in front of Masa. He or she took down a big tree, a bike rack, a mailbox, and a street sign; and was able to continue speeding away. That awful accident reminded me that I needed to finally eat here. So a day or two later, my friend and I jumped over the fallen tree, which was still laying there, and tried the 45-minute-long preparation time vegan deep dish pizza for two people.
It was an incredible goo of their own non-Daiya cheese, some kind of vegan cheese I’ve never tried before, and certainly more delicious than the two vegan pizzas that Two Boots puts out. It was big enough for three or four people to finish actually. It came on a tin and was an inch to two inches high. Actually, if I was hungrier at the time, I might have been able to finish more and not leave three slices left on the tin.
The pizza just takes a really, really long time to make! I wouldn’t substitute deliciousness for a speedier pizza in this instance. So come here with someone else who you can talk to for that long. It’s probably better for a date but I was with a childhood friend with 15 years’ worth of stories to potentially discuss over dinner. The service was fine and the dining experience was fine. The price is also pretty reasonable. It came out to $25 including a tip for two people.
Under the Mango Tree
$$ Coffee & Tea, Juice Bars & Smoothies, Acai Bowls
737 5th St
Miami Beach, FL 33139
There is not a thing more special under the mango tree than under any other kind of tree.
I came in here at exactly 3:59 pm. when two women were switching between shifts. I could sense I came at not the greatest time. Neither was very friendly, said hello, or even acknowledged I was there but I didn’t need very friendly. Someone finally came over and I ordered my bowl and tried to find a comfortable seat to sit down at. All of the furniture was kind of small and flimsy. I felt like a bull trying to sit in a dollhouse. I am a thin man of average height at 5’11 and everything required me to bend over and hunch. The tables or footrests (I concluded they were tables because my feet can easily knock them over) were a foot above the ground. It wasn’t comfortable to be on a laptop here so I basically gave that idea up.
When I began to eat the Marley Bowl I ordered, it was a bit underwhelming. The bowl is not that big and not filled to the top. I find it funny that everyone said that these bowls were mind-blowing. But I am Californian and we experience the best of everything, so I get that they may be the queens of the hill here but they were about what I expected for $11. The Marley Bowl comes less with hints of peanut butter and spinach that I hoped for but the acai is delightfully creamy. And it comes with a sparse amount of granola, not too much, which is good. It also comes with BERRIES on top of it, which I would have preferred more peanut butter and spinach as the berries were kind of flavorless distraction (compared to the acai) to the overall flavor.
Useful: 2 Funny: 1 Cool: 1
12/4/2016
Comment from Patricia O. of Under the Mango Tree Business Owner
Hi Chris! You will be happy to know that we now have a new location with much-improved seating (in fact the inability to furnish properly due to the small space of the shop was one of the main reasons for our move). Based on your description you were sitting in what used to be our “glamorized” storage room, as being a shop with less than 400 square foot, we had to be creative in squeezing in as much seating area as we possibly could. In our new location, we now have a functional workspace and more comfortable seating.
Sorry, you were disappointed in our Acai – we actually get a lot of positive feedback from Californians so we don’t agree that we are not in the “queen’s” league. Brazilians love our Acai too and we all know they are the King’s of the hill (insert wink face to communicate our silly light tone since the internet is not fully evolved yet). Regarding the Marley Bowl, everyone has a different peanut butter tolerance so for the addict we recommend adding an extra dollop of our organic PB for only $1.50 to really get the hit. As for the size, most people find it a satiating serving, however, we have multiple options ranging from only $.50 cents to $2 to make the bowl significantly larger depending on your personal appetite.
Regarding the lack of friendly service you received, we really apologize you were not welcomed. I am sure you read our many other reviews that show that we normally excel at this. We hope to make every guest feel happy and satisfied and are disappointed you did not experience this! We would love to show you a true Mango Tree greeting if you give us another try at our new spot next time you’re in town!
India’s Clay Pit
$$ Indian
309 N Virgil Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Cooks please -taste- your food before bringing it out! I got a really bad stomach ache here after eating their undercooked brown rice. My partner told me that it was ‘al dente’ but it was hard enough to give me sharp stomach pains for the rest of the night, which then dominoed into a kind of -yuck- laxative effect.
Now let’s talk about their food food. I don’t appreciate how things are hit or miss here. While my non-vegetarian acquaintances attest to enjoying the meat dishes here, their veg stuff leaves a lot to be desired. The veg curries and vegetables make me wonder whether they are pre-made, while the cooks focus all their energy on freshly preparing the meat items. The spinach/saag essentially tasted as flavorful and fresh as those Indian TV Dinners that you buy in a box and heat in an oven. It tasted like spice added post-hoc to the blandness.
The baingan bharta (eggplant) made thawing a frozen Indian meal actually seem desirable. It was the only time I’ve ever not enjoyed eating that dish out of the five or six Indian restaurants I’ve tried in Los Angeles. It tasted like curry that was coagulated from a flavorless, old eggplant and then pureed into a slop oblivion. I hope that they consider taking it off their menu while sorting out their freshness issues and preparation of their vegetables.
Since I found the curries to be pretty mediocre, I stuck with okra the most recent time I visited and it was better. I am unsure if I lack confidence in their food is fresh but the spices that the okra was prepared in tasted a lot better than the okra itself – it was shriveled. Okra offers a kind of crispness that their dish seemed to lack. Due to the other unfortunate circumstances I had with their food, it leads me to believe that their okra was not fresh either.
We were also served lackluster samosas that were not fresh – they tasted cooled, hardened, and dry in the center. Samosas are amazing when they melt in your mouth and this was the first time I ever got a bad samosa from an Indian restaurant so was taken aback. The hardened daal tasted like clay in the center. But fortunately, we got the pakoras, which actually tasted as good as they’re supposed to taste! Their naan and roti taste fine too.
In the end, it’s a shame that I was pleasantly surprised about getting something good here. I really want to like this place but unfortunately, their vegetarian dishes were at best as good as frozen saag from a TV dinner. It is a shame because I find the paneled ceiling to be beautiful here and hate to see it wasted on mediocre food.
Erin McKenna’s Bakery
$$ Bakeries, Vegan, Gluten-Free
236 N Larchmont Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Apparently, they have enough time to flag an image I drew last year of my experience with one of their aloof workers (or non-experience since she never actually turned around) to get it deleted from Yelp yet not have time to say, “hey I’m sorry our shitty day-old vegan biscuit almost killed you. We will personally ensure that you don’t have to have conversations with the back of any of our aloof employees’ heads ever again.”
By the way, if their staff went on to bigger and better things since my last visit in mid-2013, good for them. I hear there are smug non-profits out there that hire people to teach people how to knit sweaters out of used grocery bags. Still not returning, but thanks for being bothered enough to flag a drawing posted over a year ago.
Useful: 5 Funny: 6 Cool: 2
10/8/2014
Previous review
I remember a skit in I Love Lucy when Lucy McGillicuddy bellows as a disgusted patron at Aunt Martha’s Homemade Salad Dressing for a television commercial skit that Ethel and Lucy were doing to dissuade customers from buying more of their popular salad dressing: “What’s Aunt Martha trying to do, poison me?!”
This is the exact scene and phrase that came into my mind after eating their day-old ‘vegan butter’ biscuit with a stale bagel they offer at a discount price (which is actually still more than the price of a warm bagel you can get next door).
What’s BabyCakes trying to do?!
If I was more punk and dumpster diving, I would need to be so hard-pressed and hungry for food to eat this thing for free. This biscuit was so disgusting that somehow (whether as a direct result of this place or not) I got the stomach flu a few hours later that day and whenever I burped, it left the aftertaste of this damn biscuit. It was stale but held a buttery popcorn taste of oil that may have kept it lubricated and in one piece before crumbling in my mouth like a massive Ortega Highway rock slide.
But to be fair, I’ve had vegan cupcakes and/or a cookie in the past that wasn’t so stale-tasting or bad either. Although nothing tastes fresh-out-of-the-oven warm, their prices beg for otherwise and point to that kitchen in the back of the store that is interestingly never being used, at least when I visit.
“Expensive rice flour dude”, said one of their aloof employees. All of their employees I have encountered here are uniformly unfriendly, as if some social dynamic in this tiny space begs for employees to be mean vegans. Maybe it’s in the size of the space that makes them unfriendly. The time before, some artsy woman who appears as if she can’t wait to quit this stupid bakery gig to start her own knitting boutique is trying desperately not to engage with me as I looked at the scant selection of goods in the display in front of her. After four minutes, I decided not to ask the back of her head, which was two feet away from my face, about a cupcake I saw. I should have blown wind to her head to demand her attention.
Perhaps it is in the rice flour or non-GMO oils why these creations never taste exactly fresh, but I must point fault to things that are well-intentioned, pricey yet still taste like gluten-free geology. Read less Useful: 6 Funny: 12 Cool: 2
10/1/2013
Comment from Erin M. of Erin McKenna’s Bakery
Hi Chris! We just read your most recent review and found your older review (We’ve never flagged a review, so are not even certain how that process works. We’re sorry if a picture you drew was taken down). We’re so sorry you had a bad experience. We will remind our employees that customers shouldn’t have to talk to the back of their heads! It just isn’t right and we’re sorry that you had that kind of reception.
India’s Clay Pit
$$ Indian
309 N Virgil Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Cooks please -taste- your food before bringing it out! I got a really bad stomach ache here after eating their under-cooked brown rice. My partner told me that it was ‘al dente’ but it was hard enough to give me sharp stomach pains for the rest of the night, which then dominoed into a kind of -yuck- laxative effect.
Now let’s talk about their food food. I don’t appreciate how things are hit or miss here. While my non-vegetarian acquaintances attest to enjoying the meat dishes here, their veg stuff leaves a lot to be desired. The veg curries and vegetables make me wonder whether they are pre-made, while the cooks focus all their energy on freshly preparing the meat items. The spinach/saag essentially tasted as flavorful and fresh as those Indian TV Dinners that you buy in a box and heat in an oven. It tasted like spice added post-hoc to the blandness.
The baingan bharta (eggplant) made thawing a frozen Indian meal actually seem desirable. It was the only time I’ve ever not enjoyed eating that dish out the five or six Indian restaurants I’ve tried it in Los Angeles. It tasted like curry that was coagulated from a flavorless, old eggplant and then pureed into a slop oblivion. I hope that they consider taking it off their menu, while sorting out their freshness issues and preparation of their vegetables.
Since I found the curries to be pretty mediocre, I stuck with okra the most recent time I visited and it was better. I am unsure if I lack confidence in their food being fresh but the spices that the okra was prepared in tasted a lot better than the okra itself – it was shriveled. Okra offers a kind of crispness that their dish seemed to lack. Due to the other unfortunate circumstances I had with their food, it leads me to believe that their okra was not fresh either.
We were also served lackluster samosas that were not fresh – they tasted cooled, hardened and dry in the center. Samosas are amazing when they melt in your mouth and this was the first time I ever got a bad samosa from an Indian restaurant so was taken aback. The hardened daal tasted like clay in the center. But fortunately, we got the pakoras, which actually tasted as good as they’re supposed to taste! Their naan and roti taste fine too.
In the end, it’s a shame that I was pleasantly surprised about getting something good here. I really want to like this place but unfortunately their vegetarian dishes were at best as good as frozen saag from a TV dinner. It is a shame because I find the paneled ceiling to be beautiful here and hate to see it wasted on mediocre food.
Electric Lotus
$$ Indian
1739 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Yelp is asking me for tips about the atmosphere of Electric Lotus. Good question. Electric Lotus is NOT ‘Divey’, ‘Hipster’, ‘Touristy’, ‘Trendy’ or ‘Upscale’. And it is more ‘Casual’ and ‘Intimate’ than it is ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classy’ because I come here for their inexpensive $4.99 vegetarian lunch special, which feels pretty ‘Casual’ during the day. Although I can see how it changes at night, I also checked off ‘Intimate’ as I am usually the only person amongst other loners, a grim gathering of single men eating Indian food in a large dark restaurant.
Electric Lotus could be brighter or more vibrant, but for the price, it doesn’t bother me too much. It offers lots of seating to have their cheap and delicious vegetarian lunch special offering, which usually includes chana masala (garbanzo beans), saag (spinach), basmati rice, and salad. All of their food is really good, freshly prepared (at least) by that morning and vegan, unfortunately, they do not have any substitutes for a non-dairy salad dressing (they don’t have oil for salad dressing – they once looked at me as if I was crazy for asking and offered cooking oil) so often I get a lot of lettuce leaves to eat with the masala sauce, which is fine. Their vegetarian lunch special sometimes has daal (lentils) instead of one of the aforementioned, but more often than not, it is usually chana masala.
Fast enough service and quite a large plate of food for the price!
MooShoes – CLOSED
$$$ Shoe Stores, Accessories
3116 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
MooShoes is an awesome vegan shoe store that is a great addition to Los Angeles. I was in and out with a pair of vegan Doc Marten boots in a matter of six minutes. Their online store showed me everything I needed to know about those shoesy woosies before I came in to try them out. In fact, what I like about this store is that everything is basically laid out online so I can do my research and find exactly what I want to look at. I am uncreative, I hate being surprised, and I would hate to fall in love twice.
Two of my vegan coworkers told me about this store after they were sporting some awesome boots. So I had to get a pair myself. I tried the boots that I found online on and they were an incredible fit. Not only that, they are the most DURABLE non-leather leathery shoes I have ever owned! Most vegan shoes I have worn over the course of 15 years last perhaps a year or two with my feet because they are made out of canvas or rubbery materials that are slightly stronger than a pencil eraser. Everyone who complimented my new boots is surprised that they are not leather.
The store is very physically attractive and carries its own weight in terms of atmosphere and vibe. The woman working at this location is very helpful and nice. My only suggestion is for them to make it more apparent that they are located here! I bike past this location almost everyday and did not realize it had been here for three or four months before someone else pointed it out to me. They should have tables, serve yerba mate and raw vegan carrot cake or something, so they can get more foot traffic.
Hollywood/Western Red Line Station
Public Transportation
5450 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Hollywood and Western Red Line Station is a station that, yeah, has a Starbucks across the street from it and offers a strangely large and wide pattern of 1990s-esque glossy tiles, but beyond that, it is great station to LIVE near.
While navigating Hollywood/Vine and Hollywood/Highland Red Line stations is to get by a lot of confused tourists, and Sunset/Vermont Red Line is getting by a lot of wheelchairs for the hospitals, and Vermont/Santa Monica Red Line is not tough to get by, but located in a general area that’s tough to get by. Hollywood/Western is uncrowded and easy to get in and out of.
It is small and fast to get to the actual terminal. In the two years I have been using this station, no homeless person or person hanging out at plaza area of the station have bothered me here. Actually most of the vagrants hanging out at the plaza really don’t stay here very long because I think security or police kick them out often.
It takes me 6 minutes to get here from my studio:
I look at my iPhone app that tracks the LA Metro called ‘Next Ride’.
I run or bike three blocks down Hollywood Blvd.
I go downstairs.
I fill my card at the machine.
I go through the turnstiles.
6a. If I have time, I check my phone at the large empty space after the turnstiles. Reception is good there. When I feel the wind of the train blowing and hear it coming, I go downstairs.
6b. If I don’t have time, I run down the second flight of stairs.
Right side goes to Downtown. Left side goes to North Hollywood.
I take the train.
There will be crowds of people that will be lingering or confused at the other neighboring stations, but not over here. It is mostly a residential station, thus there is no reason to linger. For those who want to visit something from here, Griffith Park is nearby.
University Inn
$$ Hotels
950 N Stone Ave
Tucson, AZ
I REMEMBER when I was 18 years old and helping my dad pack up and move from New Jersey to Southern California. He was getting a camper hitch put onto the back of his car at a Uhaul dealer in a rural gas station town off of the turnpike while I was exploring the area. I entered a nearby diner with two big piercings in my lips and crimson/black hair; and the staff paused with a confrontational frown and after a beat, the closer of the two told me that they can’t serve me, they don’t have to-go and bye.
So lo and behold, some ten years later, after traveling the world, losing the face piercings, getting piercings below the face and getting tattoos, I find myself having the same exact prejudice-based-on-looks experience here by some asshat who owns or manages University Inn in not-so-rural Tucson. I booked this place on Priceline a few weeks before I came to Tucson and apparently if you accidentally put your credit card information wrong here, the owner or manager can decide that he can charge you higher than the quote that Priceline gives.
He said that it costs so much money to run a hotel and having to deal with the stress from people like me who leave wrong credit card numbers and not show up because it happens so often, and these Priceline discounts take so much money away from his business (why advertise on Priceline?), therefore I must pay $7/night more than what Priceline quoted. Not only that, I then was lectured about this being a quiet, clean hotel and emphasizing that I am not allowed to set the air conditioner below 74 degrees.
After paying more money than what was advertised on Priceline and being given a condescending lecture, I got the room and called Priceline about the incident and their accounting rep was surprised that he refused to honor the Priceline quote. She called the hotel and made them honor the deal listed on the website. She then came back on the line with me and told me that University Inn told her that it was a mistake and that they didn’t mean to make me pay more than the listed offer and told me to go back to the lobby to gladly get the difference refunded. I went back to the front and basically the guy walked quickly from the back area to the front of the lobby and I got lectured at again, he said that he is doing this as a courtesy and it was still my fault.
I am pretty sure if I was wearing a polo shirt or a suit and had a smiley demeanor like the other three Yelp reviewers to this place, I would not have been treated like I was going to be doing a lot of drugs, partying and recklessly turning up air conditioning. I actually hate too much air conditioning and only had sex once while there, so poor assumptions all around.
Casablanca Coffee Lounge – CLOSED
$ Coffee & Tea, Lounges, Sandwiches
5718 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
I’ve come here enough times to warrant a solid review. I actually like this place and how they play 90s rock in the background all the time but I really, really do not like one of their workers.
I’d like to let the younger guy with dark hair who worked Sunday morning August 11th know that giving me $3 change in quarters as a passive-aggressive gesture can cause a chilling effect on this small business.
The cafe was completely empty. I got an iced coffee and asked if I could have some soy with that. He said that soy is 50 cents extra. I told him not for iced coffee. I get iced coffee almost every day and never was I charged for adding soy from here. I presumed he was new because he told me this and I have never seen him before. It wouldn’t have been a big deal to me because it really isn’t but how he reacted to me was what made me want to run out of there really fast.
When I told him there was no soy charge for iced coffee, he got very bent out of shape and proceeded to give me I quote a ‘dab’ of soy milk on top as if I asked for something very exquisite that he was doing me a huge favor for. The total was $2.23 and I gave him $5.25. I assumed he gave me the wrong change or that he charged me the 50 cents anyway because he gave me all quarters back. I said he gave me the wrong change. He said no, pulled out the calculator and argued that I hid my quarter underneath the $5 bill “so I passed it back to you.”
I told him he’s crazy and should not be a barista. He said have a nice day.
Koreatown
Local Flavor
Wilshire And Western
Los Angeles, CA 90010
My motto for K-town is follow a bad idea once, shame on Koreatown. Follow a bad idea twice, shame on me.
Shame on me for losing my bike lights twice after parking and double-locking my bike in Koreatown but not taking off the lights. Shame on me for going to not one, but two Koreatown Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs in a day. Shame on Koreatown for having a heavyset guy who looks like he’s never been on a bike before yell at the top of his lungs that my bike was his stolen bike but not running after it as I rode away. Shame on Koreatown for having such an unpredictable variety of Korean food restaurants that you can order Korean chicken nuggets at one place, and bibimbap in another. Shame on me for sleeping in my friends’ walk-in closet on top of a damp mattress sheet hat smells like flu in a ratty Craftsman house set in a MS-13 neighborhood to catch the morning Wilshire/Vermont red line that I didn’t pay for, twice.
Koreatown is perhaps Los Angeles’ Oakland. I hate Oakland. But I respect it for having as much of a supportive community as the 4.5 star review average here indicates. People swear by their inexpensive room rents. There are a lot of art galleries going on in big gutted old buildings that become lofts for people to spend that extra $100 saved on rent. My friend who records ambient wind on cassette tapes for a living has lived in his K-town studio for over ten years.
Koreatown does not have a baseball team like Oakland but if it did, I probably wouldn’t begin watching sports so fast. But reading the dozen five-star Yelp reviews that wax poetic the amazing Koreatown clear up my personal rainclouds on a rainy day because Koreatown is teh best town.
O’reilly’s Tattoo Parlour – CLOSED
$$$ Tattoo
1108 Mission St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Five Stars for Jason:
I worked with Jason for six months between 2008 and 2009. He tattooed my entire lower sleeve on my left arm. Jason is incredibly talented and very focused on detail and was really into the tattoo he was making, which I appreciated most. The tattoo came out incredible. Even after four years, I still get asked who worked on me. He designed a raven motif with incredible detail on the feathers and roses he gave it.
O’Reilly’s Tattoo Parlour is very clean and always smells it. It’s a converted home with perfectly polished wooden floors. I still remember their old-timey tattooed freak show pictures in the bathroom walls, which was incredibly interesting in itself.
Less than Five Stars:
A few months after my tattoo was finished, I was hanging out at Cafe Pergolesi and met a barista who was in the process of getting the SAME EXACT bird motif as mine on the same place of his arm as mine. The artist he was working with (not Jason – can’t remember his name) also worked at O’Reilly’s. Whether copying previously done tattoos and putting them in the same places that other people have them may be common, I was not expecting to ever meet them! To describe the feeling better: I felt like I was in a situation where I wearing the same dress as someone else to prom.
Coca-Cola Store Las Vegas
$$ Hobby Shops
3785 S Las Vegas Blvd
Las Vegas, NV 89109
Globalization sucks but exploring the tastes of 16 drinks from around the world was one of the more adventurous/less conventional things to do on the Vegas strip. This review will be based on the flavors of 16 drinks, all owned by subsidiaries of Coca-Cola. The cost of two trays of 16 drinks is $7. Flavors seem to change weekly. They’re not all soda.
Beware:
Bypass the paraphernalia. The stand is on the second floor. Go upstairs.
Seating is not guaranteed. Since it’s Coca-Cola, breeder families flock to the bottle like flies to sugar. They occupied the front three tables near the stand. The parents looked more bored than their 7 kids, all of whom were playing with toy cars and plastic Disney characters on the tables. None of the toys were from the Coca-Cola store.
You are given two red trays stacked one on top of the other. Don’t worry. Unless you are super clumsy or somebody pushes you, you will not spill the stacked trays.
Sitting on the floor is an option. We sat on the floor with four trays (two trays each) of drinks because there was absolutely nowhere else to sit in the area. Although I didn’t mind sitting on the floor, it may be highly problematic if the sitter is old or disabled. We were one of three groups sitting on the floor.
The flavors:
We were given two pieces of paper that indexed each of the drinks we were trying. We took a pen out and wrote some notes about the flavor of each drink. I recommend taking a pen out and making notes about the flavors of things you’re trying. It makes you think about and remember what you’re trying. The following list highlights the drinks from the notes I wrote.
Tray one:
Inca Cola (Peru) – Sweet, good
Sunfill Mint (India) – Tastes like Scope mouthwash
Stoney Ginger Beer (South America) – Reminds me of ginger candy
Aquarius Citrus (Taiwan) – Not fizzy, like a watery orange juice
Delaware Punch (Honduras) – Rich berry flavor, tastes like cough medicine
Vegitabeta (Japan) – Powdery flavor, like it was pre-mixed
Smart Watermelon (China) – Light taste, subtle flavor, good
Kinley Lemon (England) – Way too tangy, too much lemon/lime
Tray two:
Lift Apple (Mexico) – Reminds me of apple cider, prefer apple cider though
Fanta Kolita (Costa Rica) – Overwhelming and conflicting flavor, way too sweet
Krest Gingerale (Mozambique) – Blah! Yuck! Not a big fan of gingerale
Bibo Kiwi Mango (South Africa) – Not sparkling, a little too sweet
Bibo Pine Nut (South Africa) – Very sweet, not a fan of pineapple
Little Shanghai – CLOSED
$$ Chinese
1010 Cedar St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
I have never, ever, tried a more delicious tempeh meal than that from Little Shanghai Chinese Restaurant.
Specifically the Gan Sao Tempeh which is the very last thing listed on the menu and is one of only two tempeh options here. The crispy tempeh is stir-fried with vegetables and hot peppers and served in a thick sweet sauce that has the same consistency as molasses. The texture of their delicious tempeh wins me to come here on a weekly basis because it isn’t undercooked nor is it chewy or tough. It’s hard to compare the texture to any other I’ve tried because I’m generally don’t eat it.
So this review is simply based on a meat alternative that is made out of soy beans and brown rice. Tem-peh from the latin soy beanus and brown risis. I have looked at their tofu options and they look similar to other Chinese fried-tofu-mixed-with-vegetables fare. Definitely and without hesitation come here and take your risk with tempeh and my word that you will not be disappointed.
Hot Java
$ Coffee & Tea, Breakfast & Brunch
2101 E Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90803
The only time I’ve ever gotten a pedicure was on whim with my mother many years ago. We were at the shopping center and the experience was so disturbingly prissy and over-the-top that I have taken a solemn oath never shall I have uniform toenails again.
Hot Java is the footsie male’s ottoman. You can find the archetypal footsie here wiggling his manicured toes in $40 designer flip flops. Toe wiggling is a come-hither approach to grabbing the attention of the guy across the ottoman. I’m not sure if it’s a phallic gesture within the foot fetish but there is a ton of wiggling action here.
Besides toe wiggling as an instinctual mating dance, Hot Java hosts a ton of kitschy artifice, ornate rugs, a fake fireplace and gender assigned bathrooms to make things confusing. The layout is like that of an old aunt’s disorganized living room. Thanksgiving is good and all but there is no pool table or video games. I want to go home!
I don’t understand the point of gender-assigned bathrooms in this coffee shop. I’ve seen more men exit the women’s bathroom than the men’s. The arbitrary labels are ridiculous especially for those in larger proportion of the queer community who figuratively skirt the gender label. I never used the men’s bathroom myself. The women’s bathroom must install a unisex urinal for those who pee both ways!
Union Station
Train Stations, Trains, Metro Stations
800 N Alameda St
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Skip the sentimental stuff about art deco, who cares? And my cute anecdote about a bathroom encounter – someone who put their hand underneath my stall while I was peeing and me peeing on their hand, thinking that they were grabbing for my backpack (I deduced they were actually schizophrenic because that didn’t stop them), this station is good. It’s clean, pretty straight-forward and gets people in and out, like a station should.
I bike and don’t drive in LA. I primarily use Union Station for utilitarian purposes, step aside reviewers who reviewed this station based on one experience they had here.
Bus from Union Station directly to LAX (or LAX to Union Station) – $7
The bus is in front of the station, there seems to be no uniform bus that takes you to and from LAX/Union Station. They accept credit card only at a kiosk next to the buses, but sometimes, if you give $7 cash to the driver, they’ll let you on. It happened to me once, whether she pocketed that money and was actually out of protocol, I have no clue.
Access to Metro Red Line to Hollywood (or Purple Line um to a Koreatown-ish area) – $1.50
This is in the underground area, get a ticket or refill the TAP card in the semi-underground area where the machines are. There is a place there to tap your TAP card. If you want to go to Hollywood, make sure you listen to the loudspeaker, or you may end up in the Koreatownish area of Wilshire/Western. This can also take you to other downtown areas, but why not just walk to Pershing Square? It’s really close.
Metrolink and Amtrak trains to various places – $ – $$$
There are actual people who can help you get a ticket here, on top of machines. The Metrolink is CHEAPER than Amtrak but serves mostly the vicinity of Orange County/Riverside and Greater LA. Amtrak seems to be able to take you elsewhere, should you want to go to Chicago like they did back in the 40s.
There is ABSOLUTELY nothing within the vicinity of Union Station except Little Tokyo, which is not very fun after 4 hours. You have the rest of downtown if you’re without large bulky suitcases, but if you have bulky suitcases, there is a Starbucks here.
Coffee + Food – CLOSED
$$ Coffee & Tea, Breakfast & Brunch, Sandwiches
5630 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
This is the first time that I’ve visited Pricey + Tax since my review two years ago.
I am writing this review from inside the busy cafe right now. Everything, like the chairs, tables, and layout, seems more integrated and there are about 25 people sitting inside this cafe as we speak and about 10 people outside. If they added a second story or made more room in the back kitchen/back patio area, this place would be as busy as Bricks and Scones!
Cyndi F, who I believe owns this place, wrote a message to me on Yelp two years ago after I posted my review to justify the lack of prices on the walls:
“We are sorry about not posting prices – our menu changes every day and our prices are pretty LOW in comparison to everything around us (gratitude, osteria mama) so it has not really been an issue for anyone. But we can see how important it is for people who are coming for the first time – know what they are getting into.
Have a great day and hope we get another chance to woo you with our coffee + food. Best, Cyndi”
Well, in the end, 1. I come back and am wooed by their coffee. And 2. they DID put prices up on the walls so there happily goes the ‘too daunting to put prices up due to the ever-changing menu’ theory. The cold brew is not ‘LOW in comparison’ like the owner insists but more reasonably comparable to/ slightly pricier than other places – like $5 ($4.50 + tax) and as legitimately good as cold brew gets. It’s got less of a bite than other cold brews I’ve had and more of a light roast kind of taste.
All in all, it’s gotten better.
Useful: 2 Funny: 0 Cool: 2
4/16/2015
Previous review
Pricey + Tax.
Menus that do not include prices make me feel uncomfortable. It not only seems like pretentious nonsense but it puts me in an awkward position to have to inquire about prices, and then feel guilty about it. When it’s a chalkboard, and a price could easily be put next to the item, I feel like there’s a level of intent in what they are doing. And this puts me in the predicament of not feeling like the type of customer they’d want in their shop.
I am updating this review from two to three stars. The $4 americano was good. There is decent seating here along with the storefront windows if the tables are being used. This place seems to have a strange way its space flows, as if it would make sense that once you enter in, you’d be greeted by a barista behind a counter, rather than a refrigerator. The people who work here are friendly.
Barnsdall Art Park
Parks
4800 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
I got to see the grand re-opening of the Hollyhock House, aka Aline Barnsdall’s Egyptian-style mausoleum. Her morbid fortress is much adieu about something! It is constructed with the modernist wand of Frank Lloyd Wright and is actually a lot more spectacular on the INSIDE than the house looks on the outside
I came here because I actually was passing by Barnsdall Park at one in the morning on my bike. I saw all of the cars coming inside and I recall reading that the Hollyhock House was renovated, the mayor came and cut the rope and there was a free ‘self-guided tour’ of the house all night. I knew I would never ever pay for a guided tour in the future, so I thought this was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Barnsdall’s big open casket looked like how a flapper with money would want to languish in the afterlife – probably not with all the gawking people. I wanted to take photos but my phone died as I waited in line for over two hours, between 1 am and 3:30 am, to go inside and see it. It was a non-stop all-night viewing. In fact, I believe other people are currently waiting in line to see it as I write this.
The one word that comes to mind when I viewed the Hollyhock House was ‘horizontal’. Even though the building was up high, everything inside emphasized being straight on one plane. It really brought my eye to see the cool angular furniture and then the panoramic views of the flickering lights of nighttime Los Angeles from below. Since everything that I saw was level, you are sort of met with the windows to the sky and the electricity below. I wonder whether Barnsdall had the same kind of view here 80 or 90 years ago, whether the lights emitted from early 20th-century electricity were the same kind of brightness and look. The house looks Egyptian with its architecture and golden tones from the wood floors, so being elevated on one plane seemed otherworldly and afterlife-ish.
Barnsdall Park, I still hate you. I think the car-centric navigation to and from the park has a lot left to be desired. But I’m kind of realizing that the one-directional ‘grand driveway’ helps perpetuate the foreboding fortress-like architecture of the Frank Lloyd Wright building looking down on the little people of East Hollywood below.
Useful: 5 Funny: 1 Cool: 4
2/14/2015
Previous Review
I don’t think I could dislike a park more than I do Barnsdall Park. I truly hate Barnsdall Park. It’s awful.
Can we bulldoze the Frank Lloyd Wright fortress, parking lot, and fences and add trees and have a large hippie hill for people to camp, dance, drink and lay on? The fortress-like architecture and the fortress-like structure (psycho-geography) of the park make hanging out at Barnsdall park feel like lunch at Macy’s Plaza.
I’ve been to a few events besides the Farmer’s Market here on Wednesdays (from noon to 6 pm) and I live close to the park. Most of the events require me to walk up the stairwell to the buildings. When I go to an event and hang out here, the event is never very good and usually pretty confusing. People are either crowding the door to an event that is encompassed inside of a boxy midcentury institutional-style building with no windows. Others are lingering in the periphery of the institution along with the pillared foyer to nowhere.
The areas that most of these events are housed at feel like they are a moat to the Hollyhock House, which is a sour relic of Frank Lloyd Wright. The actual Hollyhock House looks like a boxy Egyptian-styled mausoleum. It looks like a morbid fortress. At first glance, it looks like one of the more dreary examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s catalogue raisonné. At second glance, it looks like the kind of place that old flappers with money go to die – see Lady Barnsdall’s big casket for $7!
Barnsdall Park is like a dystopian Parc Guell in Barcelona. Most of Barnsdall Park, like Parc Guell, is for walking up that hill, although, unlike Parc Guell, it’s not really made to walk into or out of, it’s made to walk WITHIN it. The first thing one has to encounter when trying to enter is the huge foreboding poles along Hollywood Blvd. that serve as fences and block walking people from entering except on two opposite sides that open exclusively for a parking lot that it wraps around. If you want to enter, walk through the parking lot. The only time that parking lot is ever really useful to everyone is when there is that farmer’s market on the bottom of it. If you try to enter or exit from the stairs at the non-Hollywood entrance, the Hospital alleyway, good luck because that area is littered with no trespassing signs.
Tatsu Ramen
$$ Ramen
7111 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90046
If it was the 90s and Tatsu used automated phones instead of iPads to order ramen, this place would definitely suck. “If you would like an automated lunch, press one, o diga en Español marque dos, or to speak to a ramen representative press zero.”
Unfortunately, automated phone messages are not dead yet. They just have yet to be replaced by iPads. If we ever take a look back at life in the 2010s, Tatsu is the kind of place that will epitomize the decade. This is the first time I have ever ordered a meal (and a free water) with an iPad by myself.
As I was biking eastward on Melrose from a job in West Hollywood, I parked my bike and actually wanted a sandwich at All About The Bread next door. I decided I wanted to take a look at the menu at Tatsu but saw the line of iPads and I couldn’t resist trying it out. If it was just a menu, I probably would not have even ordered anything.
As I was clicking on the iPad, I ordered the vegan hippie bowl. I checked the item and then came the modification list with a bunch of modifications to un-hippie. Want pork? Want beef? How about cheese? You sure you don’t want cheese? No cheese. Tofu, green onions, and spinach. I showed my receipt, got seated, and got my bowl. It was as good as I expected it to be. The delicious broth offered a hint of ginger with perky noodles and good tofu in a fat kid’s cereal-sized bowl.
But the iPad! I imagine it will become more and more common to use an iPad not just as a cash register, but as a robot.
Muddy Paw Coffee Company
$$ Coffee & Tea, Bakeries
3320 Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
There’s something really furry about this store; I feel like when I bike past here on Sunset at 2 a.m., people are dressed as dogs inside, pulling on each others’ leashes and dry humping.
I will go no further than to say the two times I got a cold brew here were radically different. I came in here about a year ago, and the older guy who was working here gave me quite a disgusting iced coffee. It was served from a large plastic milk carton and tasted like brewing Folger’s and pouring it in said empty milk carton and letting it sit in a refrigerator for an hour.
I came here this past week, asked for a cold brew and the girl with really thick glasses gave me an iced Americano in a plastic cup, which was filled 1/3 to the top. There was so little of this coffee that ice was piled on top of the little coffee in it! I felt cheated but confused as to whether this is a normal drink. I get iced coffee nearly 365 days a year from all the places in the land and never have been given a cup of iced coffee 1/3 full. First-world problems, huh? Too bad it was good too!
I remember when this store was originally a clothing store with a coffee stand in the back and it has come a long way since then. I mean, now they love dogs, got rid of the clothes, and moved the stand.
Samba Rock Acai Cafe
$$ Acai Bowls
291 Water St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
You were an empty acai cafe when I first met you. The Airton Senna, the acai mixed with peanut butter, is definitely the best acai bowl that I have ever tasted. Nothing can compare to it. I used to sit in this cafe back when I was going to UC Santa Cruz in 2009, eating this acai bowl when nobody else was here except for the one nice Brazilian woman who ran the shop. I wondered whether they would stay in business.
Now five years later on, you’ve got the world at your feet. Their delicious Airton Senna acai bowl still tastes like the peanut butter and jelly mouth-gasm mixed into a bowl with granola, strawberries and banana for the same price as it was 5 years ago – $7.50 (no tax) for a hefty regular-sized portion.
Unfortunately, everyone else loves this place too. And they do annoying phone orders, so smart people call up and basically cut ahead in line of everyone else who is waiting to order a bowl. The one cashier also takes phone orders, so whoever calls up gets their food order placed in front of everyone else who is waiting in line. I considered ‘cutting in line’ by calling in my order while waiting in line, because the cashier stops whatever she was doing to put in the phone order before taking another person in line. It’s pretty maddening because I gave myself 30 minutes to catch the 17 bus at Water and Ocean.
I had to wait 25 minutes. 25 MINUTES for an acai bowl. It was absolutely swarming with people. The five workers scrambling to make orders looked like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory, working against a losing system. The conveyor belt was too fast and they were running out of room for places to put those paper receipts!
I had less than 5 MINUTES to eat this acai bowl at the bus stop at Water and Ocean. That wasn’t a problem though! I recommend coming here with at least an hour to kill because this place is way too popular now. Management, please nix phone orders, at least on busy weekends, as this place definitely does not have the capacity to smoothly carry them out.
Useful: 5 Funny: 2 Cool: 2
4/28/2015
Comment from Vanessa W. of Samba Rock Acai Cafe Business Owner
HA, Chris, you RULE, great review….!
But pleasekno that we’re ONIT w/the phone/togo orders, and we’re CONSTANTLY workingon making our systems better, but can only work on one new thing atatime!!! Sooo be ready because starting NEXTWK we will have a ‘togo’ line, and right NOW we are figuringout our systems for having a diff phone answerer than the one at the cash reg!!! We’ll C U nextime you’re in SANTA CRUZ, ORRRRRR when we’ve expanded to having some in LA!!!
ronw + Vanessa
owners
Annenberg Space For Photography – CLOSED
$ Art Galleries
2000 Ave Of The Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
I know two people who are in the current Emerging exhibit, and yes it’s an EMERGING exhibit, so don’t expect Mary Ellen Mark or Ansel Adams prints to parade around these quarters. It’s a bunch of teenagers, 20-year-olds and some 30-year-olds who know how to use an SLR camera and are … ’emerging’. The photos are supposed to show the relational aspects between photographer and subject. Like preteens photographing other preteens, etc.
As for the two people I knew, Ryan Pfluger was a MySpace friend from back in the day, who appropriately (inappropriately?) did provocative MySpace portraiture of his friends. Some guy’s MySpace photo from 2007 got onto the walls of the Annenberg as part of the exhibit. Justin Maxon, the other photographer I went to school with ten years ago and took a few photo classes with. He used to spend all day photographing homeless people smoking crack and shooting up heroin around Civic Center in San Francisco. I spent a couple of hours with him once. It was invasive shit, click click click click, as smoke from a crack pipe was billowing from the guy’s mouth. The guy seemed so unaffected by the intrusive camera lens a foot away from his face. It was kind of incredibly weird. The actual photo in the exhibit was of a grainy, dark photo of a family living in derelict conditions.
This exhibit showcased people mostly born after 1980. What was funny is that the photo selections they had of these two particular people were not photos I would have chosen of theirs but I suppose were not necessarily bad selections. Just ho-hum, in my opinion. It makes me think about the tons of other photographers on exhibit and how their other photos could potentially be more interesting than the ones the curator chose, which then makes me wish that the space was even larger to show more examples. As for the documentary, there was a documentary playing at the time I went and it was of a pretentious teenage girl talking about her amazing discovery of photography. She was waxing lyrical about the machine and how it was the only way she is able to connect to people: her, her camera, and her friend.
Annenberg Space For Photography is free. The space is not big. But it is free and worth visiting.
La Barata/Cosas Baratas
$ Discount Store, Furniture Stores, Electronics
5527 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
I just Google Street Viewed Cosas Baratas / Cheap Things to make sure this is the same store I was thinking it was. I don’t think anyone would know the name of this place by the name itself. It doesn’t have a sign on top of it. But this is the store that I recommend EVERYONE to come to who’s moving to LA for the first time. They’ve got furniture and housing supplies for possibly the least expensive you’ll find anywhere. And it’s big!
I tell people, hey if you need a mop, need a coat rack, need a cheap bicycle, go to this place on Santa Monica Blvd. next to the big abandoned Sears. It has 98¢ painted on it, I think? No it’s the big one. Now this is where Google Street View has helped me to describe it: It’s got like a lot of glass windows that has a massive display of wrapping paper, shelves and tiny microwaves underneath a hand-painted 98¢ ITEMS over a repurposed mid-century sign that’s painted blue. A hand-painted FURNITURE slopes downwards and into the store towards old vinyl signage of television brands SONY / SANYO / FISHER / ZENITH that then leads to TV / VCR / STEREO at the top of the door. I don’t think they’ve got any of these things anymore. Minus possibly -a- TV.
I recently got a collapsible luggage here. Well one wasn’t enough so I came back yesterday and got ANOTHER collapsible luggage. (Who in LA has the room for a 2×3 feet box to sit on a shelf for 11 months out of the year?) The guy who runs the store gives commentary on everything in his store. He speaks English, by the way. It’s funny. And it’s probably the only place outside of downtown LA that has got maybe twenty different types of luggage in very ample supply. They’ve got shelving, beds, like everything for the econo-couple. They’re what killed big Sears across the street! I hope
So if you happen to see an ancillary Cosas Baratas / Cheap Things sign, as you’re strolling eastward on the south side of Santa Monica Blvd, then you missed it. But if you back up, not in a car, and see a lot of glass, a 98¢ sign, and advertisements for nonexistent televisions, then you’re here.
Useful: 7 Funny: 3 Cool: 4
8/16/2018
Danny A. sent you thanks for this review Business Owner of La Barata/Cosas Baratas
Hop Woo BBQ & Seafood
$$ Chinese, Seafood
845 N Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90012
I have been here more times because of Groupon than have any other restaurant. I also have come here a lot prior to the days of Groupon. It seems like anyone who gets their MFA from an art school in Los Angeles is required to have some type of performance or exhibit in this area, hence when I run in them artistic circles, I usually end up there – then here or Hop Louie or Full House.
Their vegetarian food offers the quintessentially soggy vegetables that I’ve come to experience as being authentic at least to the way restaurants prepare them Chinatown. The mixed vegetables to schezuan eggplant to hollow vegetables from Hop Woo taste like they’re boiled with a plump texture underneath a slick layer of oil on top of them. I don’t dislike them. I just prefer how they prepare the soft tofu this way for their ma po tofu. The ma po sauce is very tasty and the dish is probably my favorite here. It tastes very salty though but for me, I like it however wouldn’t particularly recommend it for other people as I tend to like saltier saucy things.
The atmosphere is nice enough for groups but the service here is hard to describe. They don’t have bad service per se. They’re just consistently not focused on the human. I found that to be the case too when I went to a cafe on a layover in Guanzhou, China, so I think it’s just the way things are done. They’re usually as distracted by setting or bussing tables as they are taking orders, which often takes about 15 minutes to do after being seated. However they usually immediately give you tea, Spanish peanuts and crackers to munch on. I guarantee you that tea will go cold by the time they take your order so drink up first.
They’re one of a handful of places that don’t have restrictions towards how many Groupons you can use here. So they never give me a hard time about redeeming Groupon. But if you do the Groupon, print it out as they will hold onto your phone for ten or fifteen minutes while writing down the code, processing it, and simultaneously setting or bussing said tables.
LA County Department Of Registrar
Public Services & Government
14340 W Sylvan St
Van Nuys, CA 91401
Beware if you ask to get married in a civil ceremony the same day as you submit your marriage certificate, you will be met with a middle-aged registrar clerk who will look at you as if she got jabbed with a thumbtack on the back of her neck. Their 20 square foot chapel with vertical blinds is booked a month in advance so you can either book your 15-minute wedding a month later from here or from a fine (actually, a not-so-fine) list of other locations in LA County.
This place is a bit like coming to a nice Department of Public Social Services with a line that takes only about an hour to get through upon entering at 8:45 am. It has no security checkpoint as the people who matter are all protected behind glass windows. You enter from a line directly to your left once you enter the front door. From there, you get a mixed bag of fiancees, people who appear to be couples, and a scattered few lacking proofs that they were ever born, waiting in line.
In many ways, this hour-long line seemed to be the path of least resistance whose who want to get hitched perhaps without the trouble of the expensive wedding industry or society. When I was there, I noticed a few people looked so incredibly young to get married with very nervous body language, perhaps due to disapproving parents, religious guilt, or baby. There was also a handful of same-sex couples and transgendered people wanting to get married too. Some people in line were dressed in suits and gowns. And some were dressed in jackets and jeans.
YEE: Brunch at US Bank Tower
Yelp Events
633 West 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Much of this 4 3/5 star review constitutes the gratitude I have towards Katie and everyone else who helps her put on these events. This is the best Yelp Event I’ve ever been to. It was pretty fun to finally get to see the reason why that awesome little coffee shop Barista Society doesn’t exist in the lobby area anymore and was moved all the way to the back of US Bank Tower.
The Skyspace experience, which consisted of watching videos while going up elevators, definitely felt overly dramatized for what is essentially a great rooftop view of the (soon to be) second biggest building in the vicinity. The clean and stark white decor and minimalist furniture felt a bit like a VIP Lounge at an airport and definitely held onto the vibe that this is still a bank tower but hey – we’re dedicating a handful of floors to try and be a bit Hollywood. I am glad that this event allowed me to slide down that slide of theirs, which was what I was very excited to try and do.
US Bank Tower Slide –
I watched a silent film from 1920 and that was a time when the ambitious slides existed! Back then you had slides that will make you fly 15 feet in the air. Now there are too many rules to slide down a one-story slide that made me feel like a lame child. You sit on a metal slide on top of a dirty burlap blanket. Hold the blanket with both hands! Hold the blanket with both hands Christopher! Not worth $8!
Elite Mimosas –
Mimosas were awesome. There were mimosa servers at the very beginning who evanesced soon after the first 20 minutes. The blonde female bartender was awful and very argumentative about Yelp Elite members’ requests. I got a really simple mimosa so no complaints here but some Asian girl (I realize that this event was 80% Asian girls) in front of us asked for more juice in her mimosa and the woman went off about how she can’t do that – that’s NOT how a mimosa is made. It was funny to witness and I am certain that nobody took her to the side and told her that this was going to be a jungle of bitchy writers.
Food –
Fruit at the croissant table and the salad at the Eggs Benedict table were delish – coffee was good too. Somebody posted a picture of the bagel stack amongst the other food and wrote ‘as good as it looks!’ They probably did not try those bagels! Those bagels were stale and realized why that stack stayed pretty high the entire time I was there! I probably was the only person who was hopeful and gave it a go twice – I tried two of them – poppy/sesame medley and plain and they were dry and crackly. The bussers who found bagels dangling on top of mimosa flutes were the unfortunate ones who found my bagels.
People –
I didn’t talk to anyone else but my chaperone and a couple of people visiting the tower unassociated with the event – but they seemed happy to have come here and pay. So I think that this thing definitely suits its purpose for those visiting and trying to see the sights, you can definitely do that here.
Cafe Home
$ Korean, Coffee & Tea, Salad
3377 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90010
I don’t understand why Dole Whip is served by the most sketchy places. The last time I saw Dole Whip being served was at an ice cream shop in Palm Springs with a loudmouth owner who carries a bad attitude (see his epic snarky owner comment on my previous review of Lappert’s Ice Cream.) What I learned from that guy while he was talking a mile a minute was that Dole Whip IS vegan – so I knew I had to try it – just not at his shop!
There are literally only three places in Los Angeles that serve Dole Whip so I got to try it yesterday at this cave-like Korean cafe called Cafe Home. It was a bright August afternoon and I walk into this extremely dark cafe. After readjusting my eyes, I quickly made a note of the un-popularity of this place after seeing a long line of people outside the door of their neighbor the Boiling Crab versus only two or three people sitting at one table in this cafe. At the end of this dark and empty cafe was a confrontational ajumma – an older and unsmiling Korean maitre d’. I was walking towards her and she was walking towards me. I didn’t want her to get too close, so I quickly said that I’m here for Dole Whip. She stopped and turned around and went behind the counter and then barked that the smallest Dole Whip they have would be $5.50. Although a small Dole Whip from this place was $3.25 on a menu posted on Yelp from 2013, I find that everyone now thinks they’re on a trendy stretch of West Hollywood so the ridiculous 60% price inflation didn’t bother me too much.
What bothered me was that when she served it to me in a soft serve, she served the soft serve in such a way that it was hollow in the center. And I am especially disappointed because the Dole Whip was actually good – so I would have very much appreciated it if it wasn’t hollow in the center for the price I paid. I literally poked my spoon into the ice cream and it deflated. Dole Whip has the potential for it to be a trendy flavor served for similar prices at other much nicer shops as it is vegan and deliciously holds a kind of consistency between sorbet and actual ice cream. It’s just a shame that the most off-putting shops outside of Disneyland carry it. I just hope to one day be able to find this stuff at a place that I am confident doesn’t have old fossils to give me a hard time or try to rip me off.
The Wayfarer
$$ Hostels, Hotels, Venues & Event Spaces
12 E Montecito St
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
I believe most people would pay a lot of money for the fantastic experience of a nice place if they could. But most people can’t and if few can spend fifty or sixty bucks a night and share a room with four other people, it makes it worth it. I am one of those few people.
I’ve stayed at pretty standard to the most upscale ’boutique hostels’ in over ten countries. I’ve stayed at the ‘best hostel in the world’ located next to the Praca Do Comercio in Lisbon, Portugal, in which everyone who gets a bed gets a personalized home-cooked breakfast. This place comes CLOSE to having all the amenities of a good kick ass hostel. The scenery is beautiful, the spaces are clean and the location is perfect.
But THREE issues keep this place from being five star:
Communal Kitchen needs to stay COMMUNAL
UNLIKE hostels, the hotel allowed this large group of old white geezers to throw a party and take up the entire communal kitchen on Sunday night, October 2nd. NO hostel I’ve ever stayed at would ever let something like that ever go down and I suggest to management to not let people take over entire COMMUNAL areas for their private party.
Water Issues
The self-described ‘heated pool’ wasn’t and perhaps a 75 degree October day would invite anyone to take a dip in a cold pool but with expectations of dipping your toes in something warmer – that’s just false advertising. Secondly, I can’t stand the way that these new showers are built that are level with the floor of the entire bathroom. It’s totally pretentious and the drain did not (does not) work well in Room 102. So with a bathroom floor that’s level to the drain, it floods within a minute and my pants and underwear got pretty soaked.
I’ve Had Better Food At Hostel Hostels
Considering this place has A LOT of little kids running around here, I am surprised they don’t have more nutritious breakfast foods like the better hostels I’ve stayed at. ALL of the jams are of poor quality and have high fructose corn syrup in them. All the breads except the wheat bread were pre-packaged and stale tasting. The wheat bread was definitely pre-packaged but pretty yummy. And the bananas were more brown than yellow. They do have good coffee from Seattle’s Best. But no granola.
Dou Dou
£ Buffets, Vegan
6 Kentish Town Road
London NW1 9NX
United Kingdom
This might be one of the last ‘Tai’ vegan buffets in London; there used to be one in Bloomsbury that closed down. And another in Soho that closed down. I actually remember seeing more of these shops everywhere a decade back. While the food was actually tasty food, there was a tawdry sense of forwardness to get people in the door. The servers were barkers, once they got you in the door, they would hand you a plate and go back outside. And you could hear them yelling outside, pointing to the customer, me, eating their food.
I figured that they probably didn’t give a damn that it was vegan, but made the buffet vegan because they can leave out the food for a long time because old vegan food can’t really make people sick. It doesn’t spoil quite like milk or meat.
Anyway, I am unsure why this one is the (almost last one) standing but hear, hear. It’s got all the textured veggie and soy protein favorites that I have come to like from the other Chinese/Thai-style buffets. It has got, my personal favorite, soy chicken and other soy juicies. Everything is fresh here. Along with stir fried veggies, cold cabbage, fruit and really good rice. Why oh why is there no more of these in not-Camden Town? I mentioned before that sometimes the food is left out for a while. This place seems to freshen up at least a few items an hour. Nothing tasted like it was out, waiting for me to eat it, too long.
Imperial Spa
$$ Day Spas, Massage, Saunas
1875 Geary Blvd
San Francisco, CA 94115
I know now why most of the people who give this place rave reviews seem to be women. The men’s and women’s massage/acupuncture/steam/spa rooms are segregated but the men’s room doesn’t have the relaxing hot stone room, which is a huge bummer, in Korean. It also seems to have way less amenities in general. If you’re a man, you won’t get to lay on hot rocks nor get to gain equilibrium of your body’s energy or whatever wishful pseudoscience the hot stones are supposed to do. The men’s section has six plastic chairs for that instead.
I came into San Francisco after a long bus ride and felt gross. I checked Groupon out and I saw that this place had a Groupon deal going for sixteen bucks. I thought, a hot shower and relaxing steam room, why not?
After giving the woman in front the Groupon and then entering their really nice and spacious locker room and vanity room, the first thought I had of the spa, steam, and sauna rooms was a big fat underwhelming sigh. The entire steam and sauna area is about the same size of the locker room! The room is a 500 square foot room that is as tall as it is high. Why did you make such a grand locker room for such a tiny space?!
The room contained a tiny cold water pool, a tiny sauna, a tiny steam room that wasn’t very hot, and a decent-sized sauna that was incredibly hot. The steam room and sauna could comfortably seat six smaller framed men and a few more for standing room. There were five or six showers. One was kind of broken, two were out of shampoo, and one had a plastic chair with a bunch of towels hanging on top of it. At least one of those showers worked fine. There were also three or four sitting showers with buckets filled with shaving cream water and toothpaste.
I am glad I found that Groupon a few minutes before I entered because I now feel slightly jipped instead of incredibly jipped. I spent less money on two-story Korean spas with six rooms in Los Angeles. At least I got to shave, brush my teeth and sit in some hot bubbly water for a couple of hours before feeling refreshed and leaving.
Sweet! – CLOSED
$$ Candy Stores, Pop-up Shops
6801 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
I was looking to do Valentine’s Day present shopping early so I came here. The first time I came at 10:15am and it wasn’t open. The second time I came at 7pm and it was empty and perhaps closing down. It reminded me of being bored at The Disney Store when I was young with parents trying to kill time. It’s incredibly gimmicky and it’s got a very mountainous and colorful terrain of candy – a psychedelic equivalent of the candy that you’d find at Ralph’s or the drug store. Nothing stood out as interesting or vegan.
I have a non-vegan partner who likes chocolate so I came here to make a couple of do-it-yourself chocolate bars in a glass-encased kitchen manned by 15-year-old chocolatiers. I made two dark chocolates: I used raspberry filling with blueberries. The second I used Nutella (listed as chocolate hazelnut spread) filling on the second with tiny marshmallows, bananas and toffee bits.
I wanted to substitute tiny marshmallows with marshmallow fillings and the teenager was like no that absolutely can’t be done. Their rules for no substitutions are incredibly strict – with warnings on the walls, the order forms and the window. I can see people wanting to hang out and do substitutions all the time because this store is a bit of a tourist trap, but this place is supposed to be fun. So why not let us eat our damn cake? I have nothing else to say except mind the Yelp check-in deal. Apparently nobody uses it to order chocolates and I confused the guy upon presenting it to him. But it saves you an entire dollar upon buying two of these chocolate bars.
He told me it would take 30 minutes and before I could ask if I can leave and come back, he closed the window. I said hey! He either couldn’t hear me or was possibly ignoring me as he was doing the bars. But there is really no way to call these people unless they physically see you at the window or knock on the window. Since I was the only person in this chocolate lab with tables that had no seats for waiting and a large figurine of the Pillsbury dough boy around no trespassing tape, I assumed I didn’t have to stand there for 30 minutes and left. Upon coming back, I see a striped bag behind the window and assumed it was mine. I stood in front of the window and another teenager hardened by Hollywood comes up and looks at me with a deadpan expression. I didn’t know if he thought I was ordering or what. He didn’t say anything so I did the talking, two sentences worth of explaining how I wanted my bag, until he gave it to me.
POV Digital Lab LA (Traction Place) – CLOSED
Shared Office Spaces, Venues & Event Spaces
830 Traction Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90013
3.0 star rating
I came here for POV and a hackathon that was run by a bunch of hacks.
What I signed up for is building a website for a collaborative project group run by a project coordinator who had no idea what she was doing. I never met this person before so did not know what I was getting myself into when I signed up to join POV. We basically had a bunch of people who were getting paid by PBS to lecture and downright yell at us every hour and telling us that our project is very under-developed during the entire weekend. Yeah DUH we’re trying to make the best thing that we can in the little time we have possible. Stop bothering us! They basically would stop us mid-sentence and ask us what we’re doing and impart their hack wisdom every hour. It continued into the filmed presentations. And then it continued in the emailed comments a month later. That’s my hackathon in a nutshell and it was un-fun.
It wasn’t helped that it was hosted in this very stark shared office space made up mostly of concrete, glass and plastic. The perks of Impact Hub LA don’t include the uncomfortable office space with flimsy plastic chairs and very few power outlets. The perks of this place don’t include the one clean bathroom that they have that is located in very corner of the building in an adjacent hallway and the other dirtier bathroom shared by a bunch of other offices in another hallway behind it. The perks of this place don’t include it only having one entrance and exit via a fire escape to and from the cool Arts District location it is in behind the large parking lot. It is a very closed off place and has no outdoor patio area. It is as inviting as a large university classroom to get a cold computer science-y job done. Actually it not so fondly reminded me of this cold sterile building called the DARC (Digital Arts Resource Center) building that made us feel like we were in the ‘darc’ as it was a very white, cold, concrete cube with no cell phone reception that our studios were located in during my MFA at UC Santa Cruz.
Shame that they don’t incorporate more art into tech in their awesome Arts District location but it is what it is. If I were needing to work here in the future, I’d rather ‘create’ my own desk and code while looking at paint splatter and smelling art dust in one of the large art studio spaces with wifi nearby.
Clean & Done!
Home Cleaning, Home Organization, Personal Chefs
Los Angeles, CA 91607
I really don’t mind the actual job that their cleaner Ahmad did. But my partner is LIVID that Ahmad didn’t listen to the instructions he was given on thoroughly cleaning the floors and spending less time on the easier non-‘deep cleaning’ work like wiping down furniture and counters. Ahmad instead spent an hour and 40 minutes on wiping down stuff and 20 minutes on quickly mopping for their, as described on their site, 2-N-1 ‘deep cleaning’. I told my partner that he should have been on the cleaner more from the start. So lesson learned: if you want a specific chore done, tell them to do that very thing first!
After my partner complained to Clean & Done, their stance is to defend the cleaner and blame the client for ‘grossly underestimating’ what two hours of cleaning a 300 square foot studio apartment constitutes. I had to hear my partner vent all last night about how management blamed him. I’m like baby shut up, they write obnoxious responses to everyone. However they offered free 15 minutes of service next time as an acknowledgment that Ahmad should have listened better.
My problem with this business is not the cleaning or the owner responses but that they basically are an on-demand service with very, very few stable contract workers. When I purchased the Groupon, I immediately signed up for the service on their website. You sign up for a time slot on their website that you’re probably not going to get. When you don’t get the time slot you initially requested, they make you text or email them your alternate availability, since they don’t have an online system set up for this, unlike Cozy Maid’s system. Each time a time slot that you requested is not fulfilled, you get more texts and emails about them not being able to secure staff. I received eight of these messages. They apparently have no staff during the entire weekday who want to work mornings in the middle of LA (Hollywood). I spent a week and a half receiving these texts and emails until they gave me an available time slot for a weekday afternoon that I DIDN’T say I have availability for, but I was so desperate to get anyone to do this job, I begged my partner to do me the favor and sit for this guy.
It makes a lot of sense now that the owner and management are so defensive of their workers because they have so few of them to begin with! They probably are scared to death of nobody cleaning for them if they rebuke them for doing a shoddy job or not listening. If you know of anyone who is looking for a job, you should probably suggest they work for this business! You set your own hours and nobody will blame you for being lackadaisical as long as you’re wiping something!
Michael Levine Fabrics 26
$$ Fabric Stores
920 Maple Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Michael Levine is a last alternative kind of fabric store. When I can’t quickly find what I want along the perimeters of Los Angeles St. or 9th Street, I end up coming here. Usually, I am lazy and willing to spend a few bucks more than I would at a smaller fabric store. It is probably the biggest fabric store in the area. It is as good as the other big fabric stores I go to, but it feels a bit more indie and cooler than the other ones. I think I am mistaking their clutter, griminess, and haphazard organization for being cool. They don’t have aisles here, more like a maze of intertwining tables.
I have come here for three or four Halloweens. I am helping make an abominable snowman costume this year. Other years included a homemade He-man, and a brony. It usually has everything I need! One particular thing that stands out for me is their selection of dyes. I love their iDye. I had a pair of cotton shorts that I got from Urban Outfitters for $10 that bleached in the sun within a month. I used a cool blue-grey-ish color, mixed the iDye in a pot, mixed the shorts in the iDye, stirred for an hour, and ended up with a pair of jet black shorts. Be careful!
Melrose Hostel
Hostels
646 N Western Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90004
I needed a place to stay on the cheap between subletting my studio in Hollywood and flying to my studio in Madrid. I called them up and I decided to stay here because the guy, possibly the owner, who I spoke with on the phone was incredibly friendly. He told me about a 5% discount on their website and bicycle parking on the roof. It is cheaper than any of the other rates offered on other websites. It was like $28 a night! It’s against their rules to be an Angelino and stay here, so I used proof of my travels and Spanish residence to create a loophole that I could jump through.
This hostel is small and it’s furnished like a Boba shop. They’re located in the middle of Koreatown’s furniture row and the decor looks like an amalgamation of leftover furniture of nearby stores that have gone out of business. They’ve basically got three rooms with 14 beds each: Men, Women, Unisex. There is a common room on the ground level with a television, a refrigerator, a communal table, and a couch. The Men’s room is a bit cheaper than the other rooms, and it was full every night. Since LA is synonymous with homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, it’s probably not surprising to find a share of older people who normally wouldn’t stay at hostels anywhere else in the world sharing bunk beds here. Each of the rooms has got lockers. They seem like repurposed high school or gym lockers from 40 years ago with lock mechanisms that you sort of have to wiggle the lock in and out of.
The breakfast is very delicious with fresh watermelon, blueberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, bagels (prepackaged), bread, orange juice, and coffee. However it runs out at 8 am and depending on who’s working that morning, it takes a long time to refill. PARTICULARLY – the Asian woman who wears sandals absolutely hates refilling the breakfast. She gave me an attitude and raised the orange juice and milk cartons when I asked if she could refill the one small coffee maker that they use since it was empty for like the 15 minutes I was there from 7:45 – 8 am. Yeah, it’s unusual that one worker is in charge of checking people out, refilling breakfast, and basically everything – so get another person to keep an eye on it!
There are a few other bicyclists who stayed here too. They got a system of which you could lock up bikes at the top of the hostel. They’ve got an incredible rooftop that is mostly used as a smoking patio, sadly. But it is also used for lounging. And then the bikes. I’m saying this as someone who works out obsessively, it is tricky to get a bicycle up those steep steps to the rooftop! I can see a weaker person completely losing their grip. You not only have to walk up stairs, but maneuver the bicycle along a winding passageway and hunch where the ceiling gets low, while keeping the bike high enough to not hit the stairs. But I believe this is on whoever brings a bike, because you need to possess at least a semi-advanced level of competency to bicycle along any part of Melrose. Melrose is absolutely narrow and horrifying to bicycle, especially where the cars are pushing past you to get onto the 101 onramp, and Western, which is less crazy but doesn’t have a bike lane either.
LEVEL
Airlines
380 World Way
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Months ago, I booked a flight to Barcelona from Iberia Airlines. It was a nice and inexpensive $530 direct round trip flight. What Iberia did was morph my return flight into this new discount airline called “LEVEL”.
LEVEL is like a transatlantic Spirit Airlines. The ten-hour flights offer no free drinks, no free food, everything extra. I didn’t quite know this. So if you’re hungry or starving or want pillows or blankets, that’s on you peasant. But on top of that, the lines at the gates for these flights are very long because the planes are filled to capacity. There is one incredibly long and slow single file line. Both times it splintered with people coming from the left and from the right due to a general lack of direction of the line. You think you are about to enter a plane but no. The actual LEVEL planes at both LAX and Barcelona are not at the gate but parked at the far edges of the tarmac. The lines lead through the airplane gate to a shuttle. After getting through the line, the shuttle is a 15-20 minute ride to the edge of the airport, with people filled to the absolute capacity in these things.
The employees at LEVEL’s Check-In are incredibly defensive about an aisle seat request. “This is a low cost airline,” was said first to me. “We choose your seat.” I had three employees at the gate ignore me for about fifteen minutes until I addressed them really loudly. I almost surprised myself at how annoyed I sounded. I had a question about paying in cash. “I don’t know. He can help you,” the woman said and walked away. Then ten seconds of me staring at the guy. “I think so.” The guy said, not looking. I hope they’re just apathetic, not rude.
One thing that Iberia updated was having personal movie consoles and it’s cool that it now has personal movie consoles for the 10-hour journey, but they’re the glitchiest movie consoles on any transatlantic flight I’ve ever flown. Mine crashed twice and took about twenty minutes to reboot after a black screen. I couldn’t buy food or drinks. Everything was “sold out”. Even their tiny €4 bottle of water. So I couldn’t order anything. Their stellar staff didn’t know what to do about it either. The woman was irritated that I tried to give her cash without ordering from the console. She was determined that my glitchy console was working until she saw everything was sold out and literally didn’t know what to do with just cash. I wonder about the nightmare that would follow if I only had a credit card and it declined. I am going to have to take a mental note not to die of hunger or starvation in the future before embarking on what’s revealed to be a discount airline. By the way, everything is sold in euros.
It’s almost worth an extra hundred dollars to fly with an airline that provides food and drink, employees with a way higher morale, and planes that actually land at and fly from the gate. I like to save money but would seriously reconsider ever booking a flight with “LEVEL” Airlines again. I am usually pretty fair with discount airlines, but this was a pretty awful flight from such a new airline.
Aer Lingus
Airlines
200 World Way
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Aer Dingus has many empty seats. It has an outdated movie viewing console. It plays a propaganda film at the end of each flight puffing the joys of Ireland like an over-inflated balloon.
I was on a roundtrip flight to Barcelona from LAX. I got one of those cheap flights for $500-some-odd dollars with one of the stops on the flight landing in Dublin. My other flights were British Airways and American Airlines, which offer updated movie consoles and seat partitions that go all the way up. However, they are filled to the brim in comparison.
The joys of having such an empty flight include having my own row. You really can’t enjoy having your own row because the seat partitions only go so high at a 45-degree angle. But I still wanted the woman sitting next to me gone. And she wanted me gone. Fortunately, we were on the same wavelength but I couldn’t go anywhere since I had a vegan meal coming to my seat number.
When she left, I stretched out my leg a little bit and watched Swiss Army Man. My partner was dying somewhere in the back of the plane due to eating day-old fish tapas in Barcelona, complaining about not laying comfortable on a row of chairs with partitions at 45 degree angles high. So if you want to actually lay down and sleep on transatlantic flights, like on Virgin Atlantic, American, and Air New Zealand when they’re empty, you can’t do that too comfortably on this one. Not sure how sustainable these empty flights to and from Ireland are, since I doubt they make any money on most of them, but their emptiness makes it a very comfortable and inexpensive way with getting to and from Europe.
Clifton’s Republic
$$ Bars, Venues & Event Spaces, Dance Clubs
648 S Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90014
Clifton’s Cafeteria looks like it’s been through a rock tumbler but still offers an old-timey kind of charm about it. All of the old pictures of how it used to be are not here anymore. This isn’t a how-it-used-to-be place anymore but an old cafeteria that is repurposed by branding and marketing to offer generic American buffet-style food at not-cafeteria prices. I enjoy the over-polished urban decor with mood lighting because it is pleasing and acts as a window to its authentic past behind its new Las Vegas veneer. So, fortunately, for me, seeing old concrete walls behind what was cleaned and stripped off feels a little authentic by it being like a museum presentation piece.
You begin your journey by walking left from the host stand to the first-floor cafeteria. You see a carving station, $meat (however much sliced-on-demand meat is), $3 cups of quinoa, $6 soups, $6 ‘side salad’ and $11 ‘dinner size’ salad. And everything else that is at least $3. Freebies include that you can grab water in a paper Coca-Cola cup and bread rolls are free. You carry a tray, and are responsible for grabbing a napkin and forks first.
We sat on the second-floor bar. My friend grabbed a Manhattan from a very slow bartender. I finished my $6 small side salad while he was waiting for his drink. The salad was good and I added onions, mushrooms, cucumbers, spinach, carrots, and vinaigrette. The guy doing the bar was either kind of new at his job or doesn’t have a bar manager who carries a bullwhip. I work at a music venue with bartenders that fill a drink in one hand and place napkins on the bar in the other, while simultaneously taking new orders. It took about ten minutes for him to get his drink with three other people there. After he finished his drink and food, we went back to the bar. I then took out my iPhone timer to see how long it would take for this guy to get him his check and credit card from the computer at the bar. It took four and a half minutes while serving two more customers.
We didn’t have time to try the third-floor bar but went upstairs to look at it. It is incredibly attractive. It offers a lot of beauty and quietness and feels a bit more upscale and not like a place for high traffic like the two previous floors. The only thing I thought was of how something feels subliminal about the image on the tv screen of a cathedral at the very center of the third-floor bar. What are we supposed to pay reverence to?
Stir Crazy Coffee House
$ Coffee & Tea
6903 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
I really, really like this place to work. It is always comfortably dim. It is impressive that it sustains the same amount of dimness no matter what time of day or night it is! There are a lot of outlets and the wifi is probably the fastest of any coffee shop I have been to. I think the old guys are funny. Oh, and the drinks! And I think the spicy chai is the best in Los Angeles and never-ending coffee with free refills is incredibly well priced and just as well made.
There are a lot of older guys who fawn over the one particular barista with glasses who reminds me of Lisa Loeb. Seriously, I believe more than half the people who are regulars here come here because they have a huge boner for her. They disappear when the guy with the accent is working later at night. It seems that older guys would not be oblivious that she is just charismatic in a nerdy way to everyone but perhaps they love any positive attention they can get.
After I ordered a drink, there was one 50-year-old heavyset guy with long slicked back and grayish curly hair that came inside quite eagerly. He walked in as if he could not wait to be talked to, the door banged and he loudly began to pace back and forth behind me, like a large lion pacing back and forth in a cage. The steps he made on the wooden floor echoed with his hubris. He was spreading his fat body out, anticipating on talking to the barista while she was making my soy chai.
I concluded that it definitely was some kind of alpha male thing because after pacing back and forth three or four times, he could not wait any longer and went next to the register in front of me. He asked how she was doing while she was turned around. She said “ok.” And he proceeded to say something cheeky about how well his business was doing and then assured her that he will be back later.
USA Hostels – CLOSED
Hostels
711 Post St
San Francisco, CA 94109
I actually wasn’t going to review USA Hostels on Post in San Francisco since I only stayed here one night in March. But since I discovered yesterday on Hostelworld that management wrote back a smug ‘most people enjoy our atmosphere’ to my comment about it being a party hostel with an awful common room in the basement, I felt like I should expand my comment via Yelp. I only discovered their comment after reviewing a couple of other hostels during my Europe excursion. I also believe in some places not being for everyone – and this place holds true for me (and Cori N. on Yelp who similarly had a negative experience with regards to the amount of aggressively loud party people staying here).
I stay at a lot of hostels and this is by far the most overrated place I’ve been to. Besides the mishap of them having overbooked my room with one other person (the issue was remedied by me going to reception to get the guy out of my bed) and breakfast virtually having run out an hour after it began, my biggest issue was the main common rooms of the hostel are in the dim and narrow basement and all the couches either face the washer and driers in the laundry room or the pool table. Most hostels I’ve stayed at only have breakfast in the basement and have common rooms on other levels because it’s more breathable, enjoyable, and comfortable. HI City Center – my favorite hostel in San Francisco – has common rooms on two levels – the main area and the mezzanine. It’s incredible and pleasant.
When I say ‘narrow’ here – I mean the ceiling in the dim basement is really low. Their laundry room, which is about the size of a bathroom, is ironically the most comfortable space to do work. They’ve got washers and dryers on one wall and cozy couch chairs and tables three feet away on the other wall. Mind you, I am indeed saying that the laundry room is the MOST comfortable part of their common area. The kitchen, lounge and eating area are all one big room for partying. All of the couches in that lounge face the pool table. So if you decide to sit there, you are basically joining in on Game Night, which is the night I stayed.
When I went down into the dim basement on Game Night, there was this miasma – a heavy odor – of sweat and beer in this unventilated, narrow hallway and low-ceiling basement. It was only 11 pm! There were a ton of 21-year-old guys yelling and beer cups everywhere. I work at a really popular music venue so I am around people who like to unwind that way all the time. BUT THERE ARE NO OTHER COMMON ROOMS for people who want a quieter space to go on their laptops, except that laundry room, and there were literally two people on each couch chair and people sitting along the wall to avoid those loudmouths with beer odor. There is also the drafty waiting room in front of reception, which is basically as comfortable as the heavy fluorescent lights it is situated in.
I initially felt like I just stayed at the wrong place, but after reading the reply left by Ria S. to Cori N.’s review, I know that I stayed at the wrong place. This is probably a reply left by the same person who posted the comment to my review. If you really want to tout and celebrate your amazing diversity of guests, why is it set up so every couch and room is facing a pool table and beer?
I lived in San Francisco and there is nothing about this place that offers a semblance to the city. It is a very generic, culture-less party hostel. And that’s fine if that’s what most people want. But if management wants to leave a comment on MY review that pats themselves on the back about their beloved hostel with a spacious basement, then this is my response. I recommend anyone who reads my review to stay at my favorite San Francisco hostel HI – City Center as it has an awesome local staff and atmosphere, but if you are scared to navigate the Tenderloin, then try HI – Downtown. It’s got a cool common room on an upper level, it’s next to Market Street, and has got an amazing breakfast with SF bagels that don’t run out.
Araya’s Place – Thai Vegan Restaurant
$$ Vegan, Thai
8101 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Avaya’s place is more like a 3.5 out of 5 stars. The food is not bad. But I am rounding down to 3 stars because it simply was too expensive and average tasting for Thai vegan.
Avaya’s place serves the standard watery red tofu curry that you could find at any given Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. Thai Patio or Red Corner Asia, for example, have the same watery red curry that they serve in a similar portion for half the price of Araya’s $10 lunch special. No Bueno in Thai. You, dear reader, may say that “those places are not vegan though.” My rebuttal would be to name other Thai vegan examples, like The Vegan Joint or Vegan House, which would give you a heaping big bowl of curry with rice for the same $10 price. And their curries are thick and way more flavorful.
Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing majorly wrong with Araya’s red curry. The tofu was firm and the vegetables were fresh. The red curry though tastes pretty weak and uninspired. I asked for extra spicy. The chirpy younger woman who was serving me, I don’t know her name but I’ll call her ‘Gabby’ since all she did was talk to the other table she was serving for the 20 minutes I was there, told me that they’ll make the curry an extra spicy ’10 on a 1 to 5 scale’. The curry tasted like it had a lot of spice added after the curry was cooked. It wasn’t ‘extra spicy’ but the level of spiciness that I have come to expect from most Thai places not serving a Thai person. They also serve Thom Kha soup and similarly put the spices in post hoc, and it’s similarly unmemorable.
All I have to say is that this is surprising to me that it’s a 4.5 out of 5-star average rating. I guess I had high expectations coming in here, but this place would not stand a chance to hold that 4.5/5 rating in my Thai Town hood.
The Broad
Art Museums
221 S Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Finally, LA has a thorough art museum that highlights the contemporary art besties and worsties that all art majors in college come to intimately know. Broad (pronounced ‘Brode’) has got an entire fleet of artwork from pop to conceptual art that makes a statement towards globalization, mass-production, and iconography.
Julie Mehretu, one of her map-like abstracts, and one of my living favorite artists.
The people who didn’t book two to three months in advance have to wait 30 to 40 minutes on the line that wraps around the building. Everyone essentially gets in free but the un-ticketed people will not get to see the mirror lights exhibit, which I think was once at Tate in London without any ridiculous line. So go to London instead of wait in line! The mirror exhibit is a fun, immersive experience but it is not worth booking two months in advance to just see that.
The art gallery is two stories and 1 1/2 stories worth of art, but it takes about 90 to 120 minutes to thoroughly see and hear everything. One thing that isn’t enforced though I think should be, and I should have been reprimanded for doing is NO photography. There are camera phones on every angle of people and their friends trying to take photos (especially of the Murakami and Koons stuff), that it becomes an inevitably losing game of not getting caught in someone’s picture and becoming featured in Yelp photo number 1451 of the Brode.
Artist Glenn Ligon’s physical description as an Antebellum runaway slave.
MatchaBar – CLOSED
$ Coffee & Tea, Vegan, Breakfast & Brunch
3534 Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
Matcha is fine but there’s an epidemic of banality and too much storage space on people’s phones. I am glad I didn’t eat here because when I sat down to try this thing, this woman then sat next to me and was obsessively photographing her drink and smiling at her phone while doing it for the duration of while I was there. I felt a mixture of pity and embarrassment that maybe in a more naive state of my life that could have been me, contributing to the ugly photo pool of our consumption. And partly because she was so close to me that people would think we were buddies and I was indulging her hobby.
Anyway, give me a cold brew. Matcha is one of those things that tastes no different anywhere I go. It’s the type of milk and sweetener that affects how the matcha powder tastes. It’s nice to be offered coconut milk at no additional price as this thing tasted as good as I could expect, though there was a part of me that hoped to have a higher expectation. But it was fine. It tasted as good as the best ones I have come to try over the many years. Meaning, good. But as I am not a big matcha person, I never fathomed a need to have matcha in such a pressing way, that there would be a store dedicated to it. Nor have I had a need to photograph my matcha cup and post it on here, to assure my 300 or whatever friends on Yelp that this drink is indeed green.
On a Saturday, this place had a line. It seemed to get busy, then it stopped, then it got busy again. They are nearby the human mouse trap Millie’s Diner so there’s a ton of people in the vicinity, and being on a patio nearby the narrow sidewalk of the hubbub is a bit anxiety-inducing. But they indeed offer a type of minuscule sitting arrangement in front and wifi, which are two nice enough things to look forward to if looking for a hang out spot in the area.
6/11/2017
Useful: 2 Funny: 3 Cool: 0
Comment from Max F. of MatchaBar
Business Owner
Hi Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to come to MatchaBar and leaving us a review. I am sorry that some of our other customers seemed to sully in the way of your experience. Obviously we can’t really control how deep someone is going to go in on their photo shoot.
I would love to get some more feedback from you – if you could send me a message i have a few questions I would love to ask. As I read your review it seems to say that we are doing just about as good a job as any Matcha spot could do – because you’re not that into Matcha…
For future reference (maybe you missed it in-store) we do have an amazing coffee partner and serve up a full coffee/espresso menu for individuals such as yourself who just don’t really get down on Matcha. Bar9 (roaster in culver city) has an awesome cold brew system which is actually why we brought them on board. If you are in the area again and are in the mood – I urge you to give it a go.
City of Los Angeles
Public Services & Government
Los Angeles, CA
High school graduation for a boy from Orange County was coming closer and closer. Turning 18 meant going to Club Beat It or Club Bang. The class of 2001 was not the Class of 2000 but the first high school graduating class past the millennium, which being the first class was somehow more important than being zeroth. First prize, first kiss, first pregnancy. There was The Smell, too. It was nice because the Friday-slash-Saturday night Los Angeles traffic would guarantee that the hangout would be past 2 am or 3 am when you get back.
But being in Los Angeles was separate from living in Los Angeles. There is nothing really penetrable about visiting Los Angeles. (The car is just another surface against the city.) And having abandoned Orange County years ago to San Francisco and London, I moved here, to a close but separate place, because I missed the weather. I also knew about the culture, the isolation, the pretension that is not the beast of just Los Angeles, but Southern California in general. The seductive part of Los Angeles is breaking through its seeming impenetrability. Perhaps seduction is found in the tension that another surface brings it. I’m not sure if Los Angeles could be Los Angeles without the moving car.
Getting to know Los Angeles requires willpower to combat it and a surface to ride against it. I don’t need a car here so I have ridden with my bike from my apartment in Los Feliz to other things on a daily basis for three years. I have hit into things pretty hard so Los Angeles is literally in my arms and legs, and my own blood is on it too. The cracks become the focus if they are what make you fall. I’ve embraced the isolation and glamorous surface and crisscross (and sometimes fall from) these fragments. Yet I think the fragments from around these cracks are the tectonic plates that keep this city moving. There is a hazy cloud of Angelenos who literally live on separate tectonic plates and co-exist as a sub-community of the moving car. And I embrace the counterintuitive impulse to coexist on a tectonic plate, movement against movement, and I like the weather.
Spirit Airlines
Airlines
300 World Way
Los Angeles, CA 90045
The second best thing next to spending $100 instead of $200 is that they sell “fancy mixed nuts” for $4. It’s embarrassing to ask for it. “Can I have the fancy mixed nuts?” Sounds like something that would come in quite a big package. It actually does – filled to the brim with delicious almonds and cashews mixed with golden raisins and pretzels.
The airline is great for people who travel light. They show a naked person on the website under the “bare bones” option and highly advice against it so many times, on the site, and through email but don’t fret. “Bare bones” gets you at least a few days’ worth of stuff on the plane without spending $30-50. If you have a bag that is under 18″ x 14″ x 7″ like my Diaper Dude messenger bag (which is almost exactly those measurements), you can travel with five shirts, five pairs of socks and five pieces of underwear, one laptop, two chargers, toiletries and one hardcover book just fine.
I have flown to Las Vegas and Portland from Los Angeles with this airline and found my trips to have gone smoothly. It’s really the only discount airline that flies out of LAX, so I support it for that reason alone.
Paradis – CLOSED
$ Ice Cream & Frozen Yogurt
1726 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
The major irritation about this place is their deceptive advertising. They forwardly claim to have vegan options – and yes, technically they do. I went in here once, and after asking, the worker pointed to two sorbets. It’s not only irritating, it’s extremely tacky to claim that a sorbet is vegan because sorbet is always vegan.
Any ice cream shop that has sorbet can claim to have a vegan option, which almost all ice cream shops in Los Angeles do, which makes this place as special as Häagen Dazs. Unlike an ice cream shop like Scoops in Los Angeles or Maggie Mudd in San Francisco which actually has vegan options, because they offer soy-based ice creams – Sorbet is ALWAYS vegan. It always has been vegan and always will be. Using dairy in sorbet would make it sherbet.
It’s as absurd as claiming that a fruit stand has a vegan bowl of cherries. Or a coffee shop has a vegan espresso. Or a bakery has a vegan loaf of bread. Sorbet is ALWAYS vegan. Please either get non-dairy ice cream or remove the vegan label. This deceptive advertising on Yelp’s iPhone app, which got me in this place, is making ignorant people more ignorant.
One extra star because the ‘vegan sorbet’ tasted decent.
The Literary Guillotine – CLOSED
$$ Bookstores
204 Locust St
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
I bought A Thousand Plateaus a thousand days ago from The Literary Guillotine for a course I was taking in 2009. About eighty days after a thousand days ago, I chucked A Thousand Plateaus through an open door of the Santa Cruz Art Museum, never to see it again.
And three days ago, I get a letter from my Ph.D. examiner:
Please include citations from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! And then I realized I still haven’t woken up from my nightmare. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOT DELEUZE AND GUATTARI!
The hangover of Deleuzian critical theory begins to wash from the shore again as I remember reading and re-reading A Thousand Plateaus from a thousand days ago.
How I’ve cited scores upon scores of sources for a research paper desperately hoping to avoid running into this schizophrenic telephone book of critical theory that I had bought and chucked to escape.
He/they/me/we wrote on Page 10 that “[e]very rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as” blah blah blah “constantly flees. There is a rupture” and rupture and rupture and rupture AND RUPTURE AND RUPTURE. “These lines always tie back to one another.”
You see Chris G. from Yelp, once you enter the ‘rhizome’, you will never leave the ‘rhizome’. The book of critical theory that you have despised so comes back to cling to you forever. Deleuze and Guattari really fucking miss you and want to burrow throughout your citations and demand credit.
This storage-sized bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz is a cauldron of spells of critical theory. It is stacked with course books upon course books for purchase. Do people ever read critical theory for shits and giggles? Any-who, somehow the things you don’t want to remember, the places you never want to re-visit in your mind again, the books you don’t want to miss become part of your life again.
I didn’t choose Deleuze and Guattari, but somehow my most hated book became the most crucial one to write about.
Tommaso Ristorante Italiano
$$ Italian, Pizza, Seafood
1042 Kearny St
San Francisco, CA 94133
Where to begin…
Back in the mid-2000s, there was a boy who liked a girl named Lauren. Lauren lived in a custom-built house on a hill in Corte Madera in Marin. She wore black asymmetrical dresses, and had black asymmetrical hair. She liked writing passive-aggressive letters on postcards and looking at brightly colored cupcakes that would adorn the windowsills of bakeries. She was the type who did not like to be stereotyped and yet would predictably disagree with this description.
The boy invited the girl to meet his parents who were visiting from out of town. They were finicky about the restaurants they dined at. The parents were anal-retentive and unadventurous but liked Italian food. The boy chose Tommaso’s.
The parents balked. Porn theaters were in the neighborhood, a fake $100 bill was rolling along the asphalt in the wind… They were seated on a small folding table hastily placed in the front of the restaurant. It was busy. The portions were too small for the parents, and the conversation was pat and topical. The best part of the dinner was the sauce.
To sum it up, the boy spent more time trying to impress his parents with the choice of restaurant than accommodating the girl with black hair and black asymmetrical dress, who never spoke to him again.
Tommaso’s was not Macaroni Grill for the parents. And not a good place to reconcile lovers of fake Italian food with lovers of cute windowsill cupcakes.
