the navy grog.

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On my last night in Los Angeles, a few hours before I was to head to the airport to catch my redeye flight back to New York, I met up with my old friend — and former housemate! — Travis at Bahooka, a restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley that I had long wondered about, but had never ventured inside.  Turns out that since moving to LA, Trav has become something of a tiki bar aficionado, and a few days earlier had mentioned Bahooka as a particularly nutty example of the genre.  (Seriously: enter the site for photos.)  We had to go.

I can’t believe it took me this long to try this place out.  It’s insane.  My mother had been there a couple of times for work lunches (!) — her office used to be a few miles from the restaurant — and she’d told me that the food was terrible.  Sure, maybe.  (Yes, probably.)  But I’m pretty sure nobody goes there for the food.  They go there for the dozens of aquariums lining the walls.  They go for the sheer campiness of the place.  And let’s face it: they go for the drinks.

So long story short: the photograph of Trav above is woefully overexposed, and for that I blame the Navy Grog.  Or rather, I blame my consumption of three of them.  You know what happens when you have three Navy Grogs?  You forget to meter before taking a photograph with the Hasselblad.  You just open up the camera and shoot willy-nilly, not a care in the world, not a single regard for the bright, sunny afternoon and the 400-speed film you’re shooting with.   But still, I love the photo anyway, because it’s a photo of a dear friend, and its silly overexposure issues is a great memory of a wonderful time spent catching up over ridiculous rum drinks in an aquarium-filled, fake-bamboo tiki hut.  (Er, “Tiki” “hut”.)

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