dc.
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It rained all weekend, and the lushness of the Southern vegetation only added to the humidity, but at last: DC. Armed with a crappy camera — an old Minolta Hi-Matic 7s, a rangefinder from the 1960s — with a broken light meter and loaded with even cruddier drugstore film, I decided to pretend I had a Lomo, and to hell with proper exposure and focusing!
Sorry about that. So much for feeling guilty about an underused camera. Underused for a reason, obviously.
Though we did, quite briefly, drive past the Mall and the Capitol building and all of that, it was the mundane stuff, the odds and ends of J’s new apartment and his Capitol Hill neighborhood, that caught my eye. And all those crabs down at the Maine Avenue Fish Market!
Just a quick two-day visit, this was. (Alas.) Next time I promise I’ll bring the Leica & Hasselblad.
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friday night.
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It started out so innocently.
Finding ourselves at a bar that also happened to have a pizza oven over in the back, Mike and I ordered a bacon-half-pineapple pizza. Not the finest example of the genre out there, but serviceable, especially in the face of a happy hour that — I wouldn’t find out till around 8:30 — didn’t end until 9pm.
By that point, we needed to head to a friend’s birthday party, in another bar, and pretty far afield. Somehow we reasoned that we needed to properly fortify ourselves. That’s how we ended up here:
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[Mike, I should point out, is not as grumpy as being photographed under fluorescent lights while eating Spicy Chicken McBites might otherwise indicate. His brow is perennially furrowed, regardless of his mood.]
There was a third meal after this, one that involved a fried chicken platter with biscuits and mac n cheese that the Hasselblad and I declined to photograph. Needless to say, by the time we got to the birthday party, we were tuckered out — more likely from the food than the beverage. After saying our hellos and well wishes to the birthday girl, we hopped into a cab, where with my legs curled up on the backseat, I fell asleep, my head resting on Mike’s lap.
One of those strange, long nights that, upon reflection [read: looking at the previous evening’s texts the following morning], ended far earlier than these photos suggest. We’re early bird night owls, me and Mike, tucked into bed at our respective apartments by midnight. Midnight! We are getting old.
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the garden.
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Now that my father is retired, he spends a lot of his time in the little garden he’s put together in the backyard of my parents’ place in Los Angeles. When I was home, we enjoyed some of his tomatoes in the bun rieu that my mother made; on another night, I nearly scorched my tongue off from the heat of the peppers Dad had picked earlier that day. Dad is pretty pleased with his garden, and so I took some photos for him, so he’d have some lasting evidence of his hard work.
Above: taken with the Hasselblad + Fuji Provia slide film. All photos below: Hasselblad + Polaroid back + Fuji instant film.
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Alas, when you have a garden, you sometimes encounter some curious interlopers. On my last weekend in town, Dad stumbled across two hornworms attempting to cozy up to the tomatoes. We sat them on the ledge so I could take their mug shots.
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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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the granny flat.
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It’s a strange feeling to be in your hometown, where you spent just about all of your childhood, and not stay with family. For four days a couple of weeks ago, J and I retreated to the hills in Echo Park, to a self-described ‘granny flat‘ that we’d found on airbnb. (You can see the listing here.) In the mornings, J would head outside to the backyard to get a bit of work done; I’d laze about in bed, then putter around with the cameras. We spent our days in search of good eats (quite successful!), and in the late afternoon we’d return for a nap before heading out again for dinner. The backyard faces west, so we’d delay dinner so we could watch the sunset. At night, everything was so very still, except for the crickets.
A much-needed vacation within a vacation.
[Also, as I was finishing this post, it occurred to me that in all but the first and last photos, a chair figures into the scene. This place was basically instructing you to get off your feet. For the New Yorker in me, this was something of a revelation.]
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LA folks.
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Family and friends, all very patiently posing for some Hasselblad shots.
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(nearly) everything i ate in los angeles.
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Are you ready? Here we go. Other than the photo above, of excellent fish tacos at El 7 Mares in Silver Lake, we’re gonna go in chronological order. Ready? OK!
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Bun Rieu — tomato & pork-based noodle soup with shredded crab, fried tofu, and pork ribs. Homemade by mom. I should add that this was breakfast.
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Family lunch at Il Fornaio in Pasadena. Not the greatest food, but al fresco + decent pizza + wine + family = can’t complain.
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Sunday brunch: BBQ pork + wonton noodle soup at one of those roast pork + duck shops in Monterey Park.
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Sunday night: drinks, burgers, truffle cheese fries, and lard-fried popcorn at Umamicatessen. Yup. The famed Umami burger is no joke, people. Order it.
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On Monday we had a big family BBQ-slash-birthday-party at my parents’ place. Lots of aunts and uncles and cousins showed up. Dad made steaks. Mom and I handled the appetizers. Homemade gougeres!
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On Tuesday, J came to town, and my mother and I met up with him for lunch at Pizzeria Mozza. The crispy duck leg with lentils is a Tuesday special; if you’re going to LA and plan to stop by Mozza, I recommend scheduling a Tuesday visit, just for this. It is excellent.
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On Tuesday night, J and I met up with old friends in Thai Town, at a place called Yai, recommended by our pal Rosten. This is the catfish salad. This was one of I think 8 or 9 dishes we ordered, and the only one I managed to photograph — I was too busy catching up with friends and gorging myself silly.
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After we had the delicious fish tacos pictured at the very top, J and I went on Wednesday afternoon to Yuca’s Tacos, a little shack of a place situated in the parking lot of a liquor store. We ordered and devoured the carnitas and cochinita pibil tacos.
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Completely forgetting the fact that many museums close on Wednesdays, we found ourselves in Little Tokyo in the middle of the afternoon, not quite enough of an appetite for ramen, but in need of something cold to drink. Into Demitasse we went for some cold-brewed coffee — pictured here is their very intense Kyoto brew. A sipping coffee, I was warned. Duly noted; we sat and read for a while, a respite from the heat outside.
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Inbetween our two meals at Sapp Coffee Shop for their wonderful jade noodles, we stopped at Pa Ord to try out the boat noodles (top) and tom yum noodles (above). Both were great, though eater be warned: in the mild-medium-spicy spectrum, their ‘medium’ is no joke. Sinus-clearing is an understatement.
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Later that evening, my parents, cousin, and I supped at Lukshon, and had quite a feast. I was snapping photos of all of our dishes, and though it’s unclear whether they thought I was a reviewer, after our dishes were cleared, they brought out a plate of desserts, on the house. Everything pictured here was fabulous, especially the dan dan noodles, sichuan lamb tartare, and the black rice with Chinese sausage and fried egg. Goodness gracious, that rice was glorious.
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Last (photographed) meal: a birthday dinner for my father at Lazy Ox Canteen. There were cured meats, a crispy rabbit liver salad, some grilled octopus, and a bunch more that I’m forgetting since, I mean, you try remembering the details of a gazillion meals. At the end of the meal, dad wasn’t in too much of a dessert mood, so instead of a candle atop a slice of cake, we got him some beef carpaccio to fete his big day.
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Ok, I’m going to go lay down now.
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housekeeping of sorts
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Just a quick note to let you know that you can find my digital photos (plus a few film photos transferred over) on Instagram, at @ruinista. It’s part of an ongoing experiment with the photo sharing/filter site, and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have a blog post up with my thoughts on the film vs. digitally-enhanced insta-nostalgia divide. But in the meanwhile — follow me there!
[Above: iPhone photo taken and posted on Instagram, of the view from the church in Southern California where my cousin got married a few weekends ago.]
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upcoming at lacma.
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I went with my friend Marwa to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last Saturday. They wouldn’t let me take photos inside most of the indoor exhibits (minus one — and even that one I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to use my camera), but they gave us permission to photograph just about anything else, including Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass and the empty spaces for upcoming exhibits. Go figure.
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Also, here is lovely Marwa, out in the main plaza. A breezy Saturday afternoon at the museum with an old friend — perfect.
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No joke. J and I discovered the jade noodles at Sapp Coffee Shop in LA’s Thai Town last Thursday night, and loved them so much we went back to the restaurant around noon the next day to order another bowl of it. How can you go wrong: green noodles topped with roasted duck, BBQ pork, and shredded crab meat, plus some greens, crushed peanuts and dried chili flakes, and a lime wedge for good measure. Stir it up, and dig in. It will look a mess, but an amazing one at that.
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It’s a dish served just above room temp, with the juices from the various meats coating the noodles and the squirt of lime adding a bit of bracing brightness to the whole affair. It’s the best $6.75 you’ll spend on food all day. Trust me.
If you’re still hungry, the larb and the nam sod are good bets too. Spicy, but not too much so, and a bit of rice will help cool things down anyway.
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The place really is just a glorified coffee shop, with a handful of booths and maybe ten or so tables, in a room just bigger than a hole in the wall, in a tiny mini mall on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ve got a bunch more LA food-related posts to come — pictured here are just two of I think 15 or 18 meals I managed to document during my vacation last week — but I thought I’d start out with the dish that really made the trip. If you find yourself in LA now or anytime soon, this is where you should have your first and last meals. And maybe a few of the ones inbetween, too.
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hong-an tran 