Cheap Eats
By L.E. Leone
The big 1-0
Cheap Eats celebrates an anniversary, and grease is still the word – or one of them.
IT WAS A big moment for me. A small thing, but a big moment when the Asian woman holding my feet in her hands looked up, almost humorously, and said, "Color?"
I wish they could have heard me in Oceanside. Wish they could have heard me in North Carolina and Ohio. I wish that Jimmy, Steve, Jay, Michael, Kevin, Chris, Vince, Joey, Dominic, even Marcel (who doesn't understand English yet), even Deal ... I wish they could have heard what I said. – I said, "Yellow." – This being San Francisco, of course, I wasn't the only food reviewer getting nails done down at Angel's on Church Street that day. There was one other guy. But he wasn't there with his wife. He wasn't getting his toes done too, and he certainly wasn't getting color.
For me, it was an important decision but not a difficult one. Outside of all the various shades of red and pink there weren't a lot of colors to choose from. I picked a bright, neon yellow, the color of egg yolks. It seemed like a good color to make a statement with, and a good way, by the way – especially if you're a food reviewer and not into the pain or permanence of tattoos and piercings – to make a statement with your body: something subtle, simple, straightforward. So my statement, basically, was going to be: eggs.
My feet and hands always were prettier than my wife's, and I don't mind mentioning it because she wins in every other category. Anyway, remarkably (given her presumed agreement with the above-stated objective scientific fact) the manicure-pedicure was her idea, her treat, to cheer me up.
It did! I can't stop looking at my toes. I can't stop wiggling them. Even when I'm wearing socks, I can't stop thinking, "eggs." Of course, four soccer games and two baseball games have taken a toll, but there's still a little bit of yellow left.
• • •
From my backyard to your toilet, or bus seat, or desk or couch or kitchen table, happy 10-year anniversary! It's yours as much as mine. If you're reading this because you read Cheap Eats, then ... Hi, Mom!
Promise: That's the last time I'll make that old joke. Ten years is too long, and of course at the same time not nearly long enough to laugh at the same stupid gags from every possible angle. Truth is my mom doesn't read me, unless I send it to her. She's got no Internet, not to mention computer, not to mention electricity, God bless her.
My dad reads, and my friend Neno ... Every single one of these 520-plus ditty-wa-ditties. So, happy anniversary to them. I stole the idea for the column from Neno 15, 16 years ago, in our New Hampshire days, and then my dad talked me into reviving it after I moved here. In 1990. It took him four years to talk me into it.
In 1994, when my take on Sodini's Green Valley Restaurant in North Beach hit the streets, I was living in a closet, very very literally, at Guerrero and 18th Streets, and the Mission was pre-gentrified and scary. And cheap. A loaf of bread cost 15¢, and the milkman still delivered. My love for chickens was strictly platonic; if they were on my plate, I loved them.
My van kept getting stolen. Remember? So I wasn't always able to be in Oakland, at Ann's Cafe (one of the first restaurants I stumbled into in the line of duty, 10 years ago last Tuesday), staring into a five-pound omelette with six kinds of meat in it. Sometimes I was at Cancún, hammering a carne asada burrito into my mouth. Or else getting good and greasy with homemade potato chips at whichever hole-in-the-wall burger joint occupied the hole-in-the-wall at 3406 18th St. It was Chris's Hamburger, I think, and then Lee's Hamburger, or vice versa, before it became Yamo Thai Kitchen – which recently changed owners and went vegetarian. (And people ask me if I'm ever going to run out of restaurants to write about!)
Ten years ago I took my oniony afternoon naps in a loft in a closet, the buzz and blare of Guerrero Street my lullaby. I lived in a closet because I lived in a studio apartment, with a Ping-Pong table. This month, finally, I moved back to the Mission. With my wife. And furniture. And chickens. We're lucky to live in a whole house, with four closets (where we keep, you know, clothes and things). After three years in Bernal Heights, two years in the country, and eight months in Noe Valley, the buzz and blare of Cesar Chavez is music to my ears. Even the chickens are into it. They have more bugs, more grass, and less raccoons.
Closest restaurant: St. Francis Fountain (last week's Cheap Eats), which has also undergone an ownership change – for the better.
So I guess what I'm getting at is if life doesn't come complete circle, it at least spirals and spins. Or: I'm back, only everything's different. Exactly the same, and entirely different. I'm out of the closet.
• • •
I own a manual typewriter. It's a portable Royal Deluxe with the round, silver-rimmed keys, and it goes, "CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!" Like that. The sort of sound that speaks to you, has something to say even when you're as hollowed out as a snail shell in a French restaurant. You can ride that sound like a wave. Have a pencil behind your ear, cup of coffee curling into the room around you, a candy cigarette dangling from your lip ...
I'm not the only Luddite in the world. (Hi, Mom!) I'm not the only one with a manual typewriter, I know, and I'm not the only one who still uses it sometimes – but I am the only one typing these words right now on a portable Royal Deluxe at Jumpin' Java coffeehouse, Noe and 14th, CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!
Those subliminal clicks and ticks you might make out, just barely, in the background, those are all the slickster laptops, trying real hard to stay serious in the midst of my CLACK-CLACK racket. I give them two more minutes, and everyone in this place, even the laptops themselves, will be laughing ...
The case for this thing weighs about 25 pounds, and that's without the typewriter in it. In other words, it may not be able to connect me to the World War W, but my little Royal can kick your laptop's ass.
What's this? A visitor! Uh oh ...
"What the fuck?" He's laughing.
"I should warn you." (This is me now.) "Careful what you say, because it might wind up in the paper."
Visitor: "Oh, your you're a reporter?"
Me: "How do you spell ostensible?"
Visitor: "Doesn't that have a spell-check?"
Me: "Hold on a second. Don't say anything else. I'm trying to catch up." CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! (He's laughing. Me too.) CLACK! CLACK! "OK."
Visitor: "You're not a journalist."
Me: "No? I didn't think so. What am I, do you think?"
He looks around. I think he's thinking Candid Camera, or its modern-day equivalent. (I don't watch TV.) Finally, he seems convinced the joke's not on him personally.
Visitor: "You're a terrorist."
• • •
I stopped typing. That's what those three dots mean, in this case. I stopped typing because I was speechless. He was right. I'm a terrorist. Don't tell the gubment, but a yellow-toenailed food reviewer typing on a manual typewriter in one of the city's most laptop-heavy coffeehouses can only mean one thing: terror.
"A kinder, gentler terrorism," my editor mused, when I talked to him about it. He was right too.
Hi. I'm a kinder, gentler terrorist.
• • •
All of these and many other acts of nudgey nefariousness were plotted out by me under the influence of mold. When we moved from Sebastopol to Noe Valley last summer, I had imagined that working in a basement office without windows, heat, or air exactly, would work wonders for my ... work, which suffered, according to public opinion polls and consumer research testing, from a general sort of lighthearted airy openness.
Noe Valley! With its purebred pedigreed dogs and heartwarming multiculturalism – beautiful blond babies being bandied about by Latina nannies – with its clean sidewalks and shiny-carred, tree-lined streets, the constant happy hum of deck construction, birdies ... what better atmosphere to hide out from and plot against, rubbing my pre-manicured hands together in my dank underground hovel?
My first fuzzy hatchlings centered around the neighborhood's most notable accessory, the baby carriage, and all the things I could conceivably push around in one that weren't babies. From the obvious list: chickens, chicken eggs, a dead and plucked chicken, barbecued chicken. From the not-so-obvious list: my manual typewriter, a box of condoms, a globe, a bucket of dog shit. From the not-even-close-to-approaching-obvious list: my own baby.
Ah, those were the glory days of last late-summer/early-fall, raising one eyebrow at a time as each of these ideas came to me, laughing maniacally and quite intentionally spooking the shit out of the cute little chicks I was incubating in a lamp-lit cardboard box, rearing to be my ... what's the word? Like the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. My minions? My little terrorist ... helpers.
And then the rains came and water seeped and leaked into my dark den of iniquity, and mold became visible and odorous, flourishing on the cement floor and drywall walls in many different colors. White. Black. Pink. Red. Green. At the emergence of each new variety I rejoiced, at first, thinking, How perfect! How atmospheric!
Until the atmosphere turned against me and I began to sneeze and cough and feel sick all the time, and I realized I was allergic to mold. A big bummer for wannabe nefarious evildoers.
In fact, an out-and-out no-no. I was forced by February out of my dungeon and into the light of day, where my radical terroristic leanings came to be very much watered down, naturally, since it was still raining and I don't have an umbrella.
In a cowboy hat and slicker I rounded up my by-then full-grown minions – not in a baby carriage but a cardboard box with holes in it – and I took them down to the village green to graze. Yeah, you know, I'm sure there's a political statement in there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. I just know that chickens love to eat grass, and they weren't getting any under my deck. And the outfield down at the Upper Noe Rec Center on Day Street, it looked to me, could use a little mowing.
So, I don't know, hey, who's to say: maybe this spring some Little Leaguer gets a little chicken shit residue on his shoe, or something.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha!
• • •
You should have been there that day when I let loose my three little ladies in straightaway center field. You should have been there, because I could have used help getting them back into the box.
Already in line to move to the Mission, I wasn't overly concerned about being recognized around the neighborhood thenceforth as the kooky urban farmer. I had fully intended on being noticed, recognized, ridiculed ... whatever. I was kind of curious, actually, to see what would happen.
And in any case, I knew, the kids would dig it.
What an idiot! Didn't I tell you it was raining? This was kinder, gentler terrorism's equivalent of suicide bombing the 33 bus between 4:30 and 5 in the morning.
Eventually a homeless man I'd seen before down on 24th Street, singing to pigeons, happened by and said, and I quote, "Chickens."
"Yes," I said. I was standing in deep left-center, my hands in my pockets, watching them scratch happily behind second base, and dripping from the brim of my hat.
The homeless man was passing between the tennis court and the basketball hoop, heading for the stairs, a bulging, dripping, plastic bag in each hand. On a different kind of day, maybe he would have sat down in the grass and serenaded the chickens. In a different time and place, maybe we'd have marinated them, started a fire behind home plate.
"Is it legal to keep chickens in the city?" he said.
I told him exactly what I'd told my landlord when he'd asked me exactly the same thing. I told him (having no idea whether or not it's legal) yes. Of course. Why wouldn't it be? They're just chickens. They're not roosters, or wolves.
"Yeah?" he said. "I'm gonna get me some."
I know what he was thinking.
• • •
Another evil idea I actually got to put into action, speaking of Upper Noe Rec, was beating the living crap out of fresh-faced neighborhood youths at Ping-Pong. Ping-Pong is one of the three things in the world I'm actually any good at. There's a table in the rec center there, and I'd played on it two or three times with my brother Chris, and once with my nephew Tom.
Last time there, with Chris, we were just back from North Carolina. Tom was dead, and we were wondering why, batting the little white ball back and forth. Blah blah blah blah blah. One thing: while everyone else was talking about how he was always smiling, always happy, always the peacekeeper, I had an additional image of Tom in my behind-the-eye Rolodex of available images, and it was a look of complete consternation, frustration, and bottled up ... stuff.
I kind of wish I'd never seen that look on his face, and it was right here at Upper Noe that I saw it. Ping-Pong was his sport too, one of the many things we had in common. But I was better, being twice his age. When I play family and friends, I have a tendency to play just well enough to win. Sometimes I lose, but not often enough, and then only by accident.
It had been on my terroristic list of Things To Do for months: hang out at the rec center and just all-out mercilessly obliterate little kids at Ping-Pong. That day with Chris we weren't even keeping score. I wasn't thinking about it, and then all of a sudden three after-school specials come sauntering in with their sandpaper paddles, trash-talking each other and calling winner – as if to take over the table that way.
I played all three and I'm still kicking myself for letting one of them win one point off me. Kids are over-coddled, don't you think?
We let them have the table and went outside to shoot hoops and continue the conversation, me and Chris. And if there's one thing funnier-looking than a Leone playing basketball, it's two Leones playing basketball.
But we enjoy it.
After a while the loudest-mouthed after-school special, the one-point wonder, walked out and looked at me and shook his head, half cowed, half cocky. "I kick ass at basketball," he said.
I sunk a lucky three-pointer and he kept walking.
Should've showed him my toes.
• • •
When I was growing up there was a popular writer in the Youngstown Vindicator named Esther Hamilton. She was Youngstown, Ohio,'s answer to Herb Caen. Or, hell, he was San Francisco's answer to her, for all I know. She was already ancient in the '60s and '70s, when I was a kid.
But the hilarious thing was that her column was called "About Town" or "Around Town" or "Around and About Town," or something like that, by Esther Hamilton, and this part I remember word for word: "written from her retirement home in Florida."
With a picture. Old Esther, looking at least 40 years younger than you knew she was. I think she was dressed like a flapper.
But people would send her little snippets of information, anecdotes, local color. And she would type it up into an article and send it back to Youngstown, and they'd print it, send her check to Florida, and we'd all trudge through the snow to get the paper and read her.
This killed me, even as a kid, and by high school I had honed my own column, first for friends (to try and make them laugh out loud in class), and eventually, once I'd finally "made it," for the school paper. I wrote a philosophical rap called "On the Nature of Life on Earth," by D. Leone, Written from a Windowless Padded Room in a Mental Institution on the Dark Side of Pluto's Smallest Moon.
It occurs to me now – what, 22, 23 years of life and 10 years of Cheap Eats later – that I'm still writing basically the same column. I still don't know Thing One about food, or life. And I can't even always say that I live in San Francisco. I do, but for two years I wrote Cheap Eats from Sonoma County. A lot of times, like just last week, thanks to what I call my inner train whistle, I have written my column from the road. And I'll write it from my retirement home in Florida some day if anyone lets me.
It's mind-boggling, and it's beautiful, and I wouldn't have it any other way, and I'm serious: I know some people who know less about food than I do, but I know a whole lot more who know more.
• • •
Tami Lipsey. Dave Ruddy. Penny Mapa. Tim McCrystle. John Ormsby. Timmy Binko. Tony Warminski. Chris Leone. Bernie Jungle. Jason Porter. John Hayes. Eberle Umbach. Buddy Lipsey. Betty Fay Lipsey. Nancy Krygowski. Ad McCauley. Gina Leone. Tom Powell. Yuri Ono. Eric Martin. Meredith McMonigal. Diane Vecchi. Brad Pedinoff. Lee Chae. Rebecca Gowen. Ray Halliday.
Pete Simonelli. Carrie Bradley. Neno Perrotta. Elena Powell. Jim Powell. Wally Sablosky. Lindsay Sablosky. Paul Benney. Kirsten Janene-Nelson. Josh Housh. Joe Leone. Jonah Winter. Sally Denmead. Steve Powell. Sonny Smith. Shannon Tesone. Joel Murach. Mike Stanton. Scott Houston. Case Hudson. Mari Ono. Jesse Freund. Jon Burke. Miriam Burke. Miriam Wolf. Rob Neill. Liz Silverman. Ryan and Deborah. Ron Luc. Marissa Hereso. Rick Toman.
Alison Roby. Jimmy Broustis. Jason Kleinburg. Phil Hereso. Julie Kramer. Gary Luke. Fran Bellino. Leslie Jonath. J. Neo. Teresa Leone. Michelle Alleman. Carmen Leone. Dan Leone. Tim White. Leslie Sullenger. Corey Porter. Muriel and Pascal. Chris Fortier. Andi Leone. Dave Olsavsky.
Dave Kress. Janet Balducci. Dave Ardito. Caroline Gredvig. Sabrina Merlo. Scott Donahue. Gene Leone. Guy Capecelatro III. Pam Raiford. Max Winter. Ghita Schwartz. Jen Moffitt. Dan DeLeon. Jeff Love. Scott Worsham.
Sasha Baguskas. Stephen Silbert. Jeffrey Gagnon. Suzanne Hayes. Jerry Kane. Natalie Hayes. Roger and Jeanette Winter. Dave Bolick. Isadora Alman. Michael Day. Sherrie Flick. Liz Kennedy. Matt Stahl. Nicole Claro.
• • •
Thank you for reading, and thanks for eating with me. Now that I'm out of the closet, as a sissy-toed terrorist, I thought I'd also out my heretofore anonymous friends-in-food from last week back to Sodini's. The assumption was that, judging from how much people love to see their goofy nicknames in print, they'd get an even bigger kick out of seeing their name names. If not, oops, sorry. And if I missed anyone, let me know. We can eat again some time in the next 10 years. I'm not going anywhere.
L.E. Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).
April 28, 2004
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