High noon at the Claim Jumper
Claim Jumper is one of those restaurants to which people say you should go with an empty stomach and big appetite."Go with an empty stomach and big appetite!" they say.
Because the Northridge Claim Jumper is perched at the epicenter of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, I chose to go there recently when my stomach was empty, my appetite was big, and my Richter scale needed recalibrating.
"I will have the crab cakes and the Whiskey Chicken," I told the waitress. If I could have had Jagermeister Chicken or just Jagermeister, I would have.
"Do you think you can eat all that?" she asked.
"I'll take a doggie bag if I can't," I said. I'm not proud.
It wasn't until recently that I became aware that taking a doggie bag is viewed as uncool. Not that I thought it was cool, particularly, but that someone who chooses not to throw food away would be thought of as uncool made me think I wasn't subscribing to the right magazines.
It was at a sushi restaurant in Canoga Park and I'd eaten most everything on my plate. But now I felt bloated and mean.
"Can I get a To Go bag?" I asked.
"No," I was told, "you have to eat that here."
"But I paid for it (actually I hadn't). Are you saying you're going to throw it away?"
"If you don't eat it."
"At least tell me that you'll eat it or you'll take it home," I said. "Because it's stupid to just leave this food here and not be able to take it from the building."
"We don't do doggie bags," I was told.
"Whoa," I said. That smarts.
When I worked at Pizza Hut as a teen, we would eat our mistakes. I will not say I ever made a deliberate mistake so that I could eat a pizza with the wrong topping on it, because I have evidence that my former manager reads this site. All I'm saying is that the food was not wasted.
At the sushi restaurant, I sat back down and finished my meal in spite.
People talk about animal fear. When I eat a steak, I enjoy trying to detect fear.
"Not enough fear on this one," I will say at a steakhouse. "Send it back and scare the shit out of it."
But I wonder if one's own spite changes the taste of food?
Back at the Claim Jumper, my crab cakes and Whiskey Chicken had arrived. I had a couple of margaritas and a glass of water. As I ate I was aware that I would easily finish this meal and still be hungry.
"You're really tearing through that," the waitress said. "You must have been hungry."
Maybe the experience at the sushi place a mile away had released a chemical into my hypothalamus that turned off my awareness of my own satiation in restaurants. In any case, my waitress was beginning to make me feel like I was a miracle of science, because I finished my meal and she said, "You got through it!"
I was sad that I wasn't going to be able to eat this at work.
There are food riots going on in the Southern Hemisphere. Today I found this excellent pictorial article detailing the weekly meals and food expenditures for several households around the world. I was envious of this North Carolina family's ability (left) to get pizza delivered twice a week. They must be tycoons.See also: What we eat around the world
Labels: food, los angeles
posted
by Marty Barrett at Wednesday, April 23, 2008
1 Comments:
Uhm, I think they get two pizzas delivered once a week, which is not quite as impressive as one pizza twice a week. Stil, whatever you say, I'm behind you all the way, MB.
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