Truth Like The Dark

You gotta love UK public service announcements.

If LA is America’s cosmetic face,
Washington its devious brain,
New York its jaded heart,
Boston its detached intellect,
Chicago its coursing gut,
then New Orleans,
New Orleans is its naughty package.

All things ecstatic and filthy pass
through the bottom,
the secret purpose where unexpected
germs and gametes are mixing still.

Kneed, we’ve feebly grasped
at our potent, exposed delicacy,
fragrant and stripped
of the shadowy mesh
that so titillated tourists.

For really poetic words of NOLA,
listen to (the sadly defeated-sounding) Andrea Codrescu,
or try on this past work of his:

Tourists come to New Orleans to get drunk, to get weird, and to get laid. They also come to eat and, some of them say, to dance and hear le jazz. They get that. And plenty more. Sometimes they get rolled and killed. Sometimes they get arrested for running a red light and put in jail with theives and killers. You can’t ask for anything better in America. To get all those thrills separately you’d have to go to Belfast, to Bangkok, to Haiti, to Paris, and you’d still have to come to New Orleans for the music.

What I love about America is a diner. On this specific occasion, I mean The Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown, MA.

I’ve been coming here for years. There are always the same three Latin American guys who work the grill. And they must be psychic. The coordination is amazing. Even with hundreds of orders flying in like red hot shrapnel, these troopers dispatch every tasty item like a precision munition. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but it will do so deliciously on the highly recommended sweet potato pancakes with pecans.

Everything from the grill is amazing, and oh so American. If you’d rather choose something not made on sizzling steel, I’d suggest the Cod Cakes Florentine.

Sit at the counter, watch the display of high-precision grill arts, and chat with Lauren, perhaps the best looking waitress in Bean Town.

This is the America I love, served up on warm white plates.

Tired fools has revealed my voracious appetite for the finest of British Cuisine:

If there were a god, it wouldn’t be funny to watch chickens being sucked into a industrial machine and shot out into steel coops.
Click here, then click through to the video.

If there were a god, this sort of torment wouldn’t make for such a tasty Sunday dinner, either.

My life is an endless series of coffee shops and downloads. So Seattle is a natural part of my flow, and I’m particularly happy here in the deeply marvelous Crave
Don’t let Crave fool you. It looks like the sort of place where an all-black tattoo on one’s tailbone is a more important employment qualification than any culinary service skill. In any other city, you’d expect such a consciously hip staff to serve you slightly overcooked muffins with a little too much fiber, and to sneeringly lecture you on the political merits of these food items if you dare to complain.

But I defy the snottiest Parisian epicurean to complain about the eats at Crave. I just had the homemade miso-cured salmon platter, and my only comment is “yum.” I’ve had most of the other concotions here, and I’m sitting at the bar watching their lightning preparation as I type. That such speed can result in great taste and world class presentation is a real testimony to how oxymoronic the term slacker is in Seattle.

And Crave has got great free Wifi. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough power points, so I’ll have to wander to one of the other gazillion coffee shops in this town soon.