Eating Knowledgeably

150

When I became a food blogger all those years ago, I took a food safety class at Long Beach City College.

I had no intention of becoming a chef. I didn’t want to work in a restaurant kitchen, manage one, or prepare anybody’s food professionally. I just figured that if I was going to criticize restaurants, I ought to know something about what I was criticizing.

I wanted to eat knowledgeably.

So I learned about temperatures, cross-contamination, proper storage and all the invisible things happening behind the kitchen door before a plate ever reaches the table. I wanted to understand food beyond whether I liked it. If I was going to tell somebody that a restaurant had prepared something well or poorly, I wanted my opinion to have something underneath it.

I’ve learned a lot about food since then.

The night before I left Southern California, I stayed at the Glen Capri in Glendale.

That’s unusual for me. When I’m in Los Angeles and need a hotel, I tend to drift toward Manhattan Beach. But I have a friend in Glendale and wanted to stay close to her, so I spent the night there instead.

The next morning, I was getting ready to head to the airport when I noticed The Corner Lounge sitting right across the parking lot.

I had to go.

Once I sat down, though, I wasn’t in a hurry. That was sort of the point.

I’d been running around Southern California, and in a little while I’d be back at the airport, then back on an airplane, then back in Indiana, then back to moving vehicles across the country.

Breakfast became the space between those things.

I ordered chai and the short rib Benedict.

The Benedict was beautiful.

Two poached eggs sat over shredded short rib and avocado, covered in hollandaise, with tomatoes and a little greenery scattered around the plate. Instead of the usual English muffin, the whole operation sat on a waffle.

And the waffle turned out to be more than a gimmick.

One of my complaints with Eggs Benedict is that the English muffin can surrender halfway through the meal. You cut into the eggs, the hollandaise works its way down, and eventually everything underneath becomes one soggy foundation.

This waffle held.

It was crisp enough to take everything piled onto it without giving in. The short rib was shredded, well seasoned and surprisingly not fatty. The eggs were poached beautifully. When I cut into them, the yolks didn’t explode and drown the plate. They oozed slowly, leaving enough set white that I was still eating an egg instead of adding another sauce.

The hollandaise was rich and creamy. So was the avocado. The tomatoes and little bit of greenery gave the plate some freshness against all that richness.

And I took my time with it.

A bite of Benedict. A sip of chai. Water between sips of chai. Then another bite.

There was something sophisticated about eating like that. I wasn’t eating over a steering wheel. I wasn’t grabbing whatever happened to be near the interstate. Nobody was waiting for me to get moving.

For a little while, I was just having breakfast.

And somehow, sitting there eating short rib covered in hollandaise on top of a waffle, I thought: this is pretty healthy.

Understand my grading curve.

I eat fried chicken and hamburgers damn near every day.

I’m looking at eggs. Avocado. Tomato. Greens. Short rib that isn’t swimming in fat. I’m drinking chai and chasing it with water like a responsible adult.

From where I’m sitting, we’re doing pretty fucking good here.

Never mind the hollandaise.

And underneath this entire nutritional negotiation was a fucking waffle.

I am fat.

There isn’t really a more elegant way I feel compelled to put that. I don’t particularly like being fat, either.

I’m also not announcing some dramatic transformation. There will probably be no photograph of me six months from now holding up a gigantic pair of pants and telling you discipline changed my life.

I would like to eat better.

That gets complicated because I’m still Cue the Critic.

Food is one of the ways I understand the world. I remember places through meals. I remember people through restaurants. My father and I could barely hug each other comfortably, but I remember the In-N-Out meals we shared. I can map Los Angeles by freeways and neighborhoods, but I can also map it by things I’ve eaten.

I don’t want to lose that.

I don’t want to walk into a restaurant, see something I’ve never experienced before, and order grilled chicken because I’m trying to become a smaller person.

So I ate the Benedict.

The next day, I was back in Indiana.

I transport vehicles for a living now, and a lot of the RVs I move begin their lives there. They’re built in Northern Indiana and need to get to dealerships scattered across the country. I pick one up and become its driver for however many miles separate where it was built from wherever it’s going.

That puts me in Indiana a lot.

I stopped for fuel in South Bend and started thinking about breakfast.

Across the street was a Mexican restaurant I’d been to before. I’d gotten a burrito there once and remembered it being good. Since I thought it was still breakfast time, I figured I’d get a breakfast burrito.

It was closed.

Next door was a pizza place, and people kept going in and coming out.

A lot of people.

I couldn’t understand why a pizza place was doing this much business at breakfast, but then I figured they probably had breakfast pizza.

That made sense.

So I walked over.

There was no breakfast pizza. No eggs. No clever morning interpretation of pizza. Just pizza. Regular-ass pizza.

Then I looked at the time.

11:15.

Okay. The Hoosiers were innocent.

Nobody was eating pizza for breakfast. I had walked into a pizza place at lunchtime and somehow made them the strange ones.

Except I’m from Los Angeles, and 11:15 doesn’t really feel like lunch to me. At 11:15 in Southern California, nobody has taken breakfast away from you yet.

That’s brunch. That’s still Eggs Benedict territory.

Twenty-four hours earlier, at roughly the same part of my day, I’d been sitting in Glendale slowly eating poached eggs, avocado and short rib covered in hollandaise, sipping chai between bites.

Now I was in South Bend looking at regular pizza and wondering what happened to breakfast.

I’ve felt some version of this ever since I started spending so much time away from California.

Outside California, particularly when I’m traveling through the Midwest, finding the kind of food I want sometimes feels like work. Southern California has spoiled me. I don’t think twice about being able to find Eggs Benedict. It doesn’t have to involve short rib or a waffle. I just expect that somewhere nearby, somebody is still poaching eggs at 11:15.

But the more time I’ve spent on the road, the more I’ve started wondering whether I’m blaming the wrong place.

I know Los Angeles.

I know what I can find in Glendale, Pasadena, Koreatown, Fairfax and Long Beach. I don’t arrive hungry and search whatever happens to be within walking distance. I have history there. I know neighborhoods.

Indiana is different.

Indiana is often where a trip begins.

I pick up an RV, inspect it, get whatever fuel it needs and start toward wherever somebody bought or ordered the thing. Once I’m moving, my experience of America is largely dictated by the route. Interstate exits. Fuel stops. Rest areas. Whatever restaurant is close enough that getting something to eat doesn’t become its own trip.

I am not exploring Northern Indiana’s culinary scene.

I’m exploring whatever part of it somebody decided to build within walking distance of the fuel pumps.

That’s a very different thing.

And that version of America has a remarkably consistent menu.

Pizza. Burgers. Fried chicken. Sandwiches. Fast food. Things rotating underneath heat lamps that I learned enough at LBCC to know I probably shouldn’t inspect too closely.

You can eat almost anywhere.

Eating the way you actually want to eat is another matter.

But even that gives geography too much responsibility for something that is ultimately mine.

Because I know food.

I know what béchamel is supposed to do to macaroni and cheese. I know when pasta has been cooked to death. I know why meat needs to rest. I know enough about food safety to occasionally notice something in a restaurant that I would have been happier never noticing.

I know restaurants.

That’s not necessarily the same thing as knowing how to feed myself.

Looking at an egg and recognizing protein is knowledge.

Looking at two eggs buried under hollandaise, short rib and avocado on top of a waffle and mentally filing the entire plate under healthy breakfast is something else entirely.

The waffle, on advice of counsel, has declined to comment.

I don’t want the answer to be that I stop eating things like that.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. I don’t know.

I love food too much to pretend otherwise. It was burgers with my father before it was restaurant criticism. It became a blog, then writing, then one of the ways I learned to understand wherever I happened to be. Food has been too many things in my life for me to suddenly reduce it to numbers on the back of a package.

But I also don’t need every meal to prove how much I love food.

The short rib Benedict was worth eating. If I were back at The Corner Lounge tomorrow, I’d probably order it again.

Most of what I eat, though, will never appear on Cue the Critic.

Nobody gives a shit what I grab somewhere between Indiana and wherever I’m delivering an RV. Nobody is waiting for my review of whatever I eat alone at home. There is no photograph. No caption. No audience waiting to hear whether the hollandaise was properly made.

Maybe those are the meals I’ve been thinking about wrong.

All those years ago at LBCC, I learned how restaurants were supposed to handle my food.

I learned the temperatures. I learned sanitation. I learned storage. I learned enough to become a more knowledgeable customer and, eventually, a better critic.

I passed that class.

This other shit, apparently, I’m still enrolled in.

The Benedict was excellent, by the way.

And yes. I ate the fucking waffle.