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06/03/2008 Archived Entry: "Back from Los Angeles"

I just got home from a three-day trip to Los Angeles. I suppose I am on some strange kind of jet lag. It feels different from the jet lag I get coming from Europe. I thought I would be full of energy coming from a place three hours earlier. But it’s the plane trip not so much the time change, I think, that is so exhausting.

I don’t go to California often, and I don’t like Los Angeles, or Lost Angeles, as it is called in the new Sex and the City movie. Yes, I went to see it as soon as I arrived. I liked it. Casting no aspersions on “the girls,” as in the TV show, New York City was the star. I don’t like Los Angeles because I like real cities, with people on the street and shops you can glance in as you hustle (or stroll) from one place to another, on foot. Someone yesterday at Book Expo America (I’ll get to that in a second) asked me if there was any place in America I could live besides New York. I told her that I’m a city boy. I love our country and our countryside, our rural towns and villages, what’s left of them, but I don’t care for most American cities with their uninhabited downtowns and surrounding sprawling suburbs. I need to walk downstairs and buy a quart of milk and the newspaper. Maybe I could live in Philadelphia. I love Center City Philly, I love the tone of the whole town, and it’s only 90 minutes to Times Square. (That’s only half a joke.)

What I really like is sitting in my own kitchen and sleeping in my own bed in Brooklyn. Boy do I sound like an old man. Right now I am at the kitchen table, with my nice little view behind my laptop. While I was away the people across the street planted their beautifully Baroque stone window boxes with bright pink geraniums. Behind me, in just three days, the crab apple tree in the brownstone garden lost its last withered blooms. It’s in full leaf now. I like watching the blooms turn to fruit. There should be some tiny green beginnings already. If I put my glasses on I would know for sure.

I went to Los Angeles to sign copies of “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking” at the biggest American book fair of the year. It is often in New York. More publishers than you ever thought existed have booths, some lavish, over the two vast pavilions of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The walk between the two halls, which seems interminable, is probably as much walking as any of these Californians ever do. The attendees range from independent booksellers, other kinds of book buyers for retail outlets, to agents, editors, publishers, marketing people, publicists, deal makers of all bookish kinds, plus a smattering of authors, some like me who were there mainly as show dogs. I did my 2 hours of signing and glad-handing, then we ran out of books and I went back to my hotel room and got annoyed that the chamber maid had pulled the plug on my computer and the battery had run down.

I was staying at the Wilshire Grand Hotel, perhaps the worst domestic hotel experience I have ever had. But I am not going to get into that. I have decided to put it behind me, and concentrate on the nicer aspects of my LA visit. Like my publisher took me to lunch at Nate ‘n Al, the famous Jewish delicatessen in Beverly Hills (since 1945). It was a $50, 30-minute cab ride from our the Wilshire Grand, which is smack in the middle of L.A.’s deadly downtown, near the Convention Center. It seems like everywhere you go in L.A., it’s a $50, 30-minute cab ride. I heard the car services wanted $80 for the same ride. Unfortunately, when we finally got to Nate ‘n Al, we were told we couldn’t have a table because an episode of Entourage, the HBO series, was being shot there in just one hour. The technical people but no stars were already assembled outside, waiting to pounce.

We had to talk our way in. The chubby hostess cum bouncer decided to stop seating people after the family that was right ahead of us on line, a middle-aged mother and elderly grandmother from New Zealand who were visiting their young son/grandson in Beverly Hills. So I claimed loudly that they had to give us a table because I’d flown all the way from Brooklyn just to eat pastrami at historic and famous Nate ‘n Al in Beverly Hills. It was a Larry David moment. It didn’t work. It took my tactful publisher, Lorena Jones, to get owner David Mendelson to graciously lead us to a table. We promised to eat quickly.

Mendelson, who I am guessing is about 40, is the third-generation owner of Nate ‘n Al. Al was his grandfather. As he guided us to the leather-like burgundy banquette next to the New Zealanders, he confessed that he wasn’t happy that he’d agreed to the TV shoot. No movie or TV show had ever been shot in the deli, he said, and now that he was allowing it, he realized he’d been right to have declined the many previous offers of big and small-screen fame. He was alienating customers, he worried, by having to turn them away or rush them through lunch. I think Nate and Al will survive the disruption, certainly with such an engaged and concerned owner. I mention several times in “Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food,” my “opinionated history,” that, from Jewish delicatessens to palaces of French haute cuisine, the longest-lived and often best restaurants are operated by their owners, whether they are front-of-the-house men or women or in the kitchen.

I have to say that the service at Nate ‘n Al is great. I loved our sassy grey-haired waitress, who’d been working there since 1996. It said so on her name tag. And the pastrami, corned beef, and brisket were good enough, the corned beef having the edge over the other two meats. Okay, I guess I have to admit that the corned beef was actually better than merely “good enough.” Still, even though I asked for “juicy” brisket, and our waitress promised to provide plenty of fat, my sandwich was more dry than the “juicy.” I was really impressed, however, with the sturdy, caraway seeded rye bread. It’s hard to get such good rye bread in New York these days. Truth be told, the overly white, light rye bread at New York’s Katz’s is a serious flaw.

The pickles were good. But, for three people, a few strands of sauerkraut on a plate with two pickle halves – one half-sour, one sour -- was pretty paltry and sad looking. The potato knish looked worse, though. It was an elongated thing, orange, and not a natural orange. The waitress said it was egg wash. Even California doesn’t have eggs that color. I guessed that it was a glaze with turmeric for color. Let’s hope it wasn’t artificial. And the so-called knish came with brown gravy. What was that about?

The chopped liver wasn’t good either. It was strangely watery and bland, with practically no onion or liver flavor. After thinking about what they could possibly have done to make it so lacking, egg whites came to mind, way too many egg whites. I’m guessing. I do know, though, that the yellow mustard and sugar in the macaroni salad and the potato salad ruined those two items for me. To be honest, I was happy I could tolerate only a research taste, and that I couldn’t taste any more around the menu because we had to rush off to make way for Entourage. Diet you know, diet.

To return to the subject of brisket, I did get to eat some excellent brisket that night, at the buffet dinner offered by the Jewish Book Council, at the American Jewish University (hoo-ha) on Mulholland Drive in Bel-Air (no less). I didn’t have the time to indulge in all the food on the table. There was a lot. But the brisket with tons of onions called out to me. It was similar to the way I make it myself. (I like my own cooking best.) And it was juicy and tender. I think someone dumped a bit of sugar into the onion sauce, but it could have just been very sweet onions. I’ll give the university’s strictly kosher kitchen the benefit of the doubt.

When I wasn’t eating brisket I was networking with the men and women who came from Jewish Community Centers and synagogues all over the country to look over Jewish book authors who they will one day (perhaps) engage to speak at their institutions. In other words, it was a Jewish author meat rack (pun intended). It was called Meet the Author.

Here’s how it worked: Before the networking dinner, there was what everyone was calling a “speed dating” exercise at which all the authors, about 50 of us, were, in rapid succession, given two minutes each in front of a microphone to tell our potential hosts and hostesses (mostly hostesses) why they might want to invite us to speak at their institutions. November is officially Jewish Book Month, and these events go on intensively then. Lately, however, as I understand it, there are Jewish book events all year, all over the country.

Other than at Nate ‘n Al, I didn’t eat out while in Los(t) Angeles. No Spago or anything glamorous. At BEA, I was handed a grilled chicken sandwich on ciabatta with pesto. I got through that, although not the accompanying cold mashed potatoes passing as potato salad. Not wanting to eat alone in a restaurant, I ordered room service for dinner that night. After perusing the menu and coming up with a relatively safe and dietetically non-offensive dinner, I was told that the dishes I had chosen weren’t available. I had the wrong menu in my room, the old menu. I was so annoyed – this was the umpteenth thing that didn’t go right in this hotel – I just had to indulge, so I took a hamburger with potato chips. I begged for it to be medium-rare. I flirted with the room service operator, figuring this might better my chances. Of course, it was dry, well-done, dead.

Boy, am I glad to be home.