Sunday, July 17, 2011.
Breakfast Boofay. Lotaria. Cheese And Absinthe.
First one awake, I went to the hotel's café for coffee, juice and a pastry. But the breakfast is a buffet, and my spartan breakfast costs almost as much as the full deal. So I had a big plate of fresh fruit and one link of pork sausage. The girls went far beyond that, finding the siren song of limitless bacon irresistible. I ate one of Mary Ann's strips, but swore it would be the last bacon on this trip.
Jude swung by at around nine and took us to Mass. He has kept up his church attendance far better than anyone else in our family. This, after three years of living on his own and working in show biz.
Jude lives in Studio City, a fifteen-minute drive from Paramount Pictures, where he does most of his work. That's considered a very short commute in L.A. Certainly less than the hour-long slog he had when he lived downtown, near USC.
Studio City's main drag is jammed with restaurants. The chains are there in force, but many local eateries are to be found. Many of those look like chains. The place where we had lunch, for example. Lotaria is a spiffy Mexican grill with a clean style and unusual food (to us, anyway).
We started with guacamole under a tent made of thin, melted-then-cooled cheese. And some queso with chorizo. But the best dish was an assortment of a dozen little tacos, each served with not only a different protein or vegetable, but a different salsa, too.
One of those was molé poblano, the chocolate-and-chile sauce that is a reliable marker of a good Mexican menu. Even better was the chicken with pepian sauce--the central-Mexican sauce made with pumpkin seeds, among several other ingredients.
We were thrilled with this place, and the servers responded to our enthusiasm. They didn't miss a step until dessert, when a strawberry-layered cake was served as a variation on tres leches.
We ate too much, of course. We returned to the hotel and I crashed for most of the afternoon. The Marys went to the pool, but decided it didn't have enough of a resort quality for them. Mary Ann began making plans to move to a more auspicious hostelry once our three days here were over. (She would have moved sooner, but she was working on some kind of program to get a free stay or something. I don't understand such plans.)
As the sun got in our faces, Mary Ann joined me in the lobby bar for a supper of small plates. The selection was better than I thought we would find in this mainstream hotel. All the current fare: sliders of everything but hamburgers, fried calamari (they seem to like that in California more than we do) short ribs, little salads.
The drink menu offered a martini made with absinthe in addition to the gin. It was as good as it sounded. I was a good boy and stopped at one. I did have a glass of white wine with the very generous plate of pretty-good cheeses, which almost made the terrible background music tolerable.
