a halfhearted rant about tacos and LA "winter" fashions
Happy December, friends!
I’m drafting this at Salazar, an irksomely hip barbecue/taco joint, built on an old gas station site, I think? There’s a kind of sunroof thingie, now disguised with wooden slats, that looks like it once belonged to a gas station or an auto-body shop, and the admittedly lovely landscaping doesn’t come close to hiding the traffic lurching past on Fletcher, just a block from the on-ramp to the 5.
YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ME, SALAZAR
At least Tire Shop Taqueria owns it, y’know?
I want to hate this place, it seems so full of itself somehow. Also the tacos aren’t very good. But I have to admit the indoor-outdoor bar is a nice spot to sit with my notebook.
I had a lot of trouble getting dressed to leave the house. Did I mention—irksomely hip? It’s the kind of place, or it was, the first time I was here, that makes you question your outfit upon arrival. But today I feel fine. Word has gotten out, Salazar keeps making lists like Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants and Eater LA’s 10 Hottest Tacos. A lot of this crowd isn’t from the East Side. Although Silver Lakers don’t even look East Side any more, they look like West Hollywoods trying to be hip and spending too much money in the process. Echo Park is the epicenter of East Side fashion (See: the Echo Park Lassens, best street style in LA), although it’s getting $$ too (See: the Echo Park Lassens). Salazar is in Frogtown, a little sinkhole of a neighborhood surrounded by freeways that has suddenly become desirable because of its proximity to Silver Lake/Echo Park/Atwater Village. I can’t report on Frogtown fashion from my current vantage point. I’m seeing, like… a middle-aged guy in a puffer vest. A gaggle of young women too perfectly made up to be local.
But I digress. I was talking about me having trouble getting dressed.
My phone told me it was 72 degrees outside, going up to 74, but it was chilly in our little house. When I moved here from NYC twelve years ago, exactly at this time of year, I remember finding LA “winter” fashion hilarious. Flip flops + beanies, short sleeve t-shirts with scarves. The USC undergrad women, decked out in short shorts, Uggs, and furry vests were particularly amusing. I haven’t seen an Ugg in forever, I just realized. RIP you ugly fuckers.
So what did I wear today, in "winter" of 2017? After much deliberation, I left the house in jeans, a sleeveless tee, and rubber slides—with a wool coat insouciantly thrown on top.
New York me would have laughed at me for sure.
*****
This month in tacos: Like I said, the tacos at Salazar aren’t very good. I tried the asada, which was tender but gamey, the pastor, whatever, it did come with fresh pineapple chunks, and the vegetable, which tasted like reheated leftovers from some boring Thanksgiving side dish.
This month in print: I devoured Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. It’s set mostly during World War II, but the storyline about a young woman pursuing a male-dominated profession (deep sea diving!) and all the bullshit she has to put up with… feels very right now.
This month on Netflix: Heidi Ewing + Rachel Grady’s One of Us, a doc about Hasidic Jews trying to leave the fold, offers a harrowing window into the ultra-Orthodox community, and incidentally gave me a new appreciation for Wikipedia, which one of the protagonists, who grew up without secular books, without internet, with very little knowledge of the outside world, describes as “a gift from God.”
*****
xoxo,
Laramie
p.s. pls forward to someone irksomely hip.
I’m drafting this at Salazar, an irksomely hip barbecue/taco joint, built on an old gas station site, I think? There’s a kind of sunroof thingie, now disguised with wooden slats, that looks like it once belonged to a gas station or an auto-body shop, and the admittedly lovely landscaping doesn’t come close to hiding the traffic lurching past on Fletcher, just a block from the on-ramp to the 5.
YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ME, SALAZAR
At least Tire Shop Taqueria owns it, y’know?
I want to hate this place, it seems so full of itself somehow. Also the tacos aren’t very good. But I have to admit the indoor-outdoor bar is a nice spot to sit with my notebook.
I had a lot of trouble getting dressed to leave the house. Did I mention—irksomely hip? It’s the kind of place, or it was, the first time I was here, that makes you question your outfit upon arrival. But today I feel fine. Word has gotten out, Salazar keeps making lists like Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants and Eater LA’s 10 Hottest Tacos. A lot of this crowd isn’t from the East Side. Although Silver Lakers don’t even look East Side any more, they look like West Hollywoods trying to be hip and spending too much money in the process. Echo Park is the epicenter of East Side fashion (See: the Echo Park Lassens, best street style in LA), although it’s getting $$ too (See: the Echo Park Lassens). Salazar is in Frogtown, a little sinkhole of a neighborhood surrounded by freeways that has suddenly become desirable because of its proximity to Silver Lake/Echo Park/Atwater Village. I can’t report on Frogtown fashion from my current vantage point. I’m seeing, like… a middle-aged guy in a puffer vest. A gaggle of young women too perfectly made up to be local.
But I digress. I was talking about me having trouble getting dressed.
My phone told me it was 72 degrees outside, going up to 74, but it was chilly in our little house. When I moved here from NYC twelve years ago, exactly at this time of year, I remember finding LA “winter” fashion hilarious. Flip flops + beanies, short sleeve t-shirts with scarves. The USC undergrad women, decked out in short shorts, Uggs, and furry vests were particularly amusing. I haven’t seen an Ugg in forever, I just realized. RIP you ugly fuckers.
So what did I wear today, in "winter" of 2017? After much deliberation, I left the house in jeans, a sleeveless tee, and rubber slides—with a wool coat insouciantly thrown on top.
New York me would have laughed at me for sure.
*****
This month in tacos: Like I said, the tacos at Salazar aren’t very good. I tried the asada, which was tender but gamey, the pastor, whatever, it did come with fresh pineapple chunks, and the vegetable, which tasted like reheated leftovers from some boring Thanksgiving side dish.
This month in print: I devoured Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. It’s set mostly during World War II, but the storyline about a young woman pursuing a male-dominated profession (deep sea diving!) and all the bullshit she has to put up with… feels very right now.
This month on Netflix: Heidi Ewing + Rachel Grady’s One of Us, a doc about Hasidic Jews trying to leave the fold, offers a harrowing window into the ultra-Orthodox community, and incidentally gave me a new appreciation for Wikipedia, which one of the protagonists, who grew up without secular books, without internet, with very little knowledge of the outside world, describes as “a gift from God.”
*****
xoxo,
Laramie
p.s. pls forward to someone irksomely hip.
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