A trip to La-La Land: Jet lag with Thai and tartare

DAY ONE: SUNDAY, JAN. 20

I arrive to green-brown mountains, idyllic blue skies and palm trees. Yes, I had forgotten. Los Angeles.

I had been here before, several years ago. But I had not remembered that dry, scrubby peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains ring the city in a wall of hazy, fractal triangles, that the sprawl is cut into slivers by freeways, and that the few spikes of downtown skyscrapers are the only vertical effort to compete with those skyscrapers. LA is an expression of the horizontal.

Best way to arrive: the secondary airports. My advice to the newcomer (or the jaded LA veteran) is skip LAX and fly into one of the lesser airports like Long Beach (as I did) or Burbank. Pretend you are among the elite at the dawn of commercial air travel --- James Dean, say, or Elizabeth Taylor --- as you deplane and walk across the tarmac to the modest terminal. Admire
the calm, the civility (compared to LAX), and sip an espresso as you wait near the semi-outdoor baggage claim. And yes, gaze up at the palms. This is the way to greet LA --- a small fish perhaps, but swimming in a smaller pond.

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My friend Litty picked me up and drove my jet-lagged body to the first culinary event in what turned out to be an half-decathlon of eating. We hit her favorite Thai joint in Hollywood for pork and green beans, shrimp salad and sautéed “morning glory,” then a Thai bakery across the mini-mall for super-sweet pastries that looked like a fried eggs slapped on open-face
fortune cookies. After a jaunt up Griffith Park to admire the observatory and the view (along with every family in the city), we went back to her apartment in Glendale where her husband Melkon concocted sage-maple-vanilla vodka cocktails (more on their vodka business later). Then out came the Armenian beef tartare (courtesy of Melkon’s mother). The closer? A
walk to a trendy resto in downtown Glendale for cookies and brownies a la mode. We should all be treated so well.

Day two would be more food and drink. And those irrepressible freeways and mountains. But I had stayed up all night before leaving for LA at 5 a.m. Sunday. I was wiped. Their spare bed was mighty inviting. As was sleep.