Nom followed by bleeeugh

I went to a Korean barbecue restaurant with a couple of friends this week. The food was AMAZING. Well most of it but more of that in a sec.

So the set up is, there's a grill in the middle of the table and condiments in various bowls. The menu consists of a list of meat. Meat, meat and more meat. Brisket, steak, boneless ribs and you cook it all at your table. Once we got the hang of it, with the help of our extremely enthusiastic table neighbour, Wayne who was delighted to have a couple of newbies plonked next to him, we had a great time.

And the best bit (and the worst) is, it was all you can eat. $20 for as much meat as your constitution can take. As with all barbecues, we all ate too much. Soon, we were done but Wayne had other plans.

"I'm going to order a Korean speciality. This goes great with a drink!" he yelped as he filled up our glasses with more Soju, a Korean wine (think sake and fizzy water).

A second later a plate of intestines arrived at our table. My stomach did a double pike and my mate Simon's face drained of colour.

"Ummmm... I'm quite full" we all started pleading but Wayne had already thrown this stuff on our grill. "Thanks alot, you fucker" said Simon. "You've just put guts on our thingy" but Wayne was already pouring more Soju (and it's bad luck to pour your own apparently which means you end up drinking even more coz you drink when someone else thinks you should).

I was watching these organs sizzle thinking, "I feel like Hannibal fucking Lector".

Even Pete, the Aussie in our group who'd been so keen to try the delicacy earlier, was starting to have second thoughts as we watch the small intestines, not cook, but disintegrate. No matter how high the heat, they seemed to melt rather than grill. It was a grim sight. The large intestine, which looked like a German sausage, was fairing a little better. After what seemed like a millennium, they were cooked.

Simon looked at me with a piercing look. A look that said, you can waterboard me if you like but I am not eating this shite.

Pete and I tucked in to the large intestine which looked the most palatable. It wasn't too bad. Not quite the bush tucker trial I'd imagined. Then we had the small intestines. Bleugh. Just Bleugh. No other word does it justice. Imagine if you found a piece of liver under a sofa after about 6 months, times that by ten and that's the level of bleugh we're talking about.

This was no way to end what had until that point been a sumptuous banquet.

So we decided to do what any self respecting gang of Brits, Aussies and Irish would do, hit the karaoke upstairs where, with the help of Olivia Newton John, Eminem and Coldplay, we purge the memory of the guts.

The next day, in the car with Simon, who was nursing a little bit of a Soju hangover, I turned to him and said, "You know the one question we didn't ask yesterday"

"What?" he groaned.

"Intestines of what?" I said.

He groaned again and went even greener than he already was. "Can we not talk about guts. It's not really helping my state"

In many ways (in fact all ways) I actually don't want to know.

Loathes

Before, I wrote about some of the things I love about this crazy town. Here are some of my loathes.

I LOATH how you have to drive to everything. With no centre and everything spread far and wide, there hasn't been a day where I haven't had to get in the car to get somewhere. On Sunday I walked to The Grove which is about half a mile from my house and it was so refreshing to feel my feet on ground for more than the trip from the house to the car.

Another LOATH is the advertising. I don't mind the quantity. It does jar for us Brits but you deal with it. It's the nature of it. SO much food advertising and none of it is healthy. I read somewhere, any food with an advert, won't be good for you. Never truer than in this fair country.

The aggression of other drivers is LOATHSOME though expected. In a city where one is hugely dependent on the car, at times (as in all the time) people are going to take their frustration out on each other.

Having been to a few comedy nights, I LOATH the 'ism' jokes passed off as ironic or edgy. It's all subjective and perhaps a US comic travelling to the UK would find us uptight. Whilst it is refreshing to see people comfortable to discuss race and gender, pretty much consistently I've heard something that back home, would garner gasps.

I don't LOATH but I don't like the huge obsession with celebrity. Where, back home, there's a few magazines and a few 60 second celeb round ups, here there's pages and pages of copy and hours and hours of screen time dedicated to who Suri Cruise is wearing, who Brittney Spears is screwing and what diet Blue Ivy is on. Now don't get me wrong, I love a bit of celeb goss but this has gone beyond interest and boarders on obsession, Dish Nation, Access Hollywood, E! News, TMZ are but a few shows that pick over the minute details of the celebrities lives.

I LOATH the presence of guns. I don't understand it and can't see what possible good comes from having a society where the possession of an item that's sole purpose is harm or injury to something or someone is beneficial. I guess I'm naive like that but in London, if you hear an argument in the street, you think "mm hmm. Someone's gonna get punched". Here, you think "Hide. Someone 'bout to get SHOT!". I know which situation I prefer.

Sounds a bit gripey don't it but it was actually a lot harder to put this list together than the LOVE list which is a good thing int it!

LA Loves

Today is the start of my third week here. It's been a very interesting journey so far. There are definitely some things I love about being here and some things I'm not so keen on. Here are my top five loves.

I LOVE the sunshine. It hasn't rained once since I've been here. I made a big deal about buying a replacement umbrella when I lost my old one. It was about as pointless as buying a ski jacket for a safari. Yesterday, it was 24degrees. 

Another big LOVE is the Whole foods Market. I love a shop that sells vegetables I don't recognise or can't pronounce. 

You gotta LOVE the road markings. I know it seems odd to appreciate something like that but the city seems to have a real love affair with right angles and here, like New York City, there is a very handy grid system with road markings that even a driving simpleton like me can adhere to. 

Something else I LOVE a lot is their TV. Hundreds of channels with tonnes of films on all day. This is my dream set up. As well as all that, I've got Netflix. On Sunday, while nursing a mild hangover, I just lounged around watching movies and Breaking Bad. Perfect. 

I LOVE the variety of bars and restaurants. Every meal I've had out has been excellent. Not just good but delicious. You know those meals where you think aboutthem later that day, yeah, that good. 

So that's my loves. Next time, my loathes. 

Sure as eggs is eggs

The morning of my first day here, I went to Toast on 3rd Street for brunch. Yeah, I know. How LaLa is that? From their extensive menu, I went for an omlette. These guys do love their eggs and who knew that the perfect accompaniment is fruit. Obviously, as the years rolled by melon balls must have stopped being standard issue in the full English breakfast but the fruit thing continues here.

Toast offers two egg options, their omlettes but also their scramblettes. I asked what a "scramblette" was. I thought it sounded like an omlette that the chef had fucked up. The waitress didn't really get on board with that description. She said with a stern face, "it's scrambled eggs but with the same ingredients as the omlette". I thought better of saying, "What, eggs? Ha ha ha ha!" That would have killed in the UK.

Anyway, it was a really great omlette and I'm fighting the temptation to go back there because I want to keep experiencing new stuff rather than defaulting to the know.  For example, the other day I had my first enchilada at Fred's in Los Feliz, but that, my friends is an egg-citing story for another day. (Yes, I just did that).

Food Glorious Food

Can we talk about the food here? Yesterday I went to the 24 Hour Kitchen with Eric Lampaert. After we’d driven around for about half an hour, working up quite an appetite, let me say, we finally found the place. I’d been there once before and Jennifer Love Hewitt had been dining out with a couple of friends. Although this time she weirdly decided not to meet me there, there were two very cool looking black guys, one of which was nodding off after his hearty burger. Talk about make yourself comfortable. I was half expecting the waiter to bring him his slippers. If these guys were famous this was where my my lack of knowledge of LA rap scene could prove to be a problem.

Anyway, it was a nice place to hang out and once my incredulity at the lack of parking in the area  had subsided, we ordered some food. Eric decided that because he’d eaten so many burgers. When in Rome and all that.

When Eric's salad arrived it looked like an entire forest had been felled and served up and there was enough meat to feed a leopard cub. The meatloaf was served in a pie pastry with a mushroom sauce, veggies and fries. It was – deee-lish but repeated more than the episode of Friends where Rachel makes triffle with okra.

Having (kind of) put myself on my own made up lo-carb LA diet, I decided that I wasn’t allowed to have an evening meal to make up for the 10,000 calories I’d just consumed. 

Instead I went to the Laugh Factory and had three beers – coz beer's low in calories, right?

The next day, on LA today, there was a feature on how there are some restaurant meals that have excessively high calorie counts, sometimes in the thousands. I’m pretty sure the meatloaf meal, which did defeat me in the end, was one of them.