Adventures in Barstow...
After a day of reading, responding to comments wanting to know if my blog mentor and favorite Zimbabweian Food Expert Crispin Sartwell was some kinda outside Jew Agitator because I recommended his work at Veterans Today, we were hungry. Cupboard was generally bare. Even bear would probably have sufficed but...not really. So, not caring for IHOP and wanting eggs for dinner, we ended up at Denny's in Lenwood, the upscale retail area of this awful place. It's a Overstock Mall...with some national restaurants.
While there I heard a criticism of Barstow that I need to respond to. Guy came in -- huge guy as tall as wide and he was wide-- and wanted to know if they had liver and onions on the menu. Hearing no, he was upset. He had left wherever he was this morning and thinking of his mother, he wanted LIVER AND ONIONS. Waitress -- a prison-tatooed Harley rider named PennyPam or something like that -- suggested he go to Chillis...yeah. (Guess she's never been there -- in about 100 yards away.)
The crowd Chillis markets to is definitely made up of people who might want liver and onions if and only if the alternate is live puppy and kitten flambe. Guy decided to go to Victorville and find it there...now, the idea that Barstow is restaurant, cuisine, culture, economically and educationally deprived is one I endorse, defend and publicly advocate. But, the not having a restaurant in town that has liver and onions on the menu is a plus, as far as I'm concerned. For centuries, children have been forced to eat organ meat -- liver, kidney, tongue, lungs, testicles --because their parents had had to eat it and what they had to do as kids was what they inflicted on their children.
But, we Boomers and our spiritual heirs in GenX have refused to force that crap down the throats of children...and soon, no one will eat organ meat unless in some exotic restaurant or when so old they know longer know what they're doing. We have fucked up a lot of things in our time -- but by the God that I don't believe in, that's one thing we got right.
Of course, things like Chicken nuggets are made from organ meat, skin and anything else lying around the factory floor, but at least it doesn't taste like liver, kidneys, testicles, tongue or lungs. It tastes like battered library paste...
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