RESTAURANT REVIEW : Food for Starving Artists, Writers

The Big and Tall is a bookstore and cafe where you can sit around and drink coffee, eat a sandwich, talk to smart people, think and write good chunks of your book without anybody looking at you funny or asking you to leave or coming over and telling you that if you wanted to write about something really interesting, their life story would make a heck of a good book. It’s the kind of place that helps to relieve the inexorable, inevitable loneliness endemic to reading and writing.

It always takes me a few minutes to get from the front door to the cafe in the back. I sort of browse my way through--check out the new books, see if my friend Lily’s new novel is on the shelf yet, see if the new Paris Review is in.

I also like to stand in the philosophy aisle, a thicket of the world’s most impenetrable prose. I don’t know why, but reading a few lines of Bakhtin, Bataille, Heidegger or Derrida makes me hungry. I love to pull out a book and read a sentence that, try as I might, I simply cannot understand.

For example: “(Heidegger) has initiated a vocabulary which deconstruction can appropriate and revise for the sake of disarticulating a notion of eventhood whose temporality has been eschatologically hypostasized and thereby fixed in an Aristotelian diachrony of self-contained moments.”

For a few minutes, I search out better and more incomprehensible examples of this so-called “dog Latin.” Then, I’m ready for food.

The cafe consists of a counter downstairs and a seating area upstairs. I’ve had some delicious espresso and cappuccino at the counter, which feels more a part of the bookstore than the upstairs area--and more social (the food is prepared right there, customers walk in and out through the back door and people you don’t know sit down next to you). With your coffee, you can nibble on walnut-sized chocolate chip cookies--tiny, potent sugar bombs--as you sit in a comfortable and stylish bar stool made from welded iron.

Steve Koi Vista, the cafe’s designer, seems to have concentrated the bulk of his efforts in the upstairs loft area. Small tables are surrounded by big and skinny welded throne-like chairs. A banister overlooking the bookstore is made of welded iron and incorporates big cubed globes of the world.

It was in this highly designed loft that I ate a late breakfast one morning. Nobody was upstairs except one man who sat in a chair holding his head in his hands. Along one wall, there was a trough with newspapers and a few books--Faulkner novels in fact.

The breakfast menu had only five items so a friend and I ordered three. The poached eggs were the kind of eggs cooked in those little cups so that they come out softly triangular and firm; they were served on two dry, hard, skinny little discs of white bread. The breakfast couscous had golden raisins and apples and cinnamon and was supposed to have walnuts, but didn’t.

While the couscous had a pleasurable enough texture, it was over-sweetened with maple sugar. We also ordered the fresh fruit and yogurt plate but the kitchen was out of yogurt, so we just got a frost-kissed dry orange, melon slices that tasted like juicy squash, and several mostly sour strawberries. It was a breakfast only a starving artist or writer could love. As we left, we passed the man with his head still in his hands. He must, we concluded, be deconstructing.

The lunch and dinner menu, an assortment of salads and sandwiches, is more heartening. There are lots of choices for vegetarians, also some chicken and turkey.

A good-enough wild rice salad comes with a thick slice of whole-wheat bread and butter. The mixed green salad is made with a nice assortment of fancy greens. And sandwiches are especially satisfying; my favorite is the baked eggplant sandwich with roasted peppers, tapenade and good red peppers. It comes on a square roll and looks, well, like the ultimate deconstructionist fantasy: an edible book.

Big and Tall Cafe, 7311 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 939-5022. Open 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days. No alcohol. Street parking. Lunch and dinner for two, food only, $9 to $22.