To Live and Dine in L.A.
I had toyed with the notion of using the magic of the printed page to take you to a Beverly Hills open casting call for “real people 35 and older with sagging and wrinkled skin,” but it was impossible to credit the idea that anyone would be allowed into Beverly Hills looking like that unless they bore a note confirming that they were going directly to a plastic surgeon.
Instead, I set my course for Los Angeles International Airport, on a mission of mercy for travelers. In this, the season for giving, I would write a holiday gift. They give Pulitzers for such public service. They bestow Carnegie medals for such selfless heroism.
Right now I would be happy with a Pepto Bismol.
I went to LAX to test the food.
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The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine announced two months ago, from the safe remove of Washington, D.C., that LAX serves healthier food than any other major U.S. airport. I’ll type it again, so you know you’re reading it aright. LAX has healthier food than 19 other major U.S. airports.
What is this committee, this PCRM? How responsible are they? Names can be so deceptive, after all: John Wayne’s real first name was Marion. Danny Santiago’s superb novel about young manhood in East L.A., “Famous All Over Town,” was the work of Daniel James, a Yale-educated septuagenarian. And has anyone counted heads in the Moral Majority lately?
The 3,000-member PCRM promotes preventive medicine, opposes vivisection and thinks meat should be a flavoring, not a major food group.
Little wonder, then, that they engaged consultants to do the actual test-eating, on the same principle that the Medicis employed tasters. PCRM must have shuddered to hear tales of the Louisiana boudin hot links sandwiches in Terminal 1, where praiseworthy vegetarian burritos are available . . . of the pizza bagels in Terminal 5, when commendable salads can be had a few steps away. Had the PCRM completed its duties, it would have recommended that the signs directing you to baggage claim should carry added directions, “this way to low-fat, high-fiber food.”
Like the clientele of the Midnight Mission, travelers are a captive audience, fed to meet need, not choice. Airport food is expected to be both wretched and expensive. Much of it smells like a carnival midway--hot grease and sugar and frying animal muscle tissue; a subtler scent couldn’t begin to force its way through jet-fuel fumes.
And as for taste, airport food is the seamless transition to whatever it is you will be served in the discomfort of the airplane seat itself. It is at one with the dour tour around LAX’s dismal horseshoe, the “Day of the Locust” upper-level chaos flying out, the grim underworld of baggage claim flying in, the forecourt of every terminal as smoky as a battlefield on the Somme as travelers suck in the last burst of nicotine.
Next year, all that changes, because this is L.A., where eating is not just a meal, it’s a performance--a “quality food experience,” as a Times letter writer expressed it.
After three and a half decades with a single caterer, LAX is to have new vendors. Already the groundbreakers are in place. Wolfgang Puck Express is in Terminal 2 [home to Virgin Atlantic and Air Canada, among others], with flash-bang videos of the master chef himself, confetti-colored inlaid picassiette tiles like the Watts Towers, Chinois salad for $7 (at the real Chinois you’d tip the valet more than that), smoked salmon and egg breakfast pizza for $11.95.
I was eating Puck’s mille-feuille apricot pastry that billed itself as middlebrow Danish when a tall, elegantly suited woman ordered espresso. She was handed a small paper cup of the size doctors use to collect patients’ specimens, and she peered into it as if its contents were no different. She tipped it toward me for a second opinion and said, more in answer than as question: “A buck and half for THAT?”
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Can we stand the shock of the new? Louise’s Trattoria, Johnny Rockets, Cheesecake Factory, Old Town Deli, Tampopo, Naked Foods juice bar, more burgers, more beers, so many choices we’ll have to arrive three hours early just to decide what to eat.
What complications could be next? Repealing the poverty of certain airport news shops, which simplify the traveler’s choices in literature by confining their offerings to about a dozen titles, all bestselling authors with three names, or novels with pink and gold covers (for women) or black and red (for men)?
Any more of this freedom of choice and I’ll have to take the train.
