The path to nirvana has all-you-can-eat buffet
Novelty sure can spice up an evening out -- but it never hurts if there’s an all-you-can-eat buffet involved.
On the recommendation of a fellow yoga obsessive, my husband and I checked out the Hare Krishna temple in Culver City. It has an unassuming eatery, sparsely decorated with pictures of half-man, half-animal gods, and a delicious $6 vegetarian buffet. Dinner with the Krishnas? Different enough.
And only three blocks away is the Museum of Jurassic Technology, one of L.A.’s weirdest treasures.
The modest museum’s collection of curiosities, displayed in a dark rabbit warren of alcoves, is a blend of science, pseudoscience and art. Mouths agape, we gazed at desiccated mice on toast, “micromosaics” made of butterfly-wing scales and quirky exhibitions illuminating suspiciously unfamiliar phenomena.
That’s really the point of the place, we decided: It’s meant to get you thinking about what’s real and what’s not. Even the fare at the museum’s 14-seat theater challenges your perceptions. “The Common Task” is a film about Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th century Russian philosopher who decided that the only solution to humanity’s main problem -- death -- was to resurrect everyone who ever lived.
I’ll get right on that.
But it made us wonder whether Fedorov ever existed. (He did, research shows.) Fortunately, though, David Wilson, the museum’s founder and curator, didn’t delve into the philosopher’s mechanisms for bringing back the dead. Our imaginations fueled, off to dinner we went.
The restaurant, Govinda’s, is below a shop specializing in Indian imports and bearing the same name. They are adjacent to (and owned by) the International Society for Krishna Consciousness temple, a former Methodist church whose Eastern-looking sanctuary bears the ornate pillars and arches of ancient Indian Vedic design.
We piled our paper plates high at the buffet, which includes fresh salads and hot dishes such as subji, a spiced Indian stew. After enjoying our food at an outdoor table, I went upstairs to the temple’s shop to buy a pair of sequined Indian-style flip-flops for less than I’d found elsewhere. A bargain.
Now that’s nirvana.
Zan Dubin Scott can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.
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The tab
Museum admission $10.00
Where: Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City. (310) 836-6131. Hours: 2 to 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon to 6 p.m. Fridays through Sundays.
Dinner $12.00
Shopping $21.64
Where: Hare Krishna temple (both the cafeteria and gift shop are named Govinda’s), 3764 Watseka Ave., Culver City. (310) 204-3263. Gift shop hours: 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, noon to 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Restaurant: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 8:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.
Total $43.64