PIMENTO CHEESE SANDWICHES

Among the many fantastical dishes of the South, few are closer to my heart and make me yearn for them with a passion that is decidedly not Jewish as the pimento cheese sandwich. A simple concoction made of cheddar cheese, pimento peppers, mayonnaise, hot pepper sauce and occasionally another ingredient or two, the pimento cheese sandwich is an unfussy little guy traditionally served on white bread. At places such as the Redneck Café in Newnan, Georgia, which is a large, boisterous, order-at-the-counter restaurant where coaches bring packs of screaming little league brats or at more traditional hole-in-the-wall Southern restaurants with any kind of a lunch menu, the pimento cheese sandwich is fine, but a little too straightforward, almost like ordering peanut butter and jelly at a restaurant.

The most scrumptious pimento cheese sandwich I had found until just recently was the not very traditional one at the Gold Star Café & Bakery (903 Peachtree St. Ste. Atlanta 404-870-0002) in Midtown. I believe it’s called the California Pimento Cheese or something like that. It has avocado (to the rest of the country “California” added to a food item means avocado or sprouts or cucumbers) and the pimento cheese is grilled. That is really the winning trademark of a superior pimento cheese sandwich. This one is a big mess and with the avocado seems tailor-made for a Westside Jew. This place, however, has the vibe of a forlorn coffee shop that even college kid lowlifes have abandoned. (I JUST WENT BY GOLD STAR TODAY AND IT'S CLOSED)

Then, the other day, the wife and I went to the very popular breakfast and lunch spot, Highland Bakery (655 Highland Ave. Atlanta 404 586-0772). Their pimento cheese sandwich comes on crunchy sourdough bread (can’t beat that) with a tomato slice. This, the mother of all pimento cheese sandwiches, is grilled and not too mayonnaisy. It’s about perfect. Highland Bakery is another place that doesn’t bother much with décor. But that sort of goes with the whole concept of the pimento cheese sandwich. It’s no Cirque de Soleil spectacular. It’s no dolled-up honey. It’s a damn fine, working class sandwich (not so findable outside of the South) that kicks the bejesus out of them other sandwiches.

GIVING BACK TO THE COMMUNITY

The other night, I saw a story on the television about an ex NBA player who had grown up in a rough, blighted neighborhood of Detroit, where he had recently built a shopping center and was employing 200 people from the neighborhood at a barber shop, pizza place, shoe store and some other businesses. It got me thinking about what I could give back to the community that raised me, Brentwood, on L.A.’s Westside.

If I were ever to become wealthy, I would like to open some more boutiques in Brentwood. Brentwood ladies love boutiques and Brentwood could surely use a few more. As far as I know there are no bakeries for dogs in Brentwood. I would like to open a franchise of Three Dog Bakery in Barrington Court. The poodles and Lhasa Apsos of Brentwood have suffered too long without fresh baked treats. Make the suffering end! I would also like to construct a giant, incredibly ugly, modern Jewish temple. The architecture must be truly repugnant to all the neighbors, who should complain endlessly about it as well as the traffic congestion it creates. It should be like a Frank Gehry knockoff, but more cheaply constructed and with a hideous design that only an overpaid, out-of-touch architect could justify. The rabbi should be a young, liberal, outspoken firebrand who speaks often of transgendered rights to the disdain of his congregation. I also believe Brentwood needs a few more Starbucks because high-strung Brentwood residents don’t care much for waiting in lines. And how has Brentwood survived so long without a Gelson’s! It amazes me. Silver Lake, Century City and the Pacific Palisades have Gelson’s and Brentwood doesn’t. The audacity!

It’s all about not forgetting where I came from; the streets that raised me and made me who I am today. It’s about keepin’ it real yo.

PUPUSAS BUENAS

For a while now, I’ve been obsessing over pupusas, handmade, stuffed corn tortillas from El Salvador. Common fillings are white cheese, white cheese and beans or white cheese and loroco, an edible flower common in Salvadorian cuisine. You can also stick chicharróns, squash or cactus in there. It is always served with curtido (pickled cabbage) and a mild red sauce on the side.

L.A. is crammed with pupuserias from South L.A. to Koreatown to Silver Lake to my favorite one in the city, which is in Highland Park, Restaurant Y Pupuseria La Arca (5570 N Figueroa St. 323-340-8528). This fairly large place, which is just down and across the street from Mr. T’s Bowl, has the best pupusas I’ve ever had. But don’t order the El Salvadorian horchata there. There’s a sign in Spanish warning that if you do order it, you can’t get away with saying that you don’t like it and exchange it for something else. El Salvadorian horchata, at least at this restaurant since I’ve never had it anywhere else, is like a thick paste.

So, there are a million good places to have pupusas in L.A., but I was surprised that they weren’t at all hard to find around Atlanta. You can actually find just about any type of food item in the metropolitan Atlanta area. It’s hardly Burkina Faso or North Dakota (bad food there). I’ve been to three different places here and all were good. Every pupuseria I’ve been to anywhere is much the same. There are always TVs blaring Mexican television shows. They are consistently dumpy places with almost no decor. One must invariably wait a while for the food to arrive and the pupusas usually take a minimum of 30 minutes. You may hear the chef pounding them from scratch in the kitchen.

The first place I went to was Rincon Latino, a giant, very popular place (5055 Buford Highway, Doraville, 770-936-8181) with numerous blaring televisions. The pupusas were a little on the thick side for my taste, not bad or anything, but not too special. However, my wife ordered the Honduran Breakfast, which included fried eggs, plantains, beans and rice, if my memory serves me, and that was delicious. The other day we checked out Los Ranchos Restaurant (6200 Buford Highway, Norcross 770-840-0130). Along with a couple of pool tables, they have a stage and some sort of entertainment there that was starting as we left. The pupusas were excellent. The salsa that comes with the tortilla chips here is spicy, very yummy and fine for heaping on the pupusas. The wife had the El Salvadoran breakfast, which was the same as the Honduran Breakfast mentioned above and also excellent. But the best pupusas I’ve had yet in the Atlanta area were at El Salvador Restaurant (2566 Shallowford Rd NE Ste 110, Atlanta 404-929-9080), the dumpiest and tiniest of the three places. It’s the only one with its own beckoning billboard off highway 85. The arrangement of the booths and the seats in this place is ridiculous and the jukebox was blasting the day we were there. Though, all I really care about are the pupusas and at El Salvador Restaurant, they are divine, scrumptious little tortilla mounds. I would recommend you check out all three of these places.

JEW BOY DIGS THE SKYNYRD

As an addendum to what I wrote below about Southern rock in “5 Things About Living in the South that I am Sort of in the Middle About,” I have since begun to really dig and appreciate the unsophisticated pleasures of Lynyrd Skynyrd and not in a kitschy way. This group of furry-maned redneck wankers from Jacksonville, Florida personified Southern rock with their swampy, mosquito-bitten, ramshackle groove-on and had just a little bit of soul to their sound. Rather than a greatest hits collection, which mostly feature their numerous classic rock standards, I would recommend their debut record Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd, which includes “Mississippi Kid,” a very authentic-sounding blues tune about corn bread and killing folks from Alabama set to some fancy mandolin pickin’, and “Things Goin’ On,” which has a dandy keyboard riff and some nonsensical funky lyrics from Skynyrd front dude Ronnie Van Zant. You know that you are gettin’ used to yer new digs when you are a Westside Jew raised on Run DMC and Benny Goodman shakin’ yer tail to Skynyrd while dreaming of a pimento cheese sandwich. Something has happened to your insular Jew, Frappucino-guzzling, post-election-befuddled, complaining-about-the-economy world when you find yourself reconsidering “Sweet Home Alabama” and tapping your foot and shaking your finger to “Swamp Music.” You are many moons away from your bagel noshing homeland.

DEATH METAL, JEWS AND BREAKDANCING

This week, we got out a bit. Tuesday, we saw a screening of Mike Leigh’s latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, which is about a 30-year-old gal named Poppy with an exceedingly bubbly personality and toothy smile who is quite content in her humble life of teaching elementary school kids, going to dance clubs with her younger sister and beloved flatmate and striking up conversations with random homeless men and bookstore employees. Poppy has never learned to drive and it is her driving lessons with an extremely uptight and almost murderously indignant driving instructor that are the nexus of this very humorous and quite lovely film, which I highly recommend.

Wednesday evening was my first death/prog metal concert in Atlanta. The pregnant wife wasn’t up for it, so I went alone. I saw Swedish metal titans Opeth at Center Stage, a comfy, yet fairly large venue in Midtown. I have long been a fan of Opeth’s meandering, Cookie-monster-voiced, Scandinavian art metal and this was a fine, lengthy concert of elegant guitarsmanship, double bass drum rattling and thundering power chords, with the surprising and unusual for a metal concert addition of very funny, between song comments from the singer. He is Swedish, but has a very proper sounding English accent and almost everything he said was amusing like, "This next song is from the new album... Did I just see a bunch of people roll their eyes?" I don’t recall ever seeing a metal band where the singer cracked so many jokes. Though, the main thing I was interested in was whether a death metal concert in the South would be any different than the many I’ve attended in L.A. The only difference I observed was that people were more into it, yelling out requests, moshing with their shirts off (gross) and whipping out their lighters for a ballad. But that I’ve noticed is the case for most good concerts outside of L.A., New York or London, where everyone is very blasé about seeing bands and can barely be bothered to clap. The only thing particularly Southern was a guy with a thick accent who yelled, “Play some Skynyrd!”


http://www.opeth.com/



I also went to my first Jewish event in Atlanta this week. We saw a holocaust film called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was part of the Jewish Film Festival. I was a bit shocked when we first entered the theater to find it filled with yarmulke-wearing dudes, many of them speaking Hebrew. My people. I have been to the Jew part of Atlanta and seen the Jew stores and Kosher pizza places and even flipped through the local Jewish newspaper, but I had not yet been to any sort of event that was packed with Jews up to this point. While we were waiting for the film to start, I was doing impressions of NY Jews and L.A. Jews and Israeli Jews and trying to explain which group could be more obnoxious to my non-Jewish wife, who was shushing me, when a yarmulke-wearer plopped down right next to us and I had to abruptly can it. Hebrew-speaking mofos right here in Georgia! Who knew? Also, very Jewish, was during the opening credits when someone said aloud, “Could you please be quiet?” to the few people who were still talking.

Then this evening, we went on the Castleberry Hill art stroll, which is similar to the Downtown Art Walk in L.A., where they were having an event called Le Flash. Castleberry Hill is a quite fantastic neighborhood of galleries, art lofts, tiny stores, ancient hole-in-the-wall barbershops, clubs and old brick buildings adjacent to Downtown Atlanta. The highlight of the evening was one gallery where a group of kids were gathered in a circle breakdancing. Just like back in the day, when I was a snot-nosed junior high schooler attempting to spin on the gym floor, these kids would circle around clapping and shouting to an old school mix, while each would move to the center of the group poplocking and spinning and bustin’ some super fancy moves. Some of them were wearing track suits. They all looked to be between the ages of 15 and 20. Guys were spinning on their elbows and doing flips. I hadn’t seen nuthin’ like that in a long, long time.

http://www.castleberryhill.org/artstroll.html

10 BEST THINGS ABOUT LIVING IN THE SOUTH

Autumn on the Blue Ridge Parkway, NC

1. People are real nice and friendly here

2. Southern cuisine

3. Autumn and so many trees you wouldn’t believe

4. Sweet tea

5. People are real funny, even if most of the time they don’t mean to be

6. Real estate, groceries, gas are all cheaper than most other places you might want to live in

7. The countryside is always nearby and real perty like

8. Southerners have a hearty sense of humor, even if it can be kinda dim-bulb-ish sometimes or often

9. Hillbillies and bluegrass music

10. Pie is gud. I like pie.

10 WORST THINGS ABOUT LIVING IN THE SOUTH

Dixie Republic in South Carolina

1. The summer is too sticky, nasty, yucky.

2. For the most part, bugs run the place

3. Way too much nutso Jesus b.s.

4. The widespread concept that being a dumb-ass or a redneck dumb-ass is something to be proud of

5. Southern vegetable side dishes are often cooked in bacon fat or some other pork-based grease, so being a vegetarian, I can almost never eat collard greens, black-eyed peas, etc.

6. If you go into a country antique store, it will almost surely contain racist books, dolls, toys, art and various items with offensive images.

7. Too many soldiers, too many parents of soldiers with varying patriotic bumper stickers

8. People are overly fanatical about football

9. There are conservative black Republicans and they don’t necessarily like Obama at all

10. Not everybody is so well edumacated, like the gentleman who emailed me, “Can I meat you at 4 pm?”