Harvest Moon

In more ways than one, San Francisco is a sausage town. And on paper, the Haight St combination of the Rosamunde Sausage Grill and the impressive beer selection at Toronado next door sounds like a winner. Sure, Toronado is down and dirty, but sawdusted floors can be charming as long as the vibe is good. Sadly, that’s not the case. The bartenders there are impatient jerks and any questions about their esoteric beer options are with annoyance and/or condescension. Which, for me, voids the experience and made it something I only did a few times when I lived there.

Now let's jump to Wurstkuche, self-described “purveyors of exotic sausages” in Venice.
http://www.wurstkuche.com/Menu.html
The line forms outside and filters into a gleaming, perhaps too bright, tile foyer where you start with a pleasant informational conversation with the guy pulling beers. Then you take your Spaten or Erdinger Dunkelweizen or Franziskaner and slide down the counter to the sausage section. The brats can get exotic here and I settled on the rattlesnake and rabbit with jalapeno peppers. And a side of double dipped fries (whatever that means) with curry ketchup.


I paid and scurried out of the brightness into a winding corridor where the darkness dropped like a cloud and a reddish glow led me to a lounge area in the back with communal tables and a DJ dropping cool, chilled out electronic music.

As for the shiny grey, it came courtesy of the DJ. In my mind, few things are more evocative of the 1970s than Neil Young. And this remix by Poolside (an LA music producer self-described as: "daytime disco") puts a shiny LA twist on it:


While I am on the subject of food, I have noticed that everyone in LA is on some sort of workout regimen, specialty diet or, as you get closer to Hollywood, surgical enhancement.  Austin is working the primal diet. All animal fat and vegetables and whatever else our Cro Magnon ancestors would shove into their partially evolved gullets.  (Note his bunless order in the pic.)  I have a feeling that the longer I live here, the more diet schemes I will learn about. In fact, just yesterday I heard about Olaf the Breatharian, who claims to get his sustenance requirements from the air. But that's a whole other topic.

Austin... "all burger and no bun"