Land of the Concrete Picnic

How to eat in paradise

I don’t have any pictures of parking lots but this is close enough right

The traditional meal of my people: food that was once hot, now lukewarm, served on soggy paper. It only took a year and a half away to realize how essential this meal was growing up on the West Coast.¹ Like, yeah I remember streetside taco stands eaten on a dark, liminal sidewalks. I remember idling in line for a drive thru meal so that I could enjoy some fries and a soda in the safe bubble of my car. I remember hotboxing a friend’s cubey Scion or a two-door Toyota of some kind and mindlessly bottoming out a bag of Funyuns in the cloud of smoke. I didn’t realize it had until now, but the stage for all these meals was a slab of concrete, one of our countless treasured parking lots.

Since being back on the West Coast I’ve eaten just as many meals in someone’s home as I have on fields of black tar.

There’s something so hilarious about this that I’ve never noticed before, being adjacent to this tradition my entire life. The West Coast is teeming with natural wonder. I just hiked through Yosemite and felt humbled by the giant canyon and sheer cliffs, felt the spray of waterfalls against my body. I encountered so many birds'; a pair of Golden Eagles doing their mating dance through the sky, a woodpecker hammering away at a tree. I was blessed by a vision of a hummingbird moth sipping on a bed of wildflowers. Not that I subscribe to any school of thought that delineates between human and nature or anything, but this is a country full of incredible wilderness. And we’re eating the fruits of its bounty on sad, hot piles of concrete. 

Some of the best meals I’ve had on this trip were on aforementioned sad, hot piles of concrete. I know In-n-Out is only good if you grew up eating their Christian burgers but some burger slingers back there (who get paid 22.50/hr btw, go off Christians) put their whole In-n-Outussies into my number 1, animal style. When you get bad In-n-Out it's really sad, like wet and cold, soggy. The fries are all stale even though they just cut those thangs. But when it’s good - when the burger is hot and juicy, the bun toasted on the bottom and supple on the top - when the fries are crispy and well-salted - it’s fucking good. 

I’ve been reading The Rest of Eve Babitz while I’m here and I can totally see what she means about the weather. Maybe before corporations pumped the sky full of greenhouse gases, the climate between Los Angeles and the Bay Area was more distinct, but this summer both cities have inched rather close together. In LA the weather was temperate, not hot, sometimes cold, sometimes rainy. Here in the Bay the weather’s been hot and dry and whenever I go out for a little walk, I can feel the sun beat down on my body and exhaust me. 

Maybe it's because so many of my meals have been taken care of by my beautiful, thoughtful Taurean friends² in Los Angeles or my mom out here in Pleasanton. And like, dont judge me! I’m also feeding myself and cooking family meals, too. I contribute. But now that all of the meals I eat in a day don’t have to be food I cooked or acquired myself I’m feeling a little blissed out. What I’m saying is I know what Babitz was talking about, how the weather and the cars and the everything out here in California numb you out.

Even if you’re not eating on a black tar field, you’re usually eating in a strip mall, a bunch of square greige buildings, imminently adjacent to one. Parking lots are practically sacred places for meal consumption out here. 

Here’s a highlight reel of my concrete picnics: the first bowl of ramen I’ve ever actually finished was at Silverlake Ramen where I went into a trance and ate all of my tonkotsu with a side of hot sake. I’m not sure if it was the best ramen ever or if they just put a spell on the broth that compels you to suck it down. I blacked it all out. Would go back to that cramped parking lot any day. Right now, actually.

In a parking lot at the bottom of a hill, I share a meaty, GMO chicken sandwich from Jack in the Box with my sister, complete with a buffet of sauces on the side. Jack doesn’t have any outposts in the Midwest, so it’s nice to indulge in some gross out food. The Good Good sauce was good.

On one of my trips around the Bay, we ventured out to a luxury mall out in San Jose. I had the worst facsimile of Asian cuisine ever. I don’t know what came over me when I ordered a shrimp bento from a mall stall, but as soon as I saw the food slide under the heat lamp and my number called, it had been exorcised and a very sobering reality set in. I ate most of it and sucked down the Coke it came with, praying for absolution.

While out here in the motherland I’ve also realized that I like, really love croissants. I want to be a croissant person. I like shitty croissants, I like gourmet croissants. I like when they’re flakey and aerated. I like when they’re soft and sad. I explored this newfound passion for pastry with one butter and one chocolate variation from Paris Baguette, eaten on cute garden furniture adjacent to a freeway racing with loud ass sixteen wheeler trucks.

Most recently I had some decent tacos al pastor and tripitas in the parking lot at the edge of Pleasanton, sitting in the family car’s open trunk, behind a strip mall, right next to a railroad. I intended to eat inside the restaurant but a bunch of men were suspiciously eye-ing me so I decided to enjoy my meal out en plein air. I peeled back the tin foil wrapped tightly on a paper plate and dug in under the blue sky. Another decent meal out here in boring heaven.³

1. As per the Snack Report style guide, West Coast is capitalized because it is a country.

2. If you’re going to stay with a friend make sure they’re a Taurus. They love to feed you and they will always make sure you’re eating the best possible food they can get, whether that means cooking an immaculately made meal or ordering the best take out in the neighborhood. Just trust me!)

3. Twitter user @averytuckerlive and Eve Babitz have both done a lot of thinking on L.A. as shitty heaven. I’d like to add onto this theory and propose that all of California is heaven and that some of it is not shitty, but boring.