Food can bring people from very different backgrounds together, but it can also drive us apart. In today’s society, what you can afford to put on your plate might be as powerful an indicator of your social standing as the car you drive or the house that you live in. Although most Americans eat diets that are well beyond the point of subsistence, problems affording adequate food are still widespread in the United States and obesity is a scourge that particularly affects racial minorities (interested readers can check out posts I have written on hunger, and obesity).

All of this begs a question: Is it time to have a national conversation on food inequality?

We may already have one in the making. The issue of “food justice” has become one of the most visible complaints made by the Occupy Wall Street protesters. As one protester told a New York Times reporter: “Food plays a huge part in this movement. Because people are tired of being fed poison.” The image of a modern food system that delivers massive quantities of unhealthy, environmentally destructive food to the majority of Americans has become a powerful symbol of corrupt, uncaring corporate greed. (Even sympathetic Ben and Jerry’s has been criticized)

There are really two issues at the heart of these criticisms. One is that the food system is unsustainable and bad for us. Michael Pollan has been making this argument clearly and thoughtfully for a long time. The second is that the food system perpetuates inequities in our society. This is a trickier issue, but one that is essential to the core criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement – that our society has failed to deliver a decent standard of living for the 99% of us that are not in the ownership class.

How different are the diets of the “haves” and “have nots” in American society?

An important starting point is to understand how much the diets of Americans vary by their socioeconomic status. It is known, for example, that there is an income gradient in terms of consumption of sugary beverages, that lower income households get more of their calories from carbohydrates and fats, and that many urban low-income families live in “food deserts” (i.e. they are disconnected from access to grocery stores with fresh foods). Below is a simple graph showing the percentage of people that eat the recommended five daily servings of fruits and vegetables broken down by income. There is a noticeable difference between the lowest and highest groups, but even so, fruit and vegetable consumption is fairly low across the board.

This is a fairly crude way of comparing economic disparities in American diets, and it raises more questions than it answers. To the extent that there are differences between the haves and have nots in our society, how much of it is explained by differences in culture, preferences, access to fresh foods, or affordability? To my knowledge, nobody has systematically studied that question. Here’s an intriguing data point, however: given a choice, 56 percent of people that earn less than $25,000 per year would prefer to eat organic food compared to 61 percent of people with incomes greater than $100,000. This is a difference to be sure, but not nearly as large as you might expect if you thought that only wealthy people were interested in organic food.

There is one other important gulf between social groups in the United States – the knowledge and ability to prepare fresh foods. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Americans of all ages and groups have relatively little information about healthy diets (but actually there is very little solid data to back this up). The majority of Americans do believe their diets are healthy – but the data on use of fast food restaurants would tend to contradict this rosy assessment. To close the large inequalities in dietary quality and to reduce obesity it is likely that more nutrition education, including basic cooking skills, will be needed in American schools alongside some of the more controversial policies such as restricting access to junk foods and placing higher taxes on sodas.

What would a sustainable, local, and broadly accessible food system look like?

Many people dream of food utopia – a world in which we eat only sustainable, local, organic, and seasonal food – instead of processed foods or foods that are shipped from halfway around the world. There is, in fact, a small minority of people that currently maintain a diet almost completely based on locally sourced foods. But is this a reality for most Americans, particularly people with limited economic resources?

One optimistic take on this problem is that America already has the resources to deliver a high quality, sustainable diet to all of its citizens, but it requires restructuring our eating priorities. A recent article in Newsweek makes the case that American individuality – including the right to stuff our faces with whatever unhealthy foods we like – is one of the root causes of our highly unequal and unhealthy food system:

But American culture is probably not the full story. There are real resource constraints, including the ability to productively use our farmland to support high quality foods for everyone. Eating like the French might mean less meat (meaning more energy and resources for producing healthy fruits and vegetables), but there are still problems of supplying large quantities of food at reasonable prices to consumers. This is the paradox of American plenty – we want it all, we want it now, and we want it to be fair to everyone. Something’s gotta give.

When I was a kid growing up outside Los Angeles, my family would buy pan dulce (Mexican sweet bread) from Albertson’s grocery store. The pan dulce sat in the bakery department. It happened to be next to the fried chicken, which we often bought too.

My mom would let me choose one piece of sweet bread, and lots of times I would pick a concha – a puffy roll striped in hot-pink or yellow sugar. It was never the wisest choice once I got home: Each bite was dry, bland and crumbly – as if I were licking beach sand.

Even after I grew up and moved to Texas, I continued to buy conchas from Mexican panaderías, seduced by their bright sugared tops. Unfortunately the conchas weren’t very good in Texas, either. I became convinced that no matter how adorable they were, conchas were doomed to a bland, lowly station.

Then I moved to Mexico City.

Here, many people will eat conchas in the morning with a cup of coffee, then eat a heavier breakfast around 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. One morning, a friend recommended that we meet for breakfast at a restaurant called Bondy. When the waiter delivered our tray of sweet bread, my eyes nearly flew out of my head. Sitting in the middle of his tray was an immense, spherical concha, covered in a crispy baked-sugar crust. I took a bite, and the crust shattered over my plate. The buttery insides unfurled in my mouth, the same way they do when you’re eating the inner pearl of a cinnamon roll.

I couldn’t believe it. This was a concha? It couldn’t be.

That afternoon, I went home and wrote a poem about Bondy’s conchas and posted it on my blog. “Oh sweet concha pillow…” the poem began. My Mexican concha roll obsession was born.

The great thing about a well-made concha is that its ingredients are quite simple – the dough is a mix of fat, flour, sugar and salt – yet one bite manages to be both comforting and complex. It’s as if a hamburger bun, danish and a biscuit somehow married each other, leaving a fluffy, yeasty roll with a murmur of sweetness.

In the past one-and-a-half years since my concha obsession began, I’ve tried perhaps a dozen conchas from bakeries around Mexico City. There was Maque, a restaurant hyped by locals, but whose concha was dry and sandy. El Cardenal’s concha was luscious and perfect and came with a side of clotted cream. I held a concha taste test with a friend, featuring seven types of conchas and eating only lettuce and water for two days afterward. Our top winners were the still eye-opening Bondy and Da Silva Bakery in Polanco.

Once at 7 a.m. outside my house, I flagged down the bicycle-riding pan dulce vendor while still in my flannel pajama pants. Wearing your pajamas in the street isn’t done in Mexico City; I attracted stares. The roll was really good, though. It came from a bakery in the Centro Histórico. I’d flag down the vendor and buy it again, in the same pants if necessary.

I try not to discriminate when buying conchas – you truly never know where a good one will come from. Interestingly, most bakeries in Mexico tend to look the same, no matter what the neighborhood’s socioeconomic status. There will always be shelves with bread in the windows. There will always be metal trays and tongs. And it will always, always smell heavenly. It’s just so welcoming that I can’t help but go inside, even when I’m not even hungry for bread. I buy conchas from small bakeries and large ones, vendors on bikes, upscale restaurants and fondas, casual joints that may not offer seating, where one basket of sweet breads is usually passed from customer to customer. Since customers pay for their bread by the piece and not by the basket, it’s best to get to a fonda early, while the conchas are still fresh.

The concha I tried at El Popular recently — a cafe in the Centro Histórico — was the best I’ve had in a long time. El Popular makes its own pastries in-house, and so the roll arrived slightly misshapen and covered in a spotty, homemade-looking sugar crust. It was sweet and powdery, and the innards yeasty and soft. It gave me the same type of feeling as wearing socks on a cold day.

Recently, I made conchas for the first time during a cooking class at a Mexican culinary school. While preparing the crumbly topping, I realized that it didn’t contain any butter, as I’d always thought. The topping turned out to be a mix of confectioner’s sugar, flour and vegetable shortening – more than a pound of vegetable shortening.

The news that conchas were even more artery-clogging than I’d envisioned made me enjoy them even more. These crackly, misunderstood rolls defy us to love them. How could I say no?

Lesley’s Favorite Stops for Concha Rolls in Mexico City

Wherever you go in Indian cities, you’ll meet people who want to sell you fried things. It’s usually a good idea to cooperate.

If you happen to live outside of India, you’ve probably had samosas, the most common kind of these street snacks outside of India. Other types of chaat (literally, “licks”) include pani puris, fried shells of spicy water that explode in your mouth; aloo tikkis, potato pancakes that are often covered in tamarind chutney and chickpea sauce; and many more.

What you don’t always see in this combination is fruit. From one point of view, that might be a good thing – in India, eating peeled fruit on the street, like drinking spicy delicious water on the street, is a good way to not leave your room for a couple days. And while Indians do eat lots of fruit, they do it mostly the way Americans do: they buy it, peel it, eat it, and that’s it.

Near the glistening new Metro station in Old Delhi’s Chawri Bazar, at the edge of the bathroom-parts market that borders the wedding-card market, one stand is fighting all that with kulle, also called kulliya or simply “fruit chaat.” This stand, Hira Lal Chaat Corner, actually has a competitor across the street, but I’m a man of loyalties. After reading about kulle on the blog Eating Out in Delhi, I walked straight there from my hotel behind Jama Masjid, a magnificent mosque built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, and ordered a plate.

The owner of Hira Lal told me that while his grandfather had founded the chaat shop, he himself had invented kulle. Tasty items that stand alongside his creation include aloo tikki and pao bhaji, a snack from Bombay consisting of a thin curry accompanied by what is basically a hamburger bun. Unadorned aloo chaat – chunks of fried potato splashed with lime (also better in India than in the U.S.) and tossed in a bit of masala is also a highlight.

None of these snacks, of course, are as tasty as the main event. Despite its name, fruit chaat is only about half fruit. Depending on the season, the dispenser of deliciousness will give you a mix of potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, bananas, mangoes and other delicacies. They’re all split open and filled with boiled chickpeas, pomegranate seeds, a black masala and plenty of salt.

It’s totally unlike any fruit experience I’d ever had, even when I’ve tried savory spices on fruit. People have previously tried to convince me that salt is good on watermelon; this is a lie. Other times, I’ve had Mexican and Indian preparations of fruit and cucumbers with maybe a little salt and chili powder rubbed on – much better, but still not on the level of Hira Lal’s kulle.

Ultimately, if you’re going to play this game, you’ve got to go all in. Start with bursting gems of pomegranate and chewy chickpeas. Then salt and masala – not just salt, but black salt. Sulfur salt. It’s an acquired taste. It’s hard to say what-all is in the spice mix aside from cumin and black salt, but it’s spicy and aromatic; packaged masalas for fruit (which also produce a crazy, delicious drink when mixed with soda) also contain things like cinnamon, ginger, pepper, and powdered cantaloupe and chili. The spices provide a radical contrast to the sweetness of a smooth banana. A cucumber’s mild crunch provides a great pairing, too – when matched with the warmth of a good salt, kulle illustrates the phrase, “cool as a cucumber.”

As good as banana and cucumber can be, silky, tongue-coating mango is the way to go when it comes to fruit chaat. In summer, mangoes appear all over India in a dozen or more varieties, depending on location and the time of the season. Many kinds of produce in India are not as good, to be honest, as what I can buy from a good grocer in California. Indian apples, for example, can be mealy, and Indian tomatoes are usually bland. Other produce is consistently better: Onions and bananas are substantially tastier in India than anywhere in the States.

Mangoes are not like any of these. Mangoes in India are so much better than their cousins in the U.S. that I don’t eat them when I’m not in India, and the mango kulle at Hira Lal Chaat Corner makes a very convincing case for my conversion.

Hira Lal Chaat Corner (sign in Hindi)
On the north side of Chawri Bazar
Between Hauz Qazi Chowk and Nai Sadak
(Near the entrance of Gali Lohe Wali)
Open 7 days a week until 10:00 p.m.

Many major American cities, particularly those that once, long ago, would have been called “blue collar,” can claim as part of their civic heritage a signature junk food. The food is usually messy, often greasy and always – to borrow a term from famed football coach, analyst and tailgater John Madden – a sinker. Philadelphia has its cheese steaks, Chicago its deep-dish pizza, and Baltimore its crab cakes. Never willing to let Chicago one-up it at anything, Detroit, too, has its own, lesser-known local delicacy: the Coney Island hot dog.

Although named after the frankfurters sold in southern Brooklyn, the Coney Island, also known as the “Coney dog”, or simply the “Coney”, is an invention of Michigan. A “Coney with everything” is a beef or pork hot dog set in a bun, doused in chili, slicked with deli-style mustard, and surmounted with a handful of diced onions. The chili is thin, usually beanless and, while individual recipes are nearly always secret, often contains beef hearts. Ketchup can be added to the Coney, but Michiganders seldom do, believing it gauche. Two Coneys with fries and a Coke constitute a standard lunch, but orders of twice that size aren’t uncommon.

The two foremost purveyors of Coneys in downtown Detroit are Lafayette Coney Island and American Coney Island, which, due to a generations-old fraternal feud, happen to share a wall. The story goes that Constantine “Gust” Keros, a Greek immigrant, opened American in 1917 and soon after sent for his brother, William, to join him in the U.S. and learn the hot dog trade. Several years later, the brothers suffered a falling out, and William, in a fit of pique, moved into the tiny space next door (or, depending on who’s telling it, threw up a partition in the middle of American’s dining room) and founded Lafayette Coney Island, taking its name from an adjacent street. Since then, hundreds of Coney Island restaurants, most of them still owned by ethnic Greeks, have popped up throughout Michigan. To this day, American and Lafayette remain arch rivals, standing side by side but fighting an endless cold war for Detroit’s allegiance.

On a recent unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon, I strolled into Lafayette for a quick bite. The restaurant, which occupies a sliver of space running widthwise through a triangle-shaped block, is drab and cramped. The decor is Postwar American Diner: faded formica countertops, low-slung vinyl bar stools, and pies in glass display cases. The menu is only about a dozen items, consisting of standard Coney fare: dogs, chili, fries and “loose” hamburgers. Cans of pop are kept in an ice-filled sink. The register is a clanging mechanical contraption.

I took a seat at the counter and went with a single Coney and a pack of potato chips*. Although no longer owned by the Keros family, most of the waitstaff at Lafayette are still thick-chested, hairy-armed Greek men. All of them wear short-sleeve white shirts, white aprons and expressions of perpetual fatique. When one of them takes an order, he barks it in shorthand to the fellow working the grill: “Gimme one of each light chili, heavy onions, bowl chili!”

Service is variable: sometimes the staff is jocular and attentive, bantering with regular customers and even performing the occasional magic trick; other times, they are brusque and careless, as if aware that Lafayette’s reputation by now supercedes the actual experience of eating there. Yet, these men are bearers of a tradition, and this makes them loveable, caprice and all. Today, one of the owners, a short, bespectacled man who could pass for Henry Waxman’s swarthy twin, is hunched over the counter, complaining to a regular customer about the film crew shooting a remake of the Reagan-era classic Red Dawn down the street. The owner, face crushed into a scowl, is worried he’s getting fucked and is mulling avenues of legal recourse.

*A brief digression: Whether its cars or cola, residents of Detroit are extraordinarily allegiant to local brands. Nearly everyone drives American, and many city eateries will stock neither Coke nor Pepsi, only Detroit’s own Faygo. This unflinching loyalty occasionally places Detroiters into the uncomfortable position of having to defend to outsiders a local product they know to be not just inferior, but outright heinous – examples include the Pontiac Aztec, Insane Clown Posse, and the Detroit city council. Fortunately, the local brand of potato chip, aptly named “Better Made,” is crisp, flavorful, and neither excessively salted nor oiled. I’m unsure whether Better Mades are available outside of Metro Detroit, but I’m betting that if some enterprising soul were to purchase the distribution rights and introduce them into a complacent potato chip market, they could be a giant killer.

A Coney doesn’t take long to eat. Lafayette’s chili, the dish’s focal point, is very good: mild, faintly gamy, and actually containing a few beans. The hot dog, which Lafayette has a bad rep for occasionally burning, is cooked perfectly and has a pleasant snap to it. Mustard lends the sauce a welcome acetous tinge, and the onions, while not very strong, provide a nice textural counterpoint. This being Michigan, where the fickle winds of the Great Lakes play Hell upon the predictive powers of local meteorologists, it’s not insignificant that Coneys are a fine all-weather food: they’ll warm you up on a cold day, but won’t slow you down on a hot one. On a previous visit, I had also tried Lafayette’s chili cheese fries and found them excellent, a fine fortification against boney limbs and hangovers.

American may be the older restaurant, but most Detroiters tend to consider Lafayette more authentic. This may have something to do with American’s renovation in 1989, when they it took over an adjacent building that filled out the end of its triangular block, then proceeded to expand both floor space and their menu. Suddenly, the cozy promixities of the lunch counter were eliminated in favor of islands of two- and four-person tables. With it was lost all the communal charm inherent in being made to elbow up against one’s grubby fellow man.

It didn’t help that American also chose to replace three of its four walls with glass paneling, giving the place the look of a terrarium. Recently, I’ve been writing an article on gambling, and the other day I spoke with a casino designer. He told me that well-designed casinos arrange their slots to give the gambler maximum privacy. “When’re they’re playing, slot players tend to feel physically vulnerable,” said the designer. “They like to hole up in nooks and crannies to give them some sense of protection.” The same, I suppose, could be true of people digging into a couple of sopping Coneys. At Lafayette, not only do you have a stronger sense of place, but you can be pretty sure no one’s staring at you.

Maybe Lafayette’s more popular because American tries too hard. If you’re out on Michigan Ave. staring at the two storefronts, the manager of American will often wander out and try to hustle you inside. Detroiters, with good reason, consider this sort of hard sell unseemly. By contrast, Lafayette, with its dinge and its dyspectic staff, plays it cool. It’s no wonder that Lafayette is where the last call crowd has its 3 a.m. sing-a-longs and crying jags, and it’s not surprising that Lafayette is where Patti Smith and MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic’” Smith held their wedding reception in 1980.

I polled a few patrons as to why they were eating at Lafayette and not American. One said the chili at Lafayette was better – much better. A lanky fellow who worked downtown said he’d eaten at both and thought they tasted about the same, but, for amorphous reasons, usually ate at Lafayette. “Part of it is that it’s the original,” said his girlfriend, who sat across from him, picking at a loose burger. “Everyone knows they were here first” (probably wrong, but what she says feels like it should be right). Sitting next to me at the bar was a middle-aged man and his father. The man said they’d driven down from Sterling Heights, a suburb a half hour north, just to drop in for a couple of Coneys. He said this was a thing they’ve done regularly since he was a boy. “It’s about tradition,” said the man. “Every time I have a Coney anywhere, it reminds me of having one here at Lafayette with my dad.” His dad, an oldster wearing a 3rd Infantry Division baseball cap, ate his chili and nodded.

I finished my meal and paid. Although no longer hungry, I felt compelled, out of curiosity and a sense of fairness, to stop in at American. I hadn’t eaten there since June, and when I did it was as a hungry man, not as a critic. American’s menu is far more extensive – a sign outside proclaims Wednesday “Fish Fry Night” – but I stuck to a Coney-with-everything and ate it walking down Michigan. The verdict: American has a better hot dog – it’s both larger and more sapid, not to mention consistently unburnt – but Lafayette has better chili. Given that in both cases the flavor of the chili dominates the palette, I suppose the overall edge in taste goes to Lafayette. However, having a strong opinion as to which Coney tastes better is a bit like taking a hardline stance on which is the best downmarket skin mag (Is it Club or Swank?). The products are so similar, their aims so base, that at three in the morning, either would seem to do – unless, of course, one brings tradition into it.

This story is part of a cross-post between Indefinite Articles and The Eaten Path.
You can read James Boo’s “Preemptive Strike” on Chili’s here.

For all the amazing food we have in the Bay Area, the little holes-in-the-wall and the grandiose temples to flavor, every once in a while there’s something appealing about the strip mall meal. I grew up in Auburn, California, thirty miles northeast of Sacramento, a place not exactly known for its food (excepting Ikeda’s, perhaps, a burger joint and produce market popular amongst skiers headed to Tahoe). Once you’ve had your fill of hiking and naked statues, there’s not really much to do in Auburn except to leave it, and head down to the swath of malls that fill the gap between old mining hub Auburn and the state capitol.

When The Eaten Path main squeeze James invited me to do a Chili’s crossover event between our blogs, in which he would review the restaurant without eating a bite and I would actually have to sit down and put some food in my mouth- a raw deal, to be sure- I have to say I got a little excited. I guess there’s a little nostalgia in me for giant parking lots and salmon-pink stucco-plastered walls. So, I scammed a half-dozen friends into joining me, and we jumped into a couple of cars, chanting “Awesome Blossom” the whole way down to San Leandro.

In all honesty, the enthusiasm was fueled more by the novelty of the story rather than the promise of the food. In our enveloping, obese-friendly booths, we inhaled our bountiful platters down in a daze. The fries have that bizarre Pizza Hut quality of making you hungrier as you eat them, and the entrées come across as flavor templates, little more than the Platonic intention of food. My cheeseburger came from that alternate reality of Doritos and Combos, where burger flavor implies a homogeneous blend of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise.

No, the visit was less gastronomical in nature than anthropological. That giant glowing red pepper floating thirty feet in the sky is the hearthstone of the modern American town. Walmart may have all the deals, but Chili’s, the edgy, margarita slinging Applebee’s, is the place for family and friends to kick back and have a good meal. And as Michael Scott says on The Office, it’s “the new golf course. It’s where business happens.”

But woe, even our cultural anticipation was deflated. Gone are the knick-knack plastered walls, those corporate collections of antiquated signage designed to put us at ease. Gone is the Awesome Blossom, the battered and deep-fried raison d’être of Chili’s (though apparently, it’s predated by the Bloomin’ Onion). Gone is the bustling warmth, even the faux Downtown Disneyland bustling warmth I was for some reason expecting.

Instead, Chili’s is locked in some kind of struggle to reinvent itself, driven by manifest destiny to find that weighty Cheesecake Factory sheen. The menu is a massive tome some twenty pages in length, thickly laminated, and it reads like a webpage with too much design money thrown at it. Thank God for the pictures to help me choose what I wanted.

The one saving grace of the experience was a matter of eerie serendipity. Our waitress greeted us (after an awkward twenty minute wait for menus accompanied only by the screaming of nearby babies), and mid-spiel began staring at me with an odd knowing expression. After a round of questions, it came to light that we both went to Placer High School up in Auburn together, and she remembered me. Sadly, I couldn’t reciprocate.

Here we were, three hours removed from my own Hometown, USA, and this woman emerged from the shadows of the Chili’s bar like a pale blonde ghost. She, like the mini-mall before her, had been blocked from my memory, only to return right on time to deliver me a slice of lukewarm post-Americana.

Jake Mix is a writer, artist and blog editor in Oakland, CA. You can read his work at Indefinite Articles.

In this day and age, it is almost a crime to admit to liking good, greasy food. It is especially fitting in SoCal that the salad—throughout most of history a side dish or appetizer—has taken the place of the baptism: that which serves to wash us clean of the sin of gluttony.

Don’t get me wrong. I like good salads once in a while. But everything in moderation, including health.

When my friend James (of The Eaten Path) stopped by town with his friends Zach and Alex for a wine tasting, I decided to take them to the high temple of the fallen, the gastronomical equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits. This place, of course, was none other than the world-famous Lucky Boy.

I am proud to live in Pasadena. There are great things to do here, and great restaurants: for instance, 750 mL is in South Pasadena; there is Saladang on Fair Oaks; etc., etc. But this was the man who spent a few weeks last summer driving around the South, sampling the best of Southern BBQ. This was the man with whom I had devoured ribs in Seal Beach and in Oakland. He deserved the very best.

At first, James did not want to go to Lucky Boy. He was getting ill, he said, and greasy food would potentially push his compromised immune system over the edge. However, this is the man who has devoted an entire blog to the pursuit of good eating—i.e. greasy food—so it wasn’t entirely too hard to persuade him otherwise. Zach and Alex were both vegetarian to degrees; this fact did not stand in the way of my goals.

Behold the neon-lit, dreary exterior of Lucky Boy.

We stood outside and ordered our food. We each got breakfast burritos, which are two-pound logs of hash browns, cheese, eggs, and meat. Bacon and sausage are the two most popular choices, though they also offer chorizo and ham. The vegetarians omitted the meat. To share, we ordered a side of chili cheese fries and zucchini fries.

Around us were high schoolers from South Pasadena High School, shady characters from Highland Park, and one or two college kids back for summer break. The cars whizzed by on Arroyo Parkway.

How can you describe the breakfast burrito except by saying it is pure bliss? It is heaven, if heaven came wrapped in extra-large flour tortillas. The only improvement could be liberal application of Lucky Boy’s spicy green sauce, of which there was plenty.

And the chili cheese fries? Soft, yielding, every bite like a kiss. A kiss from a beautiful voluptuous brunette saying “It’s all right, it’s all right” on the darkest of nights.

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing is the zucchini fries. These are not huge spears but are instead little curls of deep-fried zucchini. Or is it zucchinis? Because in that one translucent waxed paper bag there must be at least three zucchinis. Four grown men could not even finish half the bag.

After three bottles of wine, breakfast burritos, chili cheese fries, and zucchini fries, it’s fair to say that we each lost about a week of our lives. But life without certain sins is not worth living, just as much as living without friends is not truly living.

Joon Song is an aspiring drunkard and law school student. You can read his wine stories at Vinicultured.

Lucky Boy Drive-In Restaurant
640 S Arroyo Pkwy
Pasadena, CA 91105
626.793.0120