Don't get me started. It's doctors and nurses and teachers and professional parents and professors here in MI… the radical confusion and wtfiwwy (wtf is wrong with you) looks we get .. Alan Rudy
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Funny. I looked up my favorite shit food, Fritos Chili Cheese chips. They get a C- for nutrition, with 160 calories, 90 fat.I never see them in the grocery store, only sold at bad delis.
You can't actually get to the downtown McDonald's because there is no parking at University and Shattuck. Street people up on their change eat there.
I am sure the high school kids feel really deprived. No mall. The whole downtown is a mall during lunch hour. There is a pretty good pizza place that sells by the slice out of a hole in the wall. The university crowd is even more deprived. No chain fast food on except McDees. You have to walk all the way to Dwight and up half a block to get to Bongo Burgers---which are actually real hamburgers. The west entrance on Oxford is lined with trendy food places which serve pasta, salads, falafels, or chinese, thai, indian etc.
In Iowa City, it was morning coffee at the Mill with a sweet roll. I used to hit the bar for lunch for a tall draft, roast beef sandwich.... It was fun to go to drawing class lit up on a fall afternoon. The beer and sauages were good at another place for evening.
Student culture ain't what it was. But a lot of places are still around. The Med for coffee, the Eclair for sweet rolls. But the best cafeterias like Robbie's and the Hofbrau are gone. Top Dog is still smoking up Durant. And Brennan's is still around although remodeled beyond all recognition.
A lot of these changes reflect something of a class war. Robbie's had a diner blue collar feel. You picked up the roast beef, mash potatoes, juice or gravy, from the steam counter and then went to another for drinks, for a pitcher and glasses which this Jamaican guy manned and engaged you with a certain philosophical air.
Here's a funny dive food blog on SF coffee shops of yore:
``The Patty Melt, a coffee shop sandwich if there ever was one, lacked the sex appeal one automatically finds when taking a butch hamburger patty and tarting it up in Grilled Cheese drag. As any self-respecting queen will tell you, never show your pickle on the first date. Unless it's big. And this pickle needed a penis pump. In fact, I've seen better patty melts on prison visits.''
This is from someplace out in Daly City of Little Boxes fame, called The Westlake Coffee Shop. He takes it back to praise some of the rest of the `menu'. This guy has interesting reviews of a lot of SF neighborhoods where these coffee shops were the eat out places of yesterday.
On my delivery route out there, I used to stop at random Mexican places along Mission, some of which were great finds.
Getting back to yore, I remember these kind of places all along route 66 we drove from LA to Hobart. The best ones were in the Texas Pan Handle, where chicken fried steak, fries, A-! and Ice Tea was my favorite dinner. Sometimes I had the soup if it was beef, or salad with thousand island..
CG