Road Trips : Los Angeles : Page Three
15 February 2003 (Continued)
Saturday night dinner was at Clifton's Cafeteria, which was a high spot on the agenda which we didn't really have. I'd been here once before and it's a most amazing place, the surviving link in a chain of cafterias from the 1930s. Clifton's is a wonderful joint, with most of those cafeteria classics I miss from the south (except for the collard greens and fried okra), and I don't come to LA without visiting if possible.
After dinner, we roamed around downtown LA for a while. Lots of people tend to forget that there actually IS a downtown LA, but it's there in its faded glory. The department stores and most of the theatres are closed, but it's still a lively place, with shops catering to a largely Latino clientele and at least one really cool rock-goth-skate shop where I was pretty excited to see that Vision Street Wear is back.
We headed back to the Motel 6 to, ummm, eliminate the heavy dinner, and then wandered back out toward Hollywood and the LA branch of Amoeba Music. The San Francisco and Berkeley branches will never be quite the same for me; this place is a huge mecca for music AND video, and we spent most of the vacation budget here. It was truly amazing...
Further driving ensued (Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night is a nightmare, by the way) and somehow we ended up going all the way to Burbank and Toluca Lake, where we had late-night food at the perfectly-preseved Bob's Big Boy I'd visited once before with Duncan.
Then it was back to the Motel 6. The soccer kids were, alas, not asleep yet...