Sweet Angeli

Some people call what I do “freelance commercial production.” I call it “Blah Blah Blah, Don’t Care, Not Interested—LUNCH—Blah Blah Blah, Sleep with Eyes Open.” With such an emphasis being placed on lunch it is imperative that I make it as delicious as possible. This can sometimes involve such unsavory acts as lying, receipt shuffling/making and even stealing. I’ve been known to make up elaborate traffic accidents to justify the time I took to go to Bay Cities in between buying ink and walking the director's dog.

Fortunately, one of the companies I work for is in a prime lunch zone and at least once a week I get to hit up one of my favorites: Angeli Caffe. Angeli is like the girl you dated in high school and then dumped for the exotic exchange student, only to see her years later at a reunion and realize, a) she’s a sexy doctor, b) she’s funny and c) you made a huge mistake. You don’t see it on any of the glossy top ten lists (its glory days having come and gone in the eighties and nineties,) but it’s 2008 and Angeli has yet to disappoint me. Not that there isn’t better pizza or more exciting pastas to be found in LA, but for the price range I don’t know where you can get better, more consistent Italian. It’s the place I go when the day was long and all I want is to be held close and spoon fed bolognese. It’s hard to find a bolognese in this city that really tastes like it does in Italy and Angeli has it. They also have the Insalata Forte, or as I like to call it, Boca del Diablo—the amount of garlic in the dressing makes The Stinking Rose look like a Gerber test kitchen. The space is simple and relaxed, yet not so relaxed that you can't make a date out of it. The waiters are never overbearing-- they seem less like restaurant employees than friends of the owners who just happened to stop by.

There’s also another reason I love Angeli, a less innocent reason that verges on obsession. When people tell me how happy they are that they’ve cut bread out of their lives my first thought is, “excellent! One less person I have to talk to.” My second thought is, “they’ve never had the bread at Angeli.” Crusty and slightly burnt on the outside, soft and pillowy on the inside, each bread is like a mini dome of heaven—my own culinary Dome of the Rock. Not that I don’t do my best to limit the amount I have. I always start with one half and follow it with a little pinch of the stomach fat, just to remind myself what I'm fighting for. But soon one half turns into a full, and a full turns into two, and before I know it my lunch is fast asleep on a bed of carbs at the bottom of my stomach. At that point all I can do is sigh, look down at my belly and whisper, “sleep babies. Sleep.”

When we order Angeli at the office and the food arrives, someone inevitably emerges from a dark editing bay and asks in a desperate tone, “did they give us extra bread?” They almost always do, but every once in a while you catch them on a busy day. Last time this happened I heard someone mutter from the kitchen, “they didn’t give us bread?” Then in a much louder voice they screamed, “THEY DIDN’T GIVE US BREAD! THERE’S NO BREAD!” A general panic swept through the office as one by one everyone picked up their food and threw it against the wall in disbelief. Then we stood perfectly still and didn’t say anything for two hours. What do you want? The bread has a strange power over me. It’s an edible Rumpelstiitskin, except instead of spinning straw into gold it spins wheat into heroin. Addiction never tasted so sweet.

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before we go any further,

let's have some breakfast, shall we? after all, we are civilized people.

that's better.

a simple breakfast of herbed eggs and bacon, good bread, and strong coffee goes a long way towards making the day right.

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