Restaurant Review: The Village Inn. Provo, Utah

During my fifteenth summer I rose at 4 in the morning to ride my bike to the Embers restaurant in Roseville, where I worked mornings as a busboy.
Embers was a notable franchise up in Minnesota that was justly famous for delectable onion rings. At least that's all I remember about the place -- I stuffed myself silly with the broken remnants of onion rings all during my shift, which surprisingly did not cause my adolescent skin to bloom with acne from all that ingested grease.
I hated the job, especially because the busboys did not get any tips. Money left on the table was scooped up by the waitress; if I dared approach the table before she picked up the loot she would swoop down on me like a harpy, all screechy and ruffled feathers. Besides, getting up at four in the morning tired me out so much that when I got home in the afternoon all I could do was fall on my bed and snooze until dinner time, and then not be able to get back to sleep until midnight, and then get up again at four in the morning . . .
It finally became too stressful for Evelyn Torkildson's little boy, and I quit in early August, spending all my glorious free time down at Como Lake angling for crappies and sunnies.

Since then I have not been much of a fan of franchise hash houses. I mean, sure, I eat there, but I wasn't going to 'review' any of them in this series of blogs.

However, I found myself getting real sick of pantywaist 'furrin' food today; yearning instead for the real deal -- a burger with fries and a slice of thick, luscious pie to top it off.

So I took the #850 bus down to the Provo Bus Terminal, where The Village Inn sits on the corner of a busy intersection. I walked in to the sight of mature, relaxed couples sitting in booths and talking about John Wayne movies. Old men shuffled about, mumbling on toothpicks and looking for refills for their iced tea.

I ordered cream of broccoli soup, a crush burger with fries, and a slice of caramel/pecan pie. With a glass of lemonade. The soup could have come from a can -- I don't know. But along with it I got a whole basket of Zesta saltine crackers. There was a time, not that many years ago, when I would have taken half the basket and surreptitiously slipped them into my pocket for dinner. Praise God I don't feel the need to do that anymore . . .

Now that I'm home typing on my laptop, I can't remember a darn thing about the decor. It was standard submissive pastels. And there was muzak of sorts, but played so softly I could easily tune it out. Well lit, too -- none of this cavernous darkness that modern joints think is so impressive and moody.

Then, huzzah! huzzah! Out came the crush burger, with fries:

It was all that a burger and fries ought to be. It filled me up; it filled me out; and it went down smoothly and simply, tasting just exactly the way a burger and fries should taste. A clean taste. A wholesome taste. And by jingo, an American taste! This is what our forefathers fought for -- the right to sit down in a restaurant and enjoy a meat patty
 between two buns along with fried potato splinters dowsed in as much ketchup as a man can hold.
Plus there was enough lettuce, onion, and tomato on it to qualify as a small green salad.
Each bite was a pleasure, although to be just a wee bit finicky, I think they could have gone to the trouble of putting some mayo on the bun.

Then came the pie:

I'm not going to torture you by saying how truly good and holy it was. Because I know that you are probably on a diet of some sort that won't let you eat something like this ever again. And I feel sorry for you.

So I'm giving The Village Inn four burps. My meal of soup, burger & fries, pie, and lemonade, cost me $17.91. And the cashier gave me the Senior Discount without me having to ask. -- take THAT, you boutique eateries!

In summation, this is the place where you take your out of town relatives and friends for a good solid meal. The place is a 'safe bet'. And we Americans need all the safe bets we can get right now . . .

Hate speech

"The American University law professor and Harvard University faculty associate has grappled for months with whether Donald Trump’s rhetoric constitutes dangerous speech as she has come to define it. She has examined election-year speech before, but only abroad where the risks of mass atrocities were great."

from the Washington Post 


There once was a man gave a speech
which he thought would act like some bleach
to purify thought,
but all that he got
was a well-deserved kick in the breech. 

Stumbling blocks

We cannot afford to have our testimonies of the Father and the Son become confused and complicated by stumbling blocks.  Quentin L. Cook.


Most stumbling blocks are little, but they trip me all the same.
Whenever I move forward, they are there to make me lame.
And if I take a step back they will offer me a seat
of comfort, to give up and contemplate my own defeat.
When I stumble, Lord, forgive my inconsistent pace,
and help me once again to look upon thy loving face.
Give me wisdom to pick up those blocks that make me falter,
and pile them high until they make an unpretentious altar. 

Restaurant Review: Osaka Japanese Restaurant. Provo, Utah.

Everything was better when I was a kid. The wars were better. The diseases were better. Even the Presidents were better. And especially the Japanese restaurants were better. Much better.

I am referring, of course, to the one and only Little Tokyo in Dinkytown, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. My best friend Wayne Matsuura's parents were good friends with the owners of Little Tokyo, so Wayne and I would go there on Friday nights to stuff ourselves with tempura vegetables and pickled daikon radishes and rice balls soaked in sake and then wrapped up in layers of seaweed. In return we washed dishes and broke to saddle the larger cockroaches so we could ride 'em out of town after the place closed. I remember the food as light and crispy and filling and pungent.

But today,October 31, some sixty years later, I find myself in a Japanese place on Center Street in Provo, Utah, that does not live up to my memories at all.

 I started with a bowl of miso soup, which tasted exactly like chicken soup. Then I got a green salad, with, the waitress said, the 'house dressing'. The so-called house dressing was some kind of watery mayonnaise. So that didn't do anything to cheer me up. The decor was dark and severe, with simple Japanese calligraphy on the walls. I was happy to have a nice thick pillow on my chair -- but it was covered with crumbs. Next came the pot stickers:

They were okay; nothing to strew cherry blossoms over. As I stared at my plate of pot stickers I realized with embarrassment that I've never really known the proper way to eat them. Do you pick them up with your fingers to nibble on or cut them in pieces with a knife and fork? Me, I just stab 'em with my fork, dunk in the sauce, and then stuff the whole thing in my mouth. On reflections, that seems a rather barbaric way to eat them. So I've probably been offending Japanese culinarians for many years past. Perhaps if I had stopped there I would not now be glaring at my computer screen, with steam slowly rising out of my ears. But I went ahead and ordered vegetable tempura:

It came with the smallest bowl of rice I have ever been served in an Asian restaurant, so I couldn't even fill up on stodge. The veggies had not been dipped in batter at all; they were dipped in cement. I tried using the dipping sauce to soften them up, but they remained as impervious as granite. And flavorless as well; I ladled on the soy sauce like there was no tomorrow, but it hardly made a dent in the void. As I gnawed my way through the last piece I noticed that even though it was now high noon there was not a single solitary other customer in the restaurant -- and now I knew why; if you didn't bring your own jackhammer you probably couldn't digest anything on the menu.

I give the Osaka a one burp rating -- and they're only getting that because I liked the fish in their lobby:

My meal of pot stickers and vegetable tempura, which included the miso soup and green salad, cost $10.56.

I did not feel I had dined well after finishing this meal, so I stopped next door at Bianca's La Petite French Bakery for a Bavarian cream filled kro-nut, a leviathan pastry that set me back $4.99:

It's supposed to be a French donut sliced in half with cream filling in the middle. It succeeds in being nearly impossible to eat without dislocating your jaw and getting powdered sugar on everything within a radius of ten feet:  

But it's very good; soft and sweet without being at all gooey. As I sat back covered in powdered sugar, I decided that one lousy Japanese meal does not a tragedy make -- not when I can balance it out with a heavy sweet that will soon have me napping peacefully in my recliner until the hobgoblins start coming out tonight for their cheap candy treats. I should have gotten some gift certificates from the Osaka to hand out for Halloween . . . talk about trick or treat!  

Inside the Affordable Care Act’s Arizona Meltdown

Premiums for some plans will be more than double this year, some of the biggest increases in the nation. Only last-minute maneuvering prevented one Arizona county from becoming the first in the nation to have no exchange insurers at all.

from the Wall Street Journal  

Affordable Care is a jest,
as popular now as incest.
The premiums soar
like the hammer of Thor, 
and crushing the poor in the breast. 

When I'm good and famous

I've been reading all about Bob Dylan  being unreachable; the Nobel Prize Committee wants to get a hold of him to give him his medal and a bunch of money, but Dylan won't return their calls. Same thing with Bill Murray; he's notorious for not having an agent or manager or secretary and for never returning phone calls and not giving a hoot in hell about publicity.

What is it with these people? Are they crazy?

Crazy like a fox. Or like J.D. Salinger.

These people have gone beyond the hype of fame, to discover the Land of Fame Zen -- where privacy, if not modesty, reigns, and the media goblins have been expelled forever.

And that's how famous I want to be.

I'll go back and live in Thailand, where I spent two years as a missionary and five years as an English teacher. Pick up where I left off with my girlfriend Joom. Live on a durian plantation in a teak wood shack.  No cell phone. No internet. No indoor plumbing. Just unreliable mail delivery. Any darn reporter who wants an exclusive will have to tramp through thorny jungle trails, barely wide enough for a python, to reach my compound. And the chances will be very good that I won't be there, because I don't care enough about journalists or publicity to follow the rules of normal hospitality. They can talk to Joom, who barely speaks English.

And if I decide to fly over to Hawaii to see my good bud Barack in his retirement, for some golf or body surfing, you can bet dollars to donuts I won't alert the media. Especially the social media. No Twitter or Facebook for me, kemosabe.

I'll have a beard-growing contest with Letterman, and the press won't know a dang thing about it until it's over -- and the only information they'll get about it is from Letterman, the blabbermouth.

I'll be so elusive and aloof that all the biographies written about me will have to use the word "Unauthorized" in the title.

I guess I'll have to get a penthouse in Manhattan as well, right next to Woody Allen's. We'll feud about his dog messing around in my garbage. But the public will never know about it, since Woody knows how to keep his mouth shut, and I'll be too busy with my New York bankers to care. And I'll do nothing to scotch the rumors about a possible Broadway production.

At some point the sneaky paparazzi will snap a photo of Tom Cruise giving me a Scientology book while I give him a Book of Mormon. This is the only photo of me extant for the next twenty years.

I won't be in Washington to receive my Mark Twain prize; I'll send Joom's daughter-in-law from her first marriage, who speaks passable English, to pick it up.

Let me tell you, it's a great feeling having complete validation of my talents without being bothered by any fans or questioned by the media. I get to have my kale and eat it, too.

Now the only question is just how exactly am I going to get that famous; it usually requires work and patience and genius. And I don't go in for that kind of strenuous stuff anymore. Bad for my blood pressure.

Maybe I'll just live obscurely without bothering to become famous at all. And then I'll become famous for that.

Christ is joy!

For Latter-day Saints, Jesus Christ is joy!    Russell M. Nelson


One name only fills the earth with joy and jubilee.
Jesus Christ, the Savior -- the mild Man from Galilee.
Believe in him and sorrow melts, along with cold despair.
Pray to him for rescue -- for it is His only care.
Never doubt his love for you; each sunrise will reveal
reasons to rejoice in Him with everlasting zeal!                                                

My Neighbors

Let us be neighbors of whom it might be said: "He or she was the best neighbor I ever had."  Gordon B. Hinckley.

My neighbors are a friendly bunch
who keep me in their prayers.
They bring me casseroles for lunch
and shovel off my stairs.
When I need a ride to work
they volunteer with glee.
And when I borrow garden tools
they come and work with me.
I've never known a better group
of friends who've got my back --
even though I'm almost what
you might call Mormon Jack!

The tears of a (real) clown: All the insane clown hysteria is giving us a bad name

Clowns take us to a happy place;
that's why they wear a painted face.
Since Grimaldi they have striven
to be loved and then forgiven.
Lovable, or bold and loud,
clowns wring laughter from the crowd.
But today their very function
is subject to severe injunction.
When we make the clown a fiend,
our sense of humor we've demeaned. 

Restaurant Review: Broke Eatery. Provo, Utah.

Across the street from Provo City Hall is a two story brick building that is undecided as to its purpose. It could be a bar, from the number of neon beer signs in the windows, or a ReMax office, or a modest bistro. Turns out it is all these things. The front of the ground floor is a new bistro, with only a half dozen items on offer.

Being a pleasantly dry day, after a night of cold rain, I was out ambling along, scuffling through the leaves with my Dr. Scholl's work shoes, enjoying what promised to be the last of a very sensual fall, when my eye fell on the Broke Eatery signboard. I was on my way to a Japanese restaurant, where I planned to do multiple gag photos of me struggling with chopsticks, but the signboard halted my progress with the announcement of a turkey pastrami sandwich and bowl of potato/sausage soup for a mere pittance. As I was contemplating a change in eating plans, the chef bounded out the door to give me a hearty greeting. I steadfastly kept my eyes on the signboard; unwilling to let his friendly demeanor sway my choice of cuisine. But I suddenly realized that sushi and tempura were not to be my fate today. An unpretentious combination of soup and sandwich sounded much better.

And it was much better. Partly because I dined al fresco on their sidewalk patio, where my waitress Nichelle smiled at me the way girls used to smile at me when I was a young shavetail full of wanton promise to the opposite sex:

Nowadays, alas, my creaky knees and billowing paunch mark me as a mere Pantaloon in some tawdry commedia dell'arte production -- a toothless and repulsive wreck of a man. But still, Nichelle smiled, the sun shined, and the food was good.

 In fact it was so good that as I was slurping up the last of the soup I realized I didn't want this brief idyll on the patio, with the Honda Civics whizzing by on the street and young couples with babies in strollers wandering past on the sidewalk, to end yet. So I asked for a half order of chicken jambalaya. The chef brought it out himself:

The chicken pieces were plump; the rice succulent; and the sauce of crushed tomatoes really didn't need the dash of Tabasco I carelessly flung on it.

And then the chef sat down to talk for twenty minutes. Gradually the unhappy realization dawned on me that he thought I wanted an interview. I had told him I was doing a blog about where I was eating lunch. He must have thought I was a reporter. But I'm not. I'm a blogger. And to my way of thinking a blogger is on par with a pickpocket -- you can't trust  either one.

But once he had launched into his story I didn't have the heart to stop him. It's a humdinger of a story, full of love and violence and tragedy and triumph; but, as I say, I'm no reporter, thank god, and so I'm not going to repeat a word of what he said.

The food was good. The weather was great. And the tables all had cut flowers on them. What more do you want me to write? This isn't the New Yorker . . .

I give Broke Eatery 4 Burps. My soup and sandwich combo, with a half order of jambalaya, cost $14.40. And yes, I did leave a cash tip on the table just as I said I would start doing in an earlier blog. That got another smile from Nichelle. I think I may be in love, but I'm going to take a nap first before I do anything drastic.