Splendours and

Miseries

By LESLEY BLANCH HERE in Southern California life and gas- tronomy centre round the barbecue. This outdoor charcoal grill has become a whole waY of life, carefully impromptu, occupying a place only second to the swimming pool. It is generally a built-in stone structure, part of the patio, or a mobile wheeled affair, something between a perambulator and dinner-wagon. Its popularity stems not so much from the excellent grills it produces as from the generally servantless state which prevails here. The barbecue provides what, salesmen describe as 'host-guest-participation. The host—for barbecues are generally directed by the man of the house—can cook the dinner while still remaining among the guests; and they, while downing the relays of jumbo-sized aperitifs, can prod the steaks or fan the flames and obtain an agreeable feeling of helpfulness—of participation.

It is quite customary to see a group of film personalities, who, for all their tax torments, generally live luxuriously, with good servants, so far from being surfeited with the day's work at the studio, going through all the motions of barbe- cue cooking and—on with the motley—wearing chefs' caps and aprons too. Nor is any incongruity seen in a party of bathers assembled round the heated, flood-lit pool against a sumptuous back- drop of Renaissance château, Mexican hacienda or Southern mansion, while, at a discreet dis- tance, the imported English butler busies himself about the barbecue, performing his solemn rituals.

All this can be explained as a deliberate challenge to, or revulsion from, tin-opener snacks, and the deep-freeze, ready-packaged platters designed for preoccupied television audiences who worship other altars,

other gods. To them tele-

vision, too, is a whole way of life—a mystique, and manufacturers have exploited this cult. There are special clothes, furni- ture and food for `TV-ing'; house-coats, nests of collapsible tray-sized tables, one to each viewer, and box-meals which are no strain on the eater.

Thus it will be seen that eating, like living, is very informal by European standards; there is an over-all flavour of the picnic, and we are either perched up on high bar stools at counter-high

5 tables, or crouched low at coffee tables, or some- times wedged in our cars at drive-in restaurants, Where specially designed trays are clamped on the inside of the car, the driver being fitted with an especially ingenious one designed to fit round the steering-wheel, and waitresses dressed as drum- majorettes, cowgirls or space-women are dash- ing about between the fenders with crockery and an imaginative selection of snack meals. Indeed, the dining-room and conventional dinner-table are quite out of fashion here.

Continuing the alfresco or picnic note, hot- dog and hamburger joints abound. 'Mona Lisa's Hot Dog Stand' serves cheeseburgers and foot- long hot-dogs, and remains open twenty-four hours, a practical habit shared by many of the food shops and super-markets, and one which I miss sadly when in Europe. In spite of an enormous preoccupation with dietetic fads and religious scruples, which have produced meatless variations such as pepburgers, fishburgers and vegburgers, Hollywood is almost completely carnivorous. Meat is appre- ciated, not only as a food, but as a means of combating starch heaviness, of maintaining that slimness the whole population now craves. Even so, some meat-markets endeavour to top their already stupendous turnover in steaks by adver- tising a real diamond embedded in every hundredth steak sold. . . .

Drug-store meals are, to me, always discour- aging: they may be the popular cafés, or truly representative bistros of America, but I do' not enjoy eating in surroundings which advertise all the ills to which the flesh is heir. Sitting there, surrounded by shelves crammed with antacids and posters dwelling with the most appalling clinical frankness on constipation, flatulence or gall-stones, quite cuts my appetite.

Although there are numbers of internationally- flavoured restaurants peppered about Hollywood, and concentrated along the Sunset Strip and La Cienega, it is not, as is San Francisco, a city where there is a true tradition of restaurant life. Perhaps the sprawling nature of the place is re- sponsible. If at the end of the,day, you must drive twenty-five miles to a restaurant, most people prefer to eat at home, or among nearby friends.

Still, restaurants such as Romanoff's, where the film colony congregate. Chasen's, or La Rue are first-class by the most exigent international standards. Spanish restaurants abound, legacy of the time when Los Angeles was a Spanish colony. Japanese food, like Japanese architecture, is the latest enthusiasm : the diners sit on the floor, at saucer-height tables, eating suki-yaki or raw fish and rice dishes, while Madame Butterfly wait- resses in gaudy kimonos proffer hot towels, fer- mented rice liquors and coy smiles. However, it is the tropic, South Sea island foods found in three great restaur- ants—Beachcomber, Luaus and _ Trader Vic's—that are the true gastronomic

revelation of Holly- i., wood. .

Pacific, or South Sea island and Hawaiian ingredients 41) are obtained easily here. Papayas, cherimoyas and grenadillas are found beside grapefruit at the super-market : bamboo shoots, yams and water-chestnuts beside the broccoli. Soy sauce and a number of sour and sweet com- binAions, along with paper-thin Won-ton biscuits, not unlike the Tunisian briqucs, root ginger and unplaceable exotic vegetables, or gigantic. ,green- ish Hawaiian pineapples, are everyday merchan- dise. This Pacific island cuisine might, at first, appear Chinese and, although the junks must have left their mark as they sailed from island to island, it is something quite apart, of a sweeter. but no less delicate, nature. Its invention is infinite; strange fruits and fish - are combined : meats glazed in vinegar and apricot are served with grilled coconut flakes. . . . A pineapple, hol- lowed out, holds a frothy ambrosia of passion- fruit 'juice and rum, topped by a gardenia. . . . It would be useless for me to give any specific recipes here, for without the proper ingredients they would be worthless, and there are no substi- tutes for South Sea island foods.

However, enterprising canned-food manufac- turers, cashing in on the present trend towards exotic eating, now offer grasshopper pate, fried baby bees and such. Walking round the super- market in the small hours, lately, I noticed pre-

cooked, sliced rattlesnake. . . But 1 thought — no, not tinned.