NICK POWELL

Some weeks, you just need some ridiculously rich, stick-to-your-ribs comfort food to try and make the feelings go away. I’m not going to get into all the messy personal details here, but last week was just about my worst yet, filled with family drama, alcoholism, and deep despair. I’d never wanted a bottle of booze […]

It’s hard to say whether I’m generally broke because I’m bad with money, or if I’m bad with money because I’m generally too broke to practice using it wisely, but one thing’s for sure: If I’ve got extra money in my pocket, I’m about to spend it. Case in point, when I made the very […]

Any time you tuck some foodstuffs between two slices of bread, you’ve got the makings of a passable lunch. Sandwiches aren’t hard. I whip up the same one almost every morning, twice even, for my daughter’s and my daily grind lunches. And they’re not bad sandwiches. I treat myself to bread that’s one step above […]

Lompoc’s hottest club is Hangar 7. This place has everything—comfy chairs, card games, a bucket full of old propellers, Dan Cortese, and even fuzzy mustache mirrors (the thing where, like, when you go to the bathroom, there’s a bunch of gag shop mustaches glued to the mirror so you can line your face up and […]

I knew it would be good the moment I heard about it. My wife and I ran into her co-worker at Home Depot in Lompoc, and this good ol’ boy from Louisiana couldn’t stop himself from singing the praises of his new favorite restaurant. All we had said was, “Hello, how’re you doing?” I’m paraphrasing, […]

Have you ever avoided an entire cuisine out of pure spite? To be clear, I’m not talking about race-based spite here. I’m an idiot, not an asshole, and for decades my aversion to Hawaiian food has been based entirely on an unarticulated resentment from being too broke to visit America’s favorite tropical getaway.  Forget Hawaii, […]

As I’ve gotten older, and busier, and more addicted, my general discernment regarding coffee has waned considerably. Most mornings, I’m running late and chasing the fix—nuking whatever’s leftover from yesterday’s pot at home or swinging by McDonald’s to get three of their large $1 drips as if I’m doing the coffee run for the whole […]

There’s a solid chance that most of you reading this have no idea how good you have it. There is so much top-notch Mexican food in Southern and Central California that it kind of becomes a fact of life. Any town big enough to have more than one restaurant is going to have at least […]

California is great at a lot of things, but by and large, Italian food is not on that list, much to Chicago native Dante Stefono’s dismay. He landed on the West Coast a few decades back as an Air Force veteran and made a life here working as a painting contractor, but he kept finding […]

Look. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not even in particularly good shape. I’m just another doughy dude lumbering his way into middle age and hoping for the best. But I’ll tell you this: After sampling a few things off the menu, it sure feels like I’d be an Adonis in no […]

It was April 20, but the cloud of smoke that hung over Pioneer Park wasn’t coming from some hippie’s reefer bong. It emanated from the smoldering embers of a dozen pitmasters locked in a technically bloody but actually quite friendly battle to prove definitively who really knew how to handle the meat. The Kiwanis Club […]