Eats

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 […]

Freshly baked bread hits my nose as soon as I open the door to my house on April 9. It’s unusual considering I live alone, worked all day, and then went to class. But my cousin Parisa Amini has been staying with me for the last couple of weeks, and she’s become obsessed with baking. […]

I need to start this column off on a somewhat bittersweet note and tell you all that this will be my last Eats column for the Sun. It’s been a great ride getting to know the food of our community and the people who provide it to us, in so many different ways. I realized […]

Great news, everyone: I can see into the future! OK, that’s probably a bit (very) inaccurate. But I had so many future puns and jokes ready for this column this week I couldn’t pass that one up. While I may not be Kreskin, I have had the opportunity to sample some wines in a unique […]