2006-07-04 - 12:25 a.m.
I was lunching with my mother the other day at Amelia’s, this delightful Italian café on Main and Ocean Park. Amelia’s has become my very favorite new restaurant, not just because of their soups, which are ambrosial, but because of their coffee, which I am convinced is the best available outside of Italy.
Amelia’s coffee has spoiled me for the lighter fluid that they’ve been serving me at the Novel for all these years, and which has essentially eaten a big black hole in my poor stomach. Amelia’s iced cappuccinos are creamy and strong, using a smooth, velvety coffee that tastes like candy.
Really, the place is just a testament to the tradition of Gracious Living. The place is totally family run: Mom Amelia does the cooking, dad Ralph serves the meals and takes the orders, and son Gianni does whatever is needed. They work there from six in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, at which point I am told they all go home and take naps. Mama Amelia is this kindly Italian peasant woman, her faced wrinkled and etched, but her eyes ever-twinkly.
Amelia clearly takes an almost ecstatic pleasure in her cooking, which seems to be some sort of an emotional release for her. We have learned that prior to opening the restaurant, she actually worked for the Rand Corporation, doing the physical design for ICBMs. So perhaps the restaurant is her attempt to expiate the horrible deeds of the past – make meatballs, not missiles, as it were.
But the food! It’s like an article from the Magazine of the Italian Cucina brought to life! The soups are these magnificent, hearty bowls of colorful liquid – one day, the motherly cook might present you with a bowl of artichoke-mushroom soup that’s so creamy, you’d assume it had a thousand calories in it (it doesn’t – Amelia makes all her soups with a blender, so it has the texture of a cream soup, but none of the added weight). The next day, Amelia might serve you a bowl of some incredible bean-y minestrone soup, with scraps of meat from a hambone – delightful!
It’s Amelia’s gift that her cooking is so good, she can get you to try out all sort of vegetables and dishes that you’d never otherwise eat. Zuccini and red pepper soup? Are you kidding? And yet it was delightful. I am especially partial to the meatball sandwiches, which are astonishingly reminiscent of what my stepdad’s 85 year old grandmother used to make for Friday Night Dinner.
And one day we came in during Amelia’s own lunch hour, to find her snacking on a sandwich she made to order – it was this amazing sandwich of delicious, smoked mortadella ham and mozzarella, served on a crisp, toasted ciabatta, lightly smeared with olive oil and pesto. Ever since, that has become our sandwich as well.
The customers are surprisingly upscale, and it is not a rare thing to see a movie star like Malcolm McDowell or that guy from the first Batman movie, hiding behind his baseball cap and sunglasses, while munching on a meatball sandwich. There is also the usual collection of Venice Nuts and Deranged local loons, though, mostly of a young and female variety.
At lunch today, we found ourselves seated next to this beautiful, willowy blonde woman – tall and well dressed in a tight black skirt that showed off her decidedly ample cleavage. She looked like the sort of gal who would either be a flight attendant (if she was stupid) or your powerhouse movie executive boss (if she were smart). We got to talking to her, and she was all smiles and giggles. It turned out she was a poet! But as she simpered and tossed her blonde hair, we could catch the glint of steel in her eyes. She was a smart poet, and told us that she had found a nice niche.
“I write Christian poetry,” she explained, handing us her little chapbook, entitled, ‘Hope and Love.’ We took a look at the young woman’s poetry book. The poems within were beneath aesthetic slur, frankly – totally ersatz Rod McKuen croakings along the line of “The flowers are pretty, and love fills the air, and happiness is a joy ever lasting!” Beyond ghastly, the writing was. The blonde woman just smirked when she saw us straining to compliment her on the layout of the book and the photographs on the cover – anything but talking about the poetry itself.
She chortled, “You’d be surprised by how much money there is to make in it! My real name is Linda Williams. But when I am doing my poetry, I call myself ‘Dawn Raine.’ I am hired almost every week to read a poem in front of some church congregation. And I sell a hundred of my books at a time!”
It was really very clear that the lady was more of a motivational speaker than a poet, since the places that were hiring her were clearly more interested in her as a beautiful, tall blonde performer than as an artist. And, in fact, if you had someone reading spiritual poetry at you, you would certainly want the reader to be an attractive, All American beauty, from whose every pore seeped wholesomeness. And in fact, she probably was as wholesome as she seemed – she just wasn’t much of a poet, that’s all.
She told her that, with the loot she had made over the past few months, she and her fiancé were flying out to Hawaii to get married the next day. We wished her Mazol Tov, and she laughed, since, as a good Christian, she had never been wished such a thing by anyone. And truly, we did wish her well: If you have a good angle going, you should milk it for as long as you can, and that’s a fact.
