The Great 2020 California Road Trip (5/7) – Food

For those of us who plan vacation itineraries around food, traveling within a state where all restaurants were closed for indoor dining was strange. Each meal was no longer as simple as looking up a good restaurant. We now also had to find a place to eat it.

Snacking in the car was inevitable for the longer drives, and we had a small handful of meals at outdoor restaurant tables. For the most part, though, we ordered take out and ate in parks and hotel rooms.

Light breakfast from Captain + Stoker, a coffee shop in Monterey

The rental car was pre-loaded with an excessive amount of snacks

Drinks from Boba Ave 8090 in San Gabriel

Picnics

I like picnics almost as much as I like beaches. I do it every single time when I absolutely cannot avoid it. Thanks to COVID, we all learned to adapt in different ways. When a hotel room was too far, unavailable, or otherwise inconvenient to bring food to, we opted to find a park to enjoy our restaurant take out.

Generally speaking, picnics are associated with simple food like sandwiches. For our trip, though, we really pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. There was nothing we couldn’t take care of with sufficient napkins, wet wipes, and hand sanitizer. Tacos dripping salsa near a camp of homeless people and multi-course Chinese food on the grass will definitely make fun stories to tell our grandchildren when they learn about 2020 in history class.

Lily’s Taqueria in Santa Barbara, the first taqueria we had been that sold nothing but tacos

Chicken, beef, and pork were good. The beef tongue and the beef eye were the bomb

The park in the evening was cold and smelly, and the food was messy, but Lily’s was so amazing that kept it a net positive experience

Hodad’s in Ocean Beach, San Diego was a popular spot with a long line during lunch hours

The best spot we found to “enjoy” Hodad’s cheeseburgers was wedged between a parking lot, the beach, and a couple palm trees. A butt-naked crazy dude was exposing himself in front of our kids… so let’s call this a net negative experience

Marisco’s German Food Truck, on some random ghetto deserted back road in San Marco, served super delicious giant tacos and burritos

Eating Marisco’s food in Phil’s backyard. No crazy or smelly people here

Here’s us eating take out in a nearby park from Shangdong Dumplings in Pasadena. Everything was solid. The shredded seaweed, though, was addicting. The more we ate, the more we wanted to eat. Who knew we were able to finish two such large portions of appetizers in one go?

Breakfast from Huge Tree Pastry in Monterey Park, eaten in a park in Alhambra. It was good but not fully up to Taiwanese standards.

During this meal, we watched a young man jogging around and around the park while hitting himself nonstop…

In-Room Hotel Dining

Much better than hotel room service was self-service of better food into the hotel room. What we had never considered in the past was how little table space these rooms tend to have or how difficult it was to fit a whole family dinner’s garbage into a gallon-sized trashcan.

In-N-Out, always a great option regardless of the location

Jitlada in LA, one of the most highly rated Thai restaurants in North America. We got so excited about it so…

We ordered over $100 worth of food for dinner. The fragrance of rich Thai flavors permeated our room in InterContinental LA

A late dinner + massive quantity + sour & spicy flavors meant that we had to eat some of it as leftovers in the morning, and massive stomach problems immediately afterward

Pastries from Tierra Mia Coffee, downtown LA

Take out from Miguel’s Cocina on Coronado Island in San Diego

Noodles and braised meat/tofu combo from Mandarin Noodle House in Monterey Park. This restaurant had raving reviews online but the flavors were rather generic in my opinion

Outdoor Restaurant Dining

In a small handful of cases, we ate “properly” with food on a restaurant-owned tables and our butts in chairs. Most of them were self-served, and one meal came with a basic level of table service.

As much as we craved the historic sense of normalcy, this didn’t feel as comfortable as we had imagined. Restaurant servers and customers were often right next to our table while our masks were down, raising transmission concerns. Even in the cases where we brought our own food from the counter and tossed out our own garbage, we felt awkward that someone had to disinfect the table before and after our use.