January 2011 Archives

Home Kitchen at 309 E. Foothill in Pomona closed recently. I'd never been there but passed by frequently over the years. Then in January I noticed all the letters were gone from the face of the building. Yep, it's closed.

"No lease," explains a message on a whiteboard that directs diners to Ho's Silver Spoon at 150 S. Grand Ave. in Glendora, which is owned by the same people.

Click on the thumbnail photo at right for a larger view of the message and full directions. What a public-spirited fellow I am. Ho's gets decent reviews on Yelp.

Some of you may recall that circa 2000, the Pomona building had a Winchell's on the other end where you could watch them make the donuts. It was an experiment and didn't last long. Home Kitchen was in the other half of the building probably since the beginning. Nothing ever replaced Winchell's. Now the entire building is vacant.

Incidentally, in the small patio area when I visited a week ago, the H from the Home Kitchen sign was lying face-down on a table, as if someone couldn't be bothered to haul away the last letter.

You may recall that Ontario Music closed in July 2010 after 50 years of instrument sales, repairs and music lessons. The good news is the store reopened on Jan. 2 under new ownership. The new name, as reader Dennis Sampson's photo above illustrates, is Gard's Ontario Music.

Gard's is a longtime Glendora store that took over the Ontario location. Visit their website here. I'll have more about Gard's in my Sunday column.

When I wrote about Ontario Music's closing on my blog, it drew more than 40 comments of condolence, which you can see here. (My column with all the details also garnered comment too but those have disappeared.)

I'm pleased to announce the store's reopening here where its fans can welcome Ontario Music back.

Seoul Garden, 4200 Chino Hills Parkway No. 130 (at Pipeline), Chino Hills

Seoul Garden is in a sort of casual-restaurant row near Indian, Mexican and other ethnic eateries clustered in an outlying building in the Chino Hills Marketplace center. It's small but makes good use of the limited space, with cheerful yellow walls, a few partitions and exotic decor.

A couple of us had lunch there recently. Seoul Garden has various lunch deals, some depending on the day of the week. I had the Korean BBQ lunch box ($8.45 on Mondays) and my lunch companion had beef bulgogi ($5.45). A Korean food first-timer, he found the bulgogi (chopped, marinated beef) tender and very tasty. "I'm going to drag some people here," he vowed. My short rib lunch was also pretty good. Service was friendly.

As Korean food goes, not outstanding like Young Dong Tofu House elsewhere in town, but pleasant.

Photo courtesy University of La Verne

Director John Landis spoke at a film class at the University of La Verne on Wednesday afternoon following a screening of his 1981 horror comedy "An American Werewolf in London." Teacher Scott Essman has brought a parade of makeup artists, directors, actors and effects artists to his class this month, with Landis being the biggest surprise.

You can read all about it in my Friday newspaper column.

I had dinner Sunday with friends at Petrillo's, the famed San Gabriel Valley pizza chain. Two of us had never been while the other two grew up eating there. We went to the original on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. Motto: "Since 1954."

The pizza was thick crust, cut into squares and generously topped. It was terrific. A medium fed four of us (we also shared a spaghetti) and two of us took slices home.

The ambience is old-school Italian pizza parlor, reminiscent of Casa Bianca Pizza in Eagle Rock. The pressed-tin ceiling adds character, as does the lovely neon sign glowing outside.

There are other Petrillo's locations, including Glendora, and a couple of offshoots whose connection to the real thing I'm unclear on: Mama Petrillo's, with a location in La Verne, and Petrillii's, a takeout-only spot in Upland that may be a former Petrillo's.

There's a fat cat around Claremont, and I don't mean a rich guy. According to the Courier's Police Blotter, a dentist's office last month phoned police after a patient brought in a large wild cat, described as possibly a leopard.

"Police checked out the situation," the Courier reported, "and discovered the animal was just a large house cat."

A large house cat that could use a lap band.

Side issue: Who brings a cat of any size with them to the dentist?

Did you hear about the 1965 Volkswagen bus stolen in 1974, found in 2009 and recently returned to its owner in Spokane?

The Wall Street Journal's version, forwarded by reader Will Plunkett, notes that in its months of legal limbo, "The van sat in a Copart.com warehouse in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif."

Zeke's Eatin' Place, 1855 E. 4th St. (at Vineyard), Ontario

Zeke's has been a block or so from our newsroom during my entire Bulletin tenure, but it took me a while to get there, the name Zeke's Eatin' Place being kind of an eye-roller. I had a decent breakfast there a few years ago, which raised my opinion of the restaurant, and promptly forgot the whole thing.

For a recent breakfast meeting with three Ontario cops, they picked Zeke's, a longtime favorite of the department, at least its older members. I was happy to give the place a try in the company of some admirers.

It's breakfast and lunch only, closing at 3 p.m., and the motif is Wild West, with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood portraits, lots of wood and the deepest booths I've ever seen, able to fit six, or maybe eight. The menu has a hokey story about a fictional miner named Zeke, which is sort of charming, actually. Imagine, a diner with a concept that's more 1850s than 1950s.

Biscuits and gravy are a specialty, but that's not my thing. I had two eggs, sausage links and home fries ($6.15); others had the breakfast sandwich ($5.79), chicken fried steak and home fries ($7.35) and, for the cop with a cast-iron stomach, the chili cheese onion omelet ($8.09).

Everybody pronounced themselves pleased, although I would warn you away from the sausages, dinky things that looked fresh from the supermarket freezer. Zeke's is known for its wagon wheel-size pancakes. As stated here about Guasti Homestyle Cafe, I'm not a "big breakfast" guy, but if you are, Zeke's portions should satisfy you. Besides, it's a homey place.

The cops told me Zeke's has been around since the early 1980s, beginning in the shopping plaza at 4th and Grove before moving a few blocks east to 4th and Vineyard in the 1990s.

Lunchtime sandwich offerings on the menu made me think I should hit them up, so I've since returned for a meatloaf sandwich. It was only okay, but the fries were above average, and the service was friendly. The waitress even called me sweetheart a few times. You gotta love that. Zeke's isn't spectacular, but it's a nice regular-folks place.

Had dinner with a friend at Panda Express (hey, it wasn't my idea) in Rancho Cucamonga at Vineyard and Foothill, in the Albertsons center. We've been there before (also not my choice). It's a surprisingly popular place, one where people drift in and out all evening.

This time, on a warm January evening, the front door was propped open and the line of 10 or so people actually stretched out to the sidewalk.

A line out the door? At a Panda Express? Those two-item combos really pack 'em in.

Photo: Will Plunkett

"At the intersection Base Line and Milliken in RC, there's some construction going up, mainly a strange metal tower-thing," reports reader Will Plunkett. His next trip past, he shot a photo, lamenting that scaffolding had obscured what he called its "Martian Chronicles-style architecture."

Other readers have likewise asked about this tower cater-corner from Rancho Cucamonga's Central Park. Pat Longuevan has asked what the heck it is, while Diane Martin jokes, "I hope it's not another electronic billboard."

I can tell you exactly what it is: a cell phone tower that will be disguised as a clocktower. I wrote about it last August.

More fun, though, would be if you took guesses as to what it might be, the sillier or more cynical the better. (Diane Martin, above, had the right spirit.)

Longtime readers may recall a similar guessing game a decade ago in my column regarding the tile-clad cell tower rising across from Montclair Plaza. I dubbed it the Montclair Mystery Tower. Plunkett suggests we open the floor for ideas about the RC Mystery Tower, and I agree.

What do you think it is?

A chronological list, January to December, of the 52 titles I read in 2010. A breakdown: six by Mark Twain, five by A. Conan Doyle, three each by Harlan Ellison, Samuel Beckett and Jonathan Lethem, two each by Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and John D. MacDonald and lone books by a bunch of others.

1. "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett
2. "Happy Days," Samuel Beckett
3. "A Study in Scarlet," A. Conan Doyle
4. "Baghdad by the Bay," Herb Caen
5. "Three Coins in the Birdbath," Jack Smith
6. "The Thin Man," Dashiell Hammett
7. "Pulp Culture," Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson
8. "Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust," Nathanael West
9. "The Sign of the Four," A. Conan Doyle
10. "Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002," Jonathan Lethem, ed.
11. "The Lottery and Other Stories," Shirley Jackson
12. "What Mad Universe," Fredric Brown
13. "The Quick Red Fox," John D. MacDonald
14. "Dark Carnival," Ray Bradbury
15. "Solar Lottery," Philip K. Dick
16. "The October Country," Ray Bradbury
17. "Roughing It," Mark Twain
18. "Endgame," Samuel Beckett
19. "The World Jones Made," Philip K. Dick
20. "Just When You Thought It Was Safe: A Jaws Companion," Patrick Jankiewicz
21. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Robert Louis Stevenson
22. "Dancing Under the Moon," Al Martinez
23. "Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones," Robert Greenfield
24. "Why Call Them Back From Heaven?" Clifford D. Simak
25. "The Diaries of Adam & Eve," Mark Twain
26. "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," A. Conan Doyle
27. "If You're Feeling Sinister," Scott Plagenhoef
28. "The 'Reel' Benchley," Robert Benchley
29. "Millard Sheets: The Early Years (1926-1944)," Gordon McClelland
30. "The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966," Robert Santelli
31. "The Loved One," Evelyn Waugh
32. "Let Me Count the Ways," Peter DeVries
33. "City Lights," Dan Barry
34. "The Lurking Fear," H.P. Lovecraft
35. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain
36. "No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger," Mark Twain
37. "Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain," Walter Blair, ed.
38. "The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain," Lawrence Berkove, ed.
39. "The Good, the Bad and the Mad: Some Weird People in American History," E. Randall Floyd
40. "The God of War," Marisa Silver
41. "A Deadly Shade of Gold," John D. MacDonald
42. "Gentleman Junkie," Harlan Ellison
43. "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury
44. "From the Land of Fear," Harlan Ellison
45. "The Fortress of Solitude," Jonathan Lethem
46. "Life on the Mississippi," Mark Twain
47. "Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue-By-Issue Field Guide...," Pierre Comtois
48. "Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes," A. Conan Doyle
49. "Memos From Purgatory," Harlan Ellison
50. "Motherless Brooklyn," Jonathan Lethem
51. "The Most of S.J. Perelman," S.J. Perelman
52. "The Hound of the Baskervilles," A. Conan Doyle

Myung Dong Tofu House, 9799 Base Line Road (at Archibald), Rancho Cucamonga

Korean restaurants are relatively rare in the Inland Valley, and the subset of Korean tofu restaurants is even smaller. The only ones I'm aware of are Young Dong in Chino Hills and Myung Dong in Rancho Cucamonga.

The latter is in the shopping center where the 99 Ranch market recently opened. Based on the pit area, Myung Dong appears to have taken over a Korean barbecue restaurant. The furnishings aren't quite up to snuff; merely plopping into a booth rattled the booth back and the customer sitting behind me.

I ordered a bibimbap with beef paired with pork tofu soup ($12) and friend got mushroom tofu soup ($9). Bibimbap -- assorted vegetables with a meat of your choice, rice on the side -- is a basic Korean dish, albeit one I'd never had. The thick soup, spiked with chunks of tofu, comes in a hot pot and arrived at our table bubbling.

Service was helpful. The food was okay if unspectacular. Too much tofu and not enough of the main item (pork or mushroom, in our cases). The spice legend on the menu ranges from four peppers (extra spicy) past mild (one pepper) to white. (I joked that maybe white is for white people.) My friend's spicy soup (three peppers) wasn't very spicy; even I could eat it, and I'm sensitive to spiciness. So the food, at least in this one experience, was blander than it should have been.

Young Dong was a better experience. But if you're closer to Rancho Cucamonga than to Chino Hills, and you'd like to try Korean tofu, Myung Dong is good enough.

I would advise against the combinations unless you're a bigger eater than I am. Either the soup or the bibimbap would be enough for a decent meal, especially with the free appetizers you always get at a Korean restaurant, the small dishes of kimchi, bok choy, potato, cucumber and other items.

If memory serves, this shop at Base Line and Carnelian in Rancho Cucamonga used to be named Water and Ice. (* Or maybe it was only The Water Store.) The name upgraded a year or so back to Coffee and Water. (Next door, incidentally, is a smoke shop.)

Coffee and Water sounds like a good place to take a blind date, especially if you're cheap ("two waters, please").

But what will the next incarnation be? Perhaps the storefront will focus on catering to convicts, under the name Bread and Water.

While we're being silly, anyone want to suggest other possible combinations/clientele?

As a wage slave in a fabric-covered box myself, I knew I had to see "Cubicle," an exhibit at Pomona's dA Center for the Arts (on view through Feb. 1). The paintings and photos are cool, but even moreso are the two mock ceramic cubicles, each object within made from terra cotta by Jon Ginnaty. Each piece is for sale, from pens ($14.99) to computer ($599.99, a price that includes a "complimentary mouse pad").

Want a clean start for the new year? Here's one way (literally).

We're 10 days into the new year, which means your resolutions have either taken hold or are abandoned already. Want to share any resolutions or plans still in play for 2011?

Mine include becoming more technologically connected, taking at least one trip outside the United States and again reading 50 books.

Many of you have found it difficult or impossible to post comments here in recent months. Then came the blog meltdown, which as noted here was throughout our newspaper chain and kept everyone from commenting. This was fixed when our IT people in Denver essentially flushed the entire system.

Want to try leaving a comment? We're curious whether, as a side benefit, the reboot cured whatever glitch was blocking some of you. If you still get the "Text entered wrong" message when you know you've entered the captcha code correctly, send me an e-mail at david.allen (at) inlandnewspapers.com.

5 p.m. Thursday: Looks like we're accepting comments again. If you wish to comment on any of the last four posts (Reading Log, Favorite movies, Best quotes or this one), go for it. I'll return to regular posting next week.

The computer server for all the blogs in our newspaper chain had a meltdown late last week that slowed down the posting of new entries by up to 48 hours (!). It's all being worked on and entries are now said to be posting immediately.

More importantly, though, the commenting feature on all the blogs was taken down Monday. The meltdown related to a deluge of spam messages, so all comments on all blogs are blocked for now until the problem is dealt with.

Makes sense, but on top of the other issues many of you have been having with commenting here, it's frustrating. Even in the short term, what's a blog without reader comments?

So, I'm going to refrain from posting anything else here until the comment function is restored, other than updating this post.

My moviegoing comes and goes, and this year it mostly went: I saw a total of 16 new movies. (Plus some oldies, but those don't count.) Below are my 10 favorites, roughly in descending order of preference:

"Cairo Time," "Toy Story 3," "Mademoiselle Chambon," "The Kids Are All Right," "Inception," "Catfish," "127 Hours," "The Social Network," "Cyrus" and "The Secret in Their Eyes."

The other six: "True Grit," "Avatar: Special Edition," "Crazy Heart," "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1," "The Art of the Steal" and No. 16 out of 16, the closest thing to a stinker on the list, "Iron Man 2."

One or two of these may technically have come out in 2009, but I saw them in 2010, as did almost everyone else. I only saw "The Social Network" on New Year's Eve, solely to sneak it onto my 2010 list, and undoubtedly numerous other movies I didn't see were as good as anything on this list.

What were your favorites?

Books acquired: none.

Books read: "Motherless Brooklyn," Jonathan Lethem; "The Most of S.J. Perelman," S.J. Perelman; "The Hound of the Baskervilles," A. Conan Doyle.

Figuring 52 books for the year was a solid number, I polished off numbers 50, 51 and 52: my second Lethem novel of the year, a fifth Sherlock Holmes classic and a collection of humor essays that I've been reading off and on (mostly off) for nearly 30 years.

"Motherless Brooklyn" (bought a few weeks ago at a B&N) is a literary detective novel whose narrator is afflicted with Tourette's, causing him to bark, curse and touch things ritually at inopportune moments as he tries to trace who killed his shady but accepting employer. I worried the novel would be unreadable or show-offy -- Lethem's prose can be dense and self-referential -- but thankfully this was compelling, funny and compassionate.

"Hound of the Baskervilles" (bought new circa 1979 and, shamefully, never read) is the most famous Holmes book, and deserves its reputation. The lonely countryside, the windswept moor, the Baskerville family legend involving a demonic hound that kills two heirs, make this the most atmospheric Holmes story. A long section in which Watson investigates the case solo is a welcome change of pace.

My paperback, which looked almost as new as when I bought it, was like a preserved piece of my childhood. I avoided spilling syrup on it.

"The Most of S.J. Perelman" collects the best humorous essays from 1930 to 1958 by the late New Yorker contributor and screenwriter (the Marx Brothers, "Around the World in 80 Days," etc.). Perelman had a baroque prose style, and while it may be heresy to say so, a lot of his stuff is finely wrought but simply not funny. Although he can be hilarious, such as his travel memoir "Westward Ha!," and this line from a self-portrait: "Before they made S.J. Perelman, they broke the mold."

Anyway, I bought a Quality Paperback Book Club edition of "Most" around the same time I bought "Hound," and gradually read it, with growing dismay that his prose wasn't as funny as Groucho's speeches. Circa 1993, I found the hardcover original and learned the paperback had been abridged. Finally, 17 years later, I finished the thing.

Nobody said reading was easy.