“We just opened!” Karen, the sister of the owner of Atwater Village’s Proof Bakery says, proudly.  She hands me cheddar chive grougere, excited now, because I wanted something savory, and this, by golly, was going to do it.  “It’s only our fifth day,” she says to someone else who stops in.   And she says it again and again, as people come in and out, some curious about the new kid in town, some still confounded by the fact that their old classmate Toni’s Rolling Pin moved on and Proof in.

Yeekai Lim, on the other hand, is manning his Cognescenti Coffee station.  He’s talking milk.  Strauss or Clover, which has a more neutral taste?  He’s trying to figure out which would be better suited for his fantastic cappuccinos.  He’s excited to try out the Strauss.

A 20ish biker (telltale sign: rolled up pant leg, right side only) comes in and orders tea.  He seems to regret it a little bit once he discovers that Yeekai brews San Francisco’s Four Barrel coffee.  He’s from San Francisco, too.  He commits to his tea, though.  Karen delivers it to him in kettle as he sets up his iPad on some strange contraption that I can only describe as a cross between one of those metal brackets you use to prop up your cookbook, bright orange version, and a DIY pop-up book.  Me, I guess I’m stuck in the early-2010s with my laptop, propped up on nothing but its own plastic.  Womp womp.

An old man, white hair, balding, stares at the bakery through the glass door.  It’s a little creepy, actually, until he comes in and demands, almost politely, to know where the old bakery went.  Toni’s.  “Toni’s gone,” Karen explains, “But my sister [Na Young Ma] also makes some delicious baked treats!”  He’s a little appalled, and asks if they have French bread.  “Oh – no,” Karen says.  “At least, not yet.”  He thanks her and shuffles out.

The cheddar-chive grougere is very good.  Very very good.  Savory, yes.  Hit the spot, yes.  Perfect with Yeekai’s perfectly pulled cap.

Two women, a little boy and a little girl, come in.  They’re looking for a bathroom.  “Sorry!” Karen says, and directs them down the street to the Subway.  The women linger.  One of them asks the children if they want dessert.  They do: ice cream.  Sigh, dessert is right in front of them, and they want the other dessert.  Kids are kids, I guess.  “We’ll come back,” one of them says, on their way out.

They do come back.  I thought she meant that they’d come back tomorrow or next week, but no, she really meant it.  Between iPad guy’s commitment to his tea and these women, you’d think everyone in town was as true to their words.  The whole party returns: the women with their purses, the boy with a Drumstick (the ice cream, not a roasted leg), the girl with a Push-Up (the ice-cream, not the punishment).  Apparently, there is either a liquor store or an ice-cream truck wailing London Bridges nearby.  The women order grown-up desserts (Valrhona shortbread cookies and a croissant) and coffee.  They are very excited to try both.

Did I say how good the cappuccino is?  It’s very good.  Smooth.  I could drink this all day, but it’s probably better for my nerves that I don’t.

A girl comes in and buys out the remainder of the cheddar chive grougeres.  Ah, so she knows.  She considers a cup of coffee, but hesitates because she’s already had one for the day.  I convince her to get another. It’s rude to interrupt people’s decision-making process, but I had to interject for her own good.  She asks Yeekai for a latte, and is doubly impressed by his latte art.  This would be my one good deed of the day.

Two guys, caps on backward, lids ironed flat, come in and ask if they do ice-blended drinks.  No.  They thank everyone politely and leave.  No one directs them to Starbucks.

Others wander in; some because they know Yeekai from Cognescenti’s first incarnation as a pop-up stand inside Acai Yogurt in Eagle Rock.  They stay to try a Proof treat.  Others are lured in by the delicious baked goods and want to know how much is that pastry in the window.  They stay to try a cap or a poured-over coffee.

Proof and Cognescenti – come for one, stay for the other.  It’s like the married couple you don’t mind having dinner with.

As of this post, Proof & Cognescenti have been open now for a little over three weeks.  Check out their great space in Atwater Village, 3516 Glendale Blvd.  Hours are Wednesday-Sunday, 8am to 4pm.

My friend Saba loves the purse she picked up at the spring Unique LA event. Loves.

I hope you’ve heard of Unique LA by now.  If not, I hope it’s because you just moved here and are wandering aimlessly about the city, trying to figure out where the soul of the city is beneath the relentless traffic and weird, indecisive weather.  Well, I’ll just tell you: a little bit of it can be found this weekend at Unique LA.  This would be a congregation of over 300 (!!) vendors selling everything from messenger bags to home decor to cupcakes.  Each and every one of these vendors is based here in LA, so the city’s influence is there, somewhere, in their nifty designs.  When you need to break, grab a drink (your ticket gets you free drink, and there will be a host bar) and grub from, among others, The Manila Machine, Flying Pig, and Platine. Or, hang out at an eco workshop or learn how to sew or do something useful at a one of the DIY workshops scheduled throughout the weekend.

Across the street, Artisanal LA pops back up from its very successful autumnal debut: it’s strictly a pop-up this time, so, no, there won’t be any Lord of the Flies moments.  But, there will be over 30 local artisanal food vendors with delicious treats for immediate and future consumption.  The Flying Pie Man falls into the former category; he’s whipping up a special Pork Belly Sukiyaki Pie just for the event.  Nosh on that and pick up something bacon-ized from Cast-Iron Gourmet, for that friend of yours who hopes and prays that the bacon trend never ends.  And that’s just the beginning – the entire list of participants is here.

In keeping with community spirit, a portion of Unique LA’s proceeds from the ticket sales will benefit 826LA, and a portion of Artisanal LA’s proceeds will benefit LAUSD’s Edible Schoolyard Program.  This all works out so that you, an Angeleno, can support your friendly neighborhood businessperson, and together, everyone can help support the local community.  Is your heart warmed yet?  Good.  ’Tis the season, you know?

Unique LA will be at the penthouse of the California Market Center downtown, 110 E. 9th Street.  Artisanal LA will be across the street at the Cooper Building, 851 Santee St.  Tickets to Unique LA are $10; if you buy pre-sale tickets, you’ll score a little goodie bag.  Whether you buy the tickets in advance or the day-of, your Unique LA wristband will let you into Artisanal LA for $5 instead of $6.  Other option: check out the full details on Artisanal LA’s 2-for-1 offer here.  Both events run from 11am to 6pm Saturday and Sunday.

Every Christmas, I have the same problem: How can I have a nice Christmas tree while keeping my carbon footprint tiny?

Seriously: You buy a fake tree, and you’re just adding to the demand for petroleum by-products. Not to mention you’re stuck with a giant piece of perpetually dusty plastic that makes your forearms itch every time you put it up. Real trees are a little better, since they can be mulched after the holidays, but those can be shipped into LA from as far away as Oregon.

Here’s the solution: Rent a live tree that can be re-used year after year. Seriously!

The folks at Living Christmas will deliver a potted tree to your home, then come and pick it up after the festivities are over. They’re located in Los Angeles, with a delivery zone stretching from the Pacific Palisades to Seal Beach. And because the trees stay alive over the holidays, they can be re-used year after year. You can even adopt a tree, so you can have the same tree every year.

Living Christmas has a few rules, but nothing unreasonable; basically, you can’t flock the tree or kill it. The cost is a little more than a cut tree, but you can save money by picking up the tree yourself. And their delivery trucks are biodiesel-fueled, so even the transit impact is low.

I got this year’s tree before I found out about these guys (from the reasonable and friendly folks at Toluca Lake Christmas Trees); otherwise, I’d totally try them out. If anyone out there in readerland decides to check out Living Christmas this year, drop a comment here for our edification.

(Thanks to The ‘Queg for her help with this post.)

With the proliferation of HD DSLR’s and the ability to post on YouTube its bound to happen again.  Just in case you live under a rock and missed it 2 men were knifed during a brawl at the Rose Bowl that took place during the tailgate parties prior to the USC/UCLA game on Saturday (first story HERE).  ”hcineceros” was there and caught it all on video.  The video lead to an additional 3 arrests today according to the Pasadena Star News just a bit ago.  All this because a football hit a mercedes.


Hat Tip to the Crime Scene blog for finding this and another video of the incident.

Doesn’t it make you wonder how many other videos exist of the event and what if any additional evidence will be gathered in the process?

(Or a Hanukkah dream come true, I’m not really sure.)

Scoops – that magical place of cold creamy mixes of amazing tastes and flavors – now has a second location on the Westside!  They opened December 1 and are probably doing land office business based on the exultations on twitter recently.

They currently have seven flavors and I hear one is pumpkin eggnog. Mmmmmm. Apparently they pour coffee from Intelligentsia as well.

I’m going to keep this simple:
3400 Overland Ave. (Overland Ave and Woodbine)
Open Monday-Saturday 12PM-10PM.
Closed Sundays
@scoopswestside

(There is a website scoopswestside.com, but it’s only a temp holding page for now.)

Scoops — it’s not just for hipsters with fixies anymore!

One of the things I love about living in Los Angeles is the constant discovery of new-to-me things. I recently visited a friend in Silver Lake. I parked on St. George Street near Rowena, as I almost always had, but saw something I’d never seen before. (I think it was always dark). What caught my eye was the Rowena Reservoir, referred to as “Fantasy Island” by locals. It’s beautiful! I drove around it to see where to enter and found the gate. It was locked as the public is not allowed into this oasis.

More on the fast-approaching closure of the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, or at least part of it: per KTLA, the issue really is a turf war.  Which is horrible: I would like to think that if a major farmers’ market like the Hollywood one were to shut down, it would be for a better reason than parking.  C’mon, parking, really?  The LA Film School wants access to its parking lot on Ivar (between Sunset and Selma – a huge chunk of the market), which is blocked every Sunday for 9 hours by the market.  Accordingly, it asked the city to deny the markets’ permit renewal to operate on the street.  The market as we know it has been operating at Selma and Ivar for 20 years; according to SEE-LA, the non-profit that runs the market, up to 10,000 people shop at the market every week.

Apparently, very few decisionmakers at the film school shop at the market and realize what a gem it is.  Or, they don’t really care either way.  According to a school official who spoke to LA Weekly: ​”The school has seen incredible growth,” Ibrahim says. “And the weekends are big. Students don’t have class on those days, but they use those labs for their projects … and you’ve got to include visitors on those days.”

…right.  According to SEE-LA, “If the City follows through, most of the Sunday market vendors on Ivar Avenue between Selma Ave. and Sunset Blvd. – about 1/2 of the farmers – could be denied space to operate, or may be shifted to a new, not-yet-determined location less convenient or less safe than their current placement.”  Both SEE-LA and KTLA note a domino effect for other markets in the area if the Hollywood one is forced to shut down.  Many of the vendors make the most income at Hollywood; “with the loss of that income, 7 other smaller farmers’ markets in low income areas like Watts, Crenshaw, South Central, Echo Park, East Hollywood and Atwater Village that are supported by the Hollywood Farmers’ Market could also be forced to close.”  The repercussions, then, reach far beyond just Hollywood.

The LA Film School started in 1999, and one can make a reasonable argument that the school is an important part of the community as well.  That’s just to be fair.  After all, as the official in the LA Weekly story pointed out, the school has a student enrollment of some 1,500 — a fraction of whom, I’ll add, would like to have parking access on Sundays.  Starting at 8am.  So, given the balance of justice here, you’d think there would be some sort of utilitarian argument in favor of allowing the market to operate as it does, once a week, on Sundays. Or, you’d think there would be something about how possession-is-nine-tenths-of-the-law working in the market’s favor, because they were there before the film school.  Alas, I guess they don’t teach the tenets of John Stuart Mill in film school.

On Sunday, market volunteers gathered over 3,400 signatures to object to the closure (this would be over two times the number of students enrolled at the film school), and another petition drive will circulate if necessary.  Councilman Eric Garcetti also is intent on keeping on the market alive as is; as he tweeted this evening, “We love HFM and have worked way too hard to support it financially and with city help. Working hard to resolve legal issues. Thx!”  For now, the market will operate as it does for the next month as the permit issues are ironed out.  Ideally, during this month, more and more people will knock some reason into the film school’s classrooms.

To stay updated on the fate of the market, email your contact information to info [at]  farmernet [dot] com.  And, you can like, really, really like a Facebook page that popped up overnight to support the market here.  I can almost guarantee you that will be a billion times more effective than changing your profile picture to somehow raise child abuse awareness.

“Souper Mix” photo by Lucyrk in LA via the Blogging LA Flickr pool.

Once a year, we all get to play Santa and decide who was naughty and who was nice.  Last week, we doled out lumps of coal and beautiful gift boxes to a few choice recipients.  To recap:

On our 2010 Naughty List:

• Julie Rico and Sid Carter for their eviction of The Must Bar
• Meg Whitman; to quote RobNoxious, “Bitch tried to buy us off.”
• The LA Board of Supervisors and LA City Council for, among other things, making marijuana dispensaries illegal in unincorporated parts of the county

On our 2010 Nice List:

• Joan Whitenack, for running the great Foothill Unity Center
• Help a Mother Out, an organization that runs diaper drives for low-income families
• The organizers of CicLAvia, for showing us what a car-free LA looks like
• The Midnight Ridazz All City Toy Ride, a citywide ride toy drive to take place this Friday

Thanks everyone, for your comments and suggestions!

Photo courtesy dugm2 via the Blogging LA Flickr pool.

On this otherwise maudlin Monday morning I can’t help but share the awesomeness of “Gotta Hoop,” a short film from Philo Hagen, in which an everyday drone finds freedom at the end of another long stint at the hive to hoop it up around downtown Los Angeles:

Found  on LA Observed (who found it via Ed Fuentes’ View From A Loft).

The Hammer Museum is celebrating its 20th anniversary with 20 days of free admission.  The celebration began on Black Friday and continues through December 18, which is more than 20 days, but hey, why look a gift horse in the mouth?  Admission is usually $7 for adults.  I hope to hit the Hammer and help celebrate this milestone during the next couple of weeks.

Driving along Royal Oaks in Duarte I spotted this little Christmas Tree planted along the median near the Walk Path in the green belt.  How nice it was that someone decided to spread a little happiness by decorating the tiny tree ala Charlie Brown’s Christmas.

Pic by me with the trusty cell phone cam.

I know, it’s 11:30, you probably just got up, maybe a little hungover, maybe trying to figure out where you’re going to have brunch today, if only you can get yourself out the door.  But, before you do any of that, maybe you can stop by the Hollywood Farmers’ Market.  Because, if The Powers That Be have anything to do with it, today may be the last full day of the market.

The Hollywood Farmers’ Market has proper street permits to operate the market on Sundays at Selma and Ivar in Hollywood, just a few blocks from the Arclight.  The LA Film School happens to be right next door to the market and, as it turns out, they would like street access to the school and a parking lot on Sundays.  They’re asking that the market’s permit not be renewed for that location; if not renewed, the market volunteer was unsure where they would go and whether it would be large enough to accommodate all the current vendors.  If all this seems like it’s coming out of no where, it sort of is: the volunteer also said that this all popped up within the last month, conveniently right as their permits are up for renewal.

There is a hastily organized petition drive at the market now, so you, the farm-fresh-happy shopper can sign and formally object to the closure of one of the best farmers’ market in the city.  GO SIGN THE PETITION!  The market closes at 1!!  Please do.  I prefer this one to even the storied Santa Monica Farmers’ Market – there’s an intimacy of community, it’s small enough so that you’re bound to run into someone you know, and it’s not so crowded that you can’t talk to your farmer about the many ways to prepare a fingerling potato.  And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

For those interested, there also will be a meeting tomorrow at 2pm at the Farmer’s Kitchen.

Photo by JohnnyRokkit via the Blogging LA Flickr pool.

This is a heartbreaker. Artist, collector & gallerist Ben McGinty’s closing his beautiful Gallery At the End Of the World in Altadena, and this weekend is its last hurrah. You can’t miss your last chance to see his amazing back garden full of treasures, everything from a hanging garden of magnifying glasses to the back of a gypsy caravan. There will be the ubiquitous eclectic collection of art, crafts and handmade books, and a chance to meet the artists & enjoy drinks with the locals.

Also celebrating a final night tonight: The Robotanists close out their residency at Casey’s, the historic Irish tavern in downtown. Don’t miss their atmospheric, dramatic compositions and vocalist Sarah Ellquist’s lush vocals.

Continuing the theme of going out with a bang (or in this case, lots of bangs & thuds & whams) is the final Derby Dolls bout of the year…tonight’s their season championship, with my personal faves the Tough Cookies going up against The Swarm.

And I also have to recommend hitting Divine Design in Beverly Hills, the annual charity shopping event; 100% of funds raised to to Project Angel Food, and everything–from Oscar De La Renta dresses to cosmetics & jewelry and shoes, is 60% off today; 70% off on Sunday; and 80-90% off on Monday.

How did I not know about this??  For those not in the know, Gymkhana is a sport that has grown in popularity lately thanks to the efforts of rally driver Ken Block.  Block released a series of web videos showcasing his amazing talents at this incredibly entertaining sport.

This is what I’m talking about:

I love that I just found this video.  I hadn’t seen it yet and (perfect for my post on here) it takes place in Long Beach!

Back to this invitational.  From what I can get off their awful website, it is a competition containing a Gymkhana style course.  I wish I had know about this earlier, I think it would be a blast.  If you like cars and you’re free tomorrow.  I suggest you make your way over to Irwindale Speedway.

Tomorrow night is the 28th annual Belmont Shore (not “Shores”) Christmas Parade.  I’ll be honest, I never knew there was a Belmont Shore Christmas Parade.  I didn’t know they did any special celebration.  I wish I had!  I would have been here PLENTY of times!  But I know now and I can NOT  wait.  I’ve been told it’s super fun and cute.

If you plan to attend, I’ve been told you should arrive early.  And parking can be a bitch, so if you’re coming from farther than you can walk, I suggest using Long Beach’s Passport.  It’s a cheap (sometimes free!), easy means of communication through the city.  I am very excited for this.  I’ll be there with some friends.  And as I always say, if you see me (or think you do) flag me down!