Lunch With Giada

We watch a lot of the Food Network in our house. In particular, we like the food/travel porn shows like The Hungry Detective and Road Tasted where the hosts go to a city and pimp restaurants or other food related places. The prototype for this type of show is $40 A Day featuring the omnipresent preternaturally perky Rachel Ray.

Doing one of these shows would be my wife's dream job, because we like to travel and to eat, and particularly like to eat when we travel. Either we have been to the cities they visit and want to know what we missed or we use the show as a guide in case we ever get to that locale. On rare occasions, they hit a particular place that we have actually been to.

That happened on the Los Angeles episode of the new show Giada’s Weekend Getaway featuring, duh, De Laurentiis. Where Rachel Ray goes for bubbly and girl-next-door, Giada goes for sultry sexiness. Her picks tend to trend upscale, so I was delighted to find her at The Sidewalk Café in Venice Beach. I practically cackled in delight at spotting a place where I had dined.

Back in 2003, we spent one morning on our San Diego/Los Angeles vacation (the same where I spotted Angelina Jolie) hanging around Venice Beach. We rented bicycles and rode up to the Santa Monica Pier and back. This worked up an appetite, so we set off in search of lunch. The Sidewalk Café is right on the beach, so it has a great view of the floating freak show that is Venice Beach.

I do have to confess that half the attraction of The Sidewalk Café is that it is right next to Small World Books and I love to visit bookstores while on vacation. I don't remember what I ate, but all the hamburgers there are named after famous authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Sue Grafton. That is a pretty cool concept. We need more literate beachfront bar and grilles. Especially when they serve very tasty pub grub. Don't take my word or even Giada's on it. Check it out for yourself.

Blatant Cross-Site Plugging: I got inspired to add some pictures from the LA leg of that trip to my Flick site. I have to warn the faint hearted that they run the risk of seeing my pasty-white legs.