Reporters are strange people.
On most matters, it probably isn’t advisable to take their recommendations. They’ve spent too much time in the wee hours deciphering scribbles in their notebooks to make much sense of anything else.
But in this case, the Easy Reader staff chose areas of expertise safely within the confines of each reporter’s judgment. Among other things, our copy editing experts can tell you where you should avoid the police radar, head for the hills, get a burrito, find a soda, and go to the bathroom. They have also authoritatively identified the South Bay’s best all purpose burrito, most deft public dancer, most vigilant citizen watchdog, and the most happening art scenes.
And so we present to you, our editor’s picks…
Best Speed Trap
190th Street between PCH & Beryl
Rolling hills and the steep incline between PCH and Beryl make this a tempting stretch of road to speed on. With numerous advantageous hiding spots, the Redondo Beach Police Department continues to keep a watchful eye on the potentially dangerous area.
While the RBPD has no specific time or place to set up for speeding violations, they do respond to reports from its Traffic Hotline and will set up in areas, including school zones, deemed most important.
Working 10-hour shifts, 7 days a week, the RBPD traffic unit consists of six motorcycle police officers and one riding motorcycle police sergeant. They handle what is considered one of the most dangerous jobs on the force.
Vista Del Mar and Sepulveda through Manhattan Beach are other locations where an abundance of costly speeding tickets are issued. — Randy Angel
Best Soda Sommelier
Danny Ginsberg
The Comic Bug store, Manhattan Creamery and Bristol Farms in Manhattan, Java Man coffeehouse in Hermosa, and Catalina Coffee Company, Giuliano’s Delicatessen, Neighborhood Grinds, Dolce Vita Foods and Crème de la Crepe in Redondo all stock varying quantities of the distinctive tastes of Real Soda.
The Torrance-based company, founded by obsessed “soda sommelier” Danny Ginsburg, has carved out an impressive niche by distributing specialty soft drinks with old fashioned ingredients in glass bottles, including a few beverages of their own making.
Let’s take a look at just the root beers: There’s imported Bavarian nutmeg root beer with ceramic bottle tops. There are molasses-brewed root beers, a root beer with guarana and another with the face of TV’s Judge Wapner on it. There’s red root beer. There are root beers from Canada, Maine, Texas, Hawaii, Chicago and Seattle. There’s a microbrew from Milwaukee. There’s a root beer made by noted pastry chef Gale Gand.
A list of 63 root beers on the Real Soda website advises that if you don’t see what you want, you might also want to look at their birch beers and sarsaparillas. Unless you simply overlooked Rat Bastard root beer, which “tastes like a son of a bitch.”
And we haven’t even touched on the rows and rows of ginger brews, ginger ales and ginger beers, the Brooklyn Espresso Coffee Soda and Chai Cola, the apple beers, the red and vanilla cream sodas, the ginseng and ginko colas, the yerba matte sodas, the latte and mocha colas, the drinks designed to kick start your mind and body, the juice cocktails, coconut waters and lemonades.
How about the nectars, the sparkling and non-sparkling waters from all corners of the globe, the Austrian, Belgian, British and French sodas, the Indian, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Philippine, Jamaican and Danish sodas, the chocolate drinks and egg creams, the orange sodas and orange cream sodas, the cherries, grapes and lemon-limes, and the wild berry sodas?
And how about the drinks that even the Real Soda people call “strange,” like a strawberry rhubarb soda, one called Looks Like Orange Tastes Like Grape, or Squamscot Maple Cream Soda from New Hampshire, which tastes “like a bubbly breakfast in a bottle.”
And that doesn’t count Leninade, the distinctive red beverage with a hammer-and-sickle logo, described as a “surprisingly satisfying, simple Soviet-style soda” which is one of Ginsburg’s personal concoctions.
Ginsburg began his obsession as a boy with a bottle cap collection, and by high school he was ranging far and wide to find “old-fashioned” sodas, walking around with a backpack full of returnable bottles.
When he was 16 he got his driver’s license “just in time to buy the last four cases of Diet Pepsi being sold in L.A.”
He turned the family garage into a soda warehouse, and later bought a real warehouse to turn into a soda warehouse. Sodas got hip and his business grew. He hired workers, signed on 16 subcontracting “sodaphiliate” sub-distributors in California and beyond, and moved Real Soda to a warehouse 10 times bigger than the first one.
He started manufacturing his own beverages to expand even further the array of specialty sodas available to customers. One of his most successful concoctions was Leninade, with its label that he first drew as a joke during a Russian language class.
For more see realsoda.com. — Robb Fulcher
Best View of the South Bay
Los Arboles Park
Want to show out-of-town guests how fortunate you are to live in the South Bay? Take them to Los Arboles Park. Nestled in the hillside of Hollywood Riviera, the location is one of the best to appreciate the view of the Los Angeles basin.
The panorama stretches from the Santa Monica Bay to Long Beach and on a clear winter day, visitors can gaze from Malibu to downtown Los Angeles to Mt. Baldy and the snow covered San Bernardino Mountains.
The park has picnic tables and benches to enjoy the view, along with a playground that includes a rocketship slide. — Randy Angel
Best all-purpose burrito
Los Caballitos
There is no such thing as a best burrito. This is due to the mystery that is a burrito: how is it that the same few ingredients – tortilla, meat, beans, salsa, sometimes rice – can combine in such different ways?
Each burrito joint offers an utterly different product. Depending on your mood and your needs, different burritos serve different purposes. If you’ve been in the ocean for a couple hours, for example, the copious, old school greasy burritos (yeah, with the ground beef) at the El Porto El Tarasco are the only real choice. When you are in a more nuanced mood, the chicken burritos at Amigos (with that delicious slightly exotic tang due to owner Sam Sabra’s ancestry and upbringing in Africa) are genuine local burrito masterpieces. If you are feeling healthful, the breakfast burritos at Brother’s in Hermosa are pretty much a revelation in burrito-ology (as are Amigo’s original breakfast burritos, but for other reasons entirely – hash browns, eggs, and two kinds of meat rolled beautifully together inside the tortilla folds). Then you have the mole sauce at La Playita…
The list could go on and on: we are burrito rich in the South Bay.
That said, the best all purpose burrito locally available is at a little place called Los Cabillitos that is inside the Redondo Liquor & Deli store at the corner of Catalina Ave. and Sapphire St. This is an honest-to-God burrito stand. It’s operated by the brother and sister team of Miguel and Veronica Martinez and offers an assortment of really high quality burritos. The carne asada is especially good, but the chicken fajita burrito hard to escape… really, every single burrito produced at the little stand is lip-smackingly delicious.
Miguel, the mastermind behind these burritos, allows that part of the secret to his success – he’s been doing this for almost 20 years, though he took a three year break at one point that made local workingmen weep – has something to do with the beans. He soaks them overnight, the old-fashioned way, and then slow cooks them to perfection.
Beyond that, however, Miguel is mum.
“It is a secret,” he says.
But at least one regular customer has identified the source of Los Caballitos’ burrito supremacy: it’s in the juice.
“You could take the juice that drips out of those burritos and put it in a bowl and eat it like soup,” says Charlie D’Agostino, one of several local contractors who are regular lunchtime customers at Los Caballitos. “You don’t need anything else. You could lick the construction dirt off your hands with it. It’s perfect.”
Los Caballitos, 529 S. Catalina Ave. Redondo Beach. (310) 957-0607. – Mark McDermott
Best gadfly
Frank O’Leary
Frank O’Leary may be one of the most quietly (well, maybe quiet isn’t the word) influential political figures in recent American history (well, it’s an alternative history, of a sort).
The story goes like this: back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1930s, Frank’s brother joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He left his saxophone at home, where Frank decided a career in jazz might suit him just fine. Frank began practicing with an instructor who had a rehearsal studio right next door to an insurance agency. Frank wasn’t very good, however, and those walls were paper thin. One day Frank was practicing when he heard a man at the insurance agency next door finally lose it.
“I can’t take it anymore,” the man exclaimed loudly. “I would do anything to get away from that kid. I would even run for Congress!”
The man, it turned out, was none other than Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, who went on to serve 16 years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and 33 years in the U.S. Congress, rising to become Speaker of the House.
“So I made my humble contribution to American history,” O’Leary said. “I forced him to run for office.”
Locally, O’Leary has kept the Redondo Beach City Council honest for 24 years as a so-called “gadfly.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines gadfly as “a persistent, irritating critic” or “a family of flies known for bothering livestock.” But among followers of local government, gadfly is common parlance describing those few stalwart citizens whose commitment to local democracy is such that they make it a point to attend most every City Council meeting. O’Leary and his wife, Allie, first took notice of city politics in the mid-1980s when they spearheaded a movement that stopped the construction of an eight-lane thoroughfare on Flagler Lane.
O’Leary hasn’t stopped taking notice since.
At a recent council meeting, O’Leary rose to the podium flush with good-natured but somewhat pointed indignation at an item he’d discovered on the council’s consent calendar (items generally passed en masse, without discussion). He’d noticed that City Engineer Steve Huang was being sent on a trip the city’s Chinese sister city, Zhangjlagang, as part of a delegation that included city officials and business leaders. Huang’s expenses were listed as $2,600, but O’Leary noted that he was also going to be on salary that week working not as an engineer but “to act as interpreter for 28 Redondo Beach socialites.” As such, O’Leary said, the full cost to the city would be $6,700; he suggested the city either use an iPhone translation service (“You don’t have to feed an iPhone four meals a day,”) or a phonetic English-to-Chinese book to save money.
“A six-year-old kid with this book can go through China, and he doesn’t need a $6,700 interpreter at his side,” O’Leary said. “…There is a credibility gap coming out of this thing. The city has declared a fiscal crisis. You cut back salaries.”
City Manager Bill Workman explained that Huang was serving as more than an interpreter and that labor law required he be paid his salary. But O’Leary’s larger point, in a sense, had been made: consent calendar or not, somebody was paying close attention.
City Councilman Pat Aust commended O’Leary’s constant vigilance. Aust, in whose district O’Leary lives, receives frequent phone calls from his constituent as he pours over the council agenda every two weeks.
“I think a lot of the time he’s on target,” Aust said. “He’s definitely old school, and he reminds me a lot of my dad inasmuch as some of his logic is different than mine…. Like he doesn’t care that there are 28 other people going on that trip and to just get an iPhone really wouldn’t really cut it.”
O’Leary, a retired TRW engineer, vows to stay on the watch.
“We have 65,000 people in this city and only a handful, perhaps 10 at most, really pay attention – except if it’s a red button issue, and then you fill the hall. Generally, people are too busy with their lives to pay attention to city hall, and I think that’s unfortunate….So I feel that as long as I have the time and the energy, I should do it.” – Mark McDermott
Best Dancer
Keenan Crawford
I love watching people dance. People who dance well. People who dance badly. But mostly, I like to watch people who dance like no one is watching them.
People like Keenan Crawford, the Hermosa Beach Pier Plaza dancer extraordinaire.
You’ve seen him.
He shows up on the plaza almost every day in his tank top, jeans, sneakers and, of course, headphones. He moves, grooves, twists, turns, pops and locks along the pier promenade as if he were performing on his own personal stage before an audience of passing pier-goers.
Sometimes he glides between restaurants, giving the patio people a show. Other times, he hops up on a bench before plunging into a deep-felt solo performance for all to see.
His style?
“I do whatever I want,” the 16-year old Mira Costa student said. “Hip-hop, ballroom dance. I’ve mostly trained myself, but I’ve also gone to a few dance classes at the Hermosa Beach School of Dance to learn basic moves.”
Crawford has been dancing to the beat of his own drum – or in his case, iPod – for three years at the Hermosa Beach pier.
“It’s just entertainment,” he said. “I try to keep other people and myself entertained. People always stop and like to watch.”
While many people wonder what prompts the freely expressive Crawford to publicly share his dance moves with the world, or at least with Hermosa Beach, his answer is pretty straightforward.
“I just like to dance and chill out,” he said.
Sometimes Crawford’s friends and passers-by join him for a group dance sessions. But those less in touch with freeing their creative sides are welcome just to watch.
All types of music blast in Crawford’s ears while he dances, inspiring different dance moves every time you see him.
“I like everything,” he said. “Hip-hop, ‘80s, ‘70s. I listen to a lot of soundtracks. But most of the time, I’m listening to Michael Jackson.”
And just like the late, great King of Pop, Crawford doesn’t stop ‘till he gets enough. — Andrea Ruse
Best Death Trap
Ripley Avenue
Running diagonally in north Redondo, Ripley Avenue appears to be a skateboarder’s dream. With rolling hills and a steep drop in elevation, the 1.24-mile stretch begins just north of 190th Street at Flagler Lane ending at Inglewood Avenue in front of Adams Middle School.
But it’s a rarity to see daredevils attempting this straight-away. Even the top risk-takers know their limits. With blind intersections among the numerous cross streets and the presence of school children, a skating adventure on Ripley is an accident waiting to happen.
Whether a rider completes the course or not, the end of the road could be the same – the Pacific Crest Cemetery. – Randy Angel
Best Bathroom
Whole Foods
405 N. PCH, Redondo Beach
Another big plus: there’s a loud fan that provides plenty of covering noise when needed, if you know what I mean. (And don’t pretend like you don’t know what I mean.)
Plus, there’s the delicious scent! Seriously. The bathroom is well maintained by employees who use natural, hippie-friendly cleaning supplies, so there’s none of that chemical smell that often mars a visit to your more institutional public potties.
On the downside, the flush in the Whole Foods bathroom is jarringly loud, ending an otherwise dreamy experience with a sound like the portal of Heaven slamming shut. Really wakes you up. Personally, I prefer to end my meditation with something gentler, like the ping of a finger cymbal.
But all in all, a relaxing and invigorating experience! If you’re out and about, and one of your stops is Whole Foods, I advise you to hold it until you get there.
Runner-up: Your place! Can I come over? Please? – Robb Fulcher
Best Kids Freebie“Miss Emily” Baum, a piano teacher with an elementary credential, offers Musical Story Times 10 a.m. Thursdays at Spectrum South Bay, as well as at libraries and elementary schools. Her studio is at 1603 Aviation Blvd., Studio 13, Redondo Beach. For more call 310-937-0150 or see pianolessonsbyemily.com.
