Thai Fo

A friend of mine is flying halfway around the world and arranged to have an extra long layover in LAX so we could get together and hang out. Yay!

His plane got in earlier than I expected, which meant I wasn't awake in time. Rather than have him fester at the airport, we met up at our now-regular layover joint, the Stick-n-Stein. It's just south of LAX on Sepulveda /seh-PULL-vih-duh/ by the IHOP and I really dig it. I brought along a book describing LA neighborhoods and things to do which we thumbed through while eating brunch. After trying to figure in travel times vs available times, we actually went fairly far afield and went up to Griffith Park.

It was a GORGEOUS day to be at Griffith J. Griffith's park. Low to mid 70s with light clouds but no haze to speak of. We got parking very near the parking lot. We could see Catalina from the heights. We wandered through the exhibits, caught the Tesla coil in action, wandered down one of the hiking trails (and back up!), checked out the new basement exhibits, and bought some swag at the gift shop. All in all a delightful way to spend the afternoon when entertaining someone who will be sitting for 12 hours or so in the not too distant future. (The NorCal quake must have happened after we were there as the seismometer I was standing near at 4:30 pm or so showed no happenings on the "mid distance" monitor that covered California.)

Our 2nd stop was to head to Santa Monica for dinner. Driving through surface streets went better than I expected but because LA is massive, it still took quite a while. By the time we got near the coast we were both tired, sluggish, and not terribly hungry. I misremembered a chinese place by confusing its location with a delightful but horrendously expensive "experience" restaurant, which wasn't what we were looking for. I parked in the first parking structure with free spaces and we went looking for food. Directly across the street we saw a sign saying "Thai Fo" because the last two letters were broken off the sign. And yet... Perfect.

This place (4th and Wilshire) had nice tables and place settings, efficient service, yummy lemonade and thai iced tea with funky half clear straws (fun to watch the thai tea rise up one), and quick, tasty food. In fact, their pork pad see yoo is my favorite so far on this coast. And getting convenient, tasty food fast perked us back up enough to make it back to the aeroporto in good spirits and in good time.