I like to make up fantastic stories for people I see in seedy bars. I can entertain myself for hours, subsisting on nothing more than sips from a glass of vodka and soda and my imagination.
The more diver the bar is, the better. In a dark room that's always nighttime, the three dollars I pay to see a cover band made up of the owner's brother, nephew, and neighbor are well worth the price of admission. Is the woman who winks at the drummer between sips of Chardonnay his mother, his girlfriend, or his director?
Clubs are a special kind of special people, where most of the people I know have lives much more interesting than mine and much more interesting than I could ever imagine for them. It is a world that exists, here, right now, for me and no one else.
My current favorite is Joe Jost's, the almost 100-year-old bar (August is the centennial) in Long Beach. I came decades late to the Joe Jost fan club, but I'm a current member nonetheless.
A friend introduces me to the bar on the way back to our cars after lunch in Cambodia City. He utters the words “pickled eggs” and “100 years” and, despite the bowl of lok lak and the bowl of rice noodle soup we just finished, I can't resist.
It's just after 2 pm on a Monday. The afternoon sun shines through the dusty windows and there is a cheerful atmosphere during day drinking at Joe Jost's.
Without a free stool or an open seat at one of the worn wooden tables, we found a kind of awkward half table that reminds me of those in high school with the chairs attached. It's probably for two, but three of us got in.
The customers are mostly men who look like my late grandfather, packed elbow to elbow, drinking schooners of lager and shoveling pretzel sticks and neon pickled eggs with genuine enthusiasm. The 1972 Rolling Stones t-shirt a man on the corner was wearing was probably purchased at the actual concert and not at Urban Outfitters.
A moose head shares space with a surfboard on the wall. There are bottles and dolls behind the bar and dozens of framed photographs of sports teams, men with cars and surfboards, and license plates of indeterminate origin. That's just the front bar. In the background there are pool tables and hanging calendars with women in bikinis.
There is a line to order, but the waiters are efficient. The couple in front of me buys a hat from among the dozens on display. They are tourists who heard about the bar from a friend who recently moved to the area. Could you also buy a t-shirt?
I ask the waiter if there are so many people every Monday at 2 pm.
“Of course,” he says. “He is always busy”.
I order a Joe's Special, the first thing written on the chalkboard menu. It's a makeshift sandwich with a pickle inside a split Polish sausage and a slice of cheese on two pieces of rye bread spread with hot mustard. Then I look around and ask what's in the paper bowls in front of all the customers at the bar.
“It's the Joe's Special without bread,” explains the waiter. “Like a charcuterie board.”
Here, the term charcuterie board is more of a state of mind. I order one of those too.
Breadless Joe Special at Joe Jost's in Long Beach.
(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Another waiter begins to cut a sausage with a thin, white-handled knife that looks like the one I lost in my college dorm. He stacks the hot dogs on a paper container filled with pretzel sticks. He cuts two pieces of white cheese and adds them to the pile. Next comes a drizzle of mustard, a disc of red onion and two pickles. He hands the plate to the waiter who took my order and starts on my sandwich.
“Do you want a pickled egg?” He asks. He can tell it's my first time.
Yeah.
He uses a slotted spoon to remove an egg from a tub that appears to have held individually wrapped candy from a pharmacy. He throws a few banana peppers on my plate, then sprinkles some black pepper on the egg before handing it to me.
I Google the bar while waiting for my food and find an article from LA Taco informing me that the bar goes through over 450 pickled eggs a day. That seems correct.
The root beer tap the bar is known for isn't working, so we ordered cans of Barq's. The two specials and three sodas cost me $14 before tip, and the entire exchange takes about two minutes.
I use a pretzel stick to stab a sausage, dip it in a little mustard, and top the meat stick with a piece of cheese. I am doing it right?
Mustard is the kind that burns your nose and leaves a tear in your eye. I appreciate that the pretzels are fresh and salty. The egg is not deep at all, firmer than I would ever cook an egg, but strangely addictive in texture and flavour. I'm starting to understand why this place has been around for 100 years.
The Joe's Special has all the ingredients of a good sandwich. The rye is pillowy soft and has a crispy crust. The sausage is hot. The pickle is sour and crunchy. There is enough mustard to take you to a state resembling sobriety. The slice of cheese does not melt completely, but rather molds to the bread. You can grab everything with one hand. You can leave your drink and use two.
If I were offered this combination of ingredients in any other setting, I might reject it. But alternating between bites of sandwich, pretzel and egg and sips of ice-cold root beer while the sounds of the bar lull me into a pleasant evening haze, there's nowhere else I'd rather be. And I would rather eat nothing else. Rapture exists on a Joe Jost special at 2 pm on a Monday.
