The Hong Kong posts from September 2013 read like a travel diary. December 2012 is the opposite: an ordinary month at home, eaten one plate at a time. Ten of Roger’s Flickr posts from that month are now in the archive, and together they show what a San Diego food life looked like in 2012.
The month starts on December 4 with two very different meals. One is cơm tấm đặc biệt — the house-special broken-rice plate with a grilled pork chop, egg meatloaf and a fried egg — eaten with friends. The other is Hodad’s: a double cheeseburger, fries and a Neapolitan milkshake so tall it spills over the cup. The caption’s own hashtags, food coma and heart attack, are about as honest as a burger review gets.
December 6 is a two-post day as well. There is a round of lamb doner wraps from The Kebab Shop, and a Tower 10 IPA on a Karl Strauss coaster, drunk “the other evening” with friends. Beer comes back at the end of the month: an Apprentice IPA and a Belgian-style ale at Societe on December 30, after an earlier Societe IPA post from North Park on December 10. Going back to the same brewery twice in three weeks is a recommendation in itself.
The Asian comfort-food thread runs right through. Claypot rice topped with Chinese sausage and bok choy on December 9. Bánh bèo — soft steamed rice cakes under dried shrimp and fried shallots — for breakfast on December 10. These are the dishes people eat week to week, and the captions pile on the praise in Vietnamese, Cantonese and Mandarin.
The holiday week brings the two biggest meals. On December 27 there is a seafood brunch of lobster, crab legs and oysters with friends, and on December 30 a French dinner in Hillcrest: escargot, bouillabaisse with mussels and clams, cassoulet and a bottle of Zinfandel.
The most useful caption of the month may be the least enthusiastic. At Mikawaya in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo on December 27, Roger’s verdict on the fresh gelato mochi was that it tasted pretty good but was quite similar to the packages sold at Trader Joe’s. That is exactly the kind of small, honest note that makes an archive worth reading.
Several of these posts do not name the restaurant — the cơm tấm, the claypot rice, the bánh bèo, the Hillcrest French dinner — and the archive does not guess. And like everything in Food History, none of this is a claim about what these places serve today. It is a dated record of one month, fourteen years ago, and how well San Diego was already eating.
Source trail
Societe IPA in North Park, December 10, 2012 — Roger’s Flickr post ↗Hillcrest French dinner companion post, December 30, 2012 — Roger’s Flickr post ↗The frames in this story
