{"id":796,"date":"2012-07-27T10:12:38","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T17:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=796"},"modified":"2012-07-27T10:15:29","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T17:15:29","slug":"the-novel-cafe-koreatown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=796","title":{"rendered":"The Novel Cafe (Koreatown)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Give the Koreatown Novel Cafe<\/a> this: nobody can object. Now, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily trust an Angeleno who claims to love the place \u2014 show me a man who eats here every time they come to the neighborhood, and I\u2019ll show you a man who\u2019s given up \u2014 but if you\u2019re meeting someone you don\u2019t know very well for lunch, here\u2019s your effortless go-to. I did just that recently, in fact. She got delayed coming out of LAX \u2014 try not to look surprised \u2014 so I sat at a table and waited, reading a Murakami novel and drinking their no-frills cappuccinos. \u201cHave you got another person coming?\u201d a waitress asked. \u201cBe fifteen minutes,\u201d I replied, not lying but not exactly not lying either. I think I sat there for a reasonably enjoyable hour and a half, and then for another two after she turned up. In Tokyo they\u2019d surely lock me up for squatting on table real estate like this, but the Novel Cafe staff didn\u2019t seem to mind.<\/p>\n

What do you eat here? Oh, salads. Pesto sandwiches. Chicken wraps with lots of beans, corn, and lettuce. Complimentary bread with the faintest sweetness. Nothing to get excited about, and even slightly on the bland side, but somehow an unimprovable exemplar of this modern genre of California lunch food that bothers nobody and actually sounds just about ideal one hot day out of every two or three weeks. The Wilshire-facing window prominently advertises free wi-fi, and I think I glimpsed a room of vinyl records one time I really looked around, but I don\u2019t know if this location qualifies as a much of a workspace or a hangout. If I set myself up to do bear down on some serious writing, I suspect that a staff member \u2014 they walk right up to your table and everything \u2014 would ask me why I haven\u2019t ordered a wrap yet. I would get over this awkwardness quickly, but not everyone does. Then again, elements of the place do seem geared-toward the hanger-out; I notice many a wall-mounted sports-glowing television and a concert stage with a drum kit already on it, though I don\u2019t know when it sees use.<\/p>\n

Those who meet the semi-unknown for lunch all over town, especially on the westside, know that Novel Cafes have multiplied: you\u2019ll find one in Westwood, an astonishing three in Santa Monica, and even one way over in Pasadena. I can\u2019t vouch for those branches, but the Arts District location downtown, more a coffee shop than a full-service cafe, has on many days provided me a space to work and the drinkables to go with it. You can technically get lunch there, too \u2014 I ate a burrito of some kind there once, almost certainly containing avocado, and I\u2019d recommend it \u2014 but nobody brings it to you. The Koreatown Novel Cafe has more \u201ccool\u201d going for it, or rather, a different kind of cool, a slicker, just-up-the-scale cool. The Arts District Novel Cafe\u2019s cool is the cool of old typewriters used decoratively, a wall of loose-leaf tea, and a wide take-a-paperback-leave-a-paperback shelf. I get the sense that whoever\u2019s running things thinks the Koreatown crowd \u2014 a crowd with different aspirations, to be sure \u2014 doesn\u2019t want to see that stuff out in the open. They\u2019ve got pesto to eat. But I, too, often have pesto to eat.<\/p>\n

(More such writeups on Yelp<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Give the Koreatown Novel Cafe this: nobody can object. Now, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily trust an Angeleno who claims to love the place \u2014 show me a man who eats here every time they come to the neighborhood, and I\u2019ll show you a man who\u2019s given up \u2014 but if you\u2019re meeting someone you don\u2019t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coffee","category-food","category-places"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":798,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions\/798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}