UNCLE MEAT
Kate Mantilini
By Arty Nelson
Okay, okay, so I'll admit, I'm a sentimental young-old fool treading on white-hot lava just under the short side of 40, and the reason I love this cheesy old place is because when I first moved to L.A. 14 years ago, I used to eat here once a week with my uncle. His dime, of course, back in the middle of a particular chapter in my life when I was living solely on bologna and white bread sandwiches, with only the occasional chocolate-chocolate donut with coconut sprinkles to break up the monotony.
Kate Mantilini. Ah, yes, I can still remember the sizzling sounds and the bustle from that first time I walked in. All that glass and the warm, extremely crusty bread with the super-light whipped butter in the little white cup. Every time I'd come over to borrow money from my beloved Unc, he'd take me to Kate's and we'd wrap up our business there. All in all, what I'm harkening back to are some fairly bleak and lonely - suicidal, even? - times, and Kate's, for an hour and a half or so a week, made me feel like I had landed someplace where there were possibilities, despite the early emergence of those loudly booming internal clocks I've often alluded to.
Possibilities that I'd be ready for, with a belly full of finely chopped shrimp cobb salad, or the delightful hobo steak, or oysters in that bizarrely lush pesto sauce, or that bowl o' latte ... or maybe just those strawberries with hot fudge and whipped cream, rounding out my physique in a way that
wasn't derogatory. Yeah, that was how it felt back then. And it was a good feeling, too; though probably a total misread, considering that I had hair halfway down my back and a complexion like a week-old grapefruit. But one of the great things about being both really lost and really loaded all the time is that you tend to have no perspective whatsoever on the way other people see you. And thank God my uncle was a regular, or maybe I wouldn't even have been able to stumble through the front door, since the sight of me sitting in Kate's back then would hardly lead a hostess to imagine I was sitting with my future tribe when, in some ridiculously succinct way, I really was like a 70-something Beverly Hills housewife with too much mascara on. I just happened to be trapped in a hulking 20-something ex-jock's body that was rapidly imploding in hopes of leaving only a Judy Garland husk to refer back.
If any of this is hard to follow, well then, I guess that's probably about as close to honest as it could ever be, because who can ever look back honestly and objectively and say how it was? Not me, that's for sure. It all melts and fades with cruel precision. The moments become a murky mélange of facts corrupted by feelings. And what then emerges is a weird bouillabaisse of half-truths, which is really a way of saying: You must always go back, once again, just to make sure.
And that, of course, means that I had no choice but to pack up my three-week-old beard and pile into the Jeepster and head west to Wilshire just west of Doheny, where once again I would play that very dangerous game of soul-chicken with the Beverly Hills housewives and the cell phone salesman down from Sherman Oaks. Oh my, it got ugly. Every which way I looked, I saw ultra-brite fangs hanging over Tod's slip-ons. Odd hair colors that had managed to avoid the color wheel altogether, and deadbeats in black suits fronting with their pinky rings. It was a lot to endure when all was said and done, but the journey was bellowing out and I was the man who had agreed to step forward. And yes, it was all true. The people were a wild and ridiculous breed and, at points, I got scared and wanted to leave, but then I dipped into the shrimp chopped cobb and spooned up; then the hobo steak - which, in fact, is grilled meatloaf - and then it all seemed right and good and worth braving the fast-moving waters of my own quick judgments. Kate Mantilini is the greatest daily grill to ever spring into the arena, and if that means anything to you, then enter the coordinates into your land shuttle and don't look back ever again. Ciao.Published: 04/01/2004
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