Walked about 8 minutes from Stardust to the central main street with lots of shops and cafes. Very much epitomizes the vibe of Venice Beach, Mäni’s Bakery & Café is specialized in healthy organic food: sugarless, anti-artificial flavor+color and homemade. Lots of vegetarian and vegan items on menu. They sweetened the cake/jam with natural ingredients (fruits). I’ve bought a cake here before for a party and didn’t really like it…only because it was a carrot cake that I never liked. ^^;; Maybe I should try their chocolate truffle cake, which is claimed to be their best and most popular.
Fitting the neighborhood are the shops inside: gifts and art store inside cafes, to celebrate the art. The items are eccentric handmade clothes, gypsy-ish garments, handcraft home decor stuffs, paintings, new agey and eastern religion artifacts…etc. One store has bunch of photos of the owner and friends at Tibet and stuffs. ^^;;;
Tomato Soup $3.5 The waiter make a note “it’s all vegan”~ a fact that I won’t care ^^;;; Yum!
Betty’s Famous Potato Pancake $6.95 with homemade Applesauce~ Jolly good! It’s like pancake + hashbrown I think? Forgot to take picture, but they also gave us a jar of very good raspberry jam. It is also homemade and very fresh fruit tasting.
Oh, I should totally go there sometimes. Thanks for the coverage (maybe you should consider a part-time job as a reporter :P)
Didn’t try the bread from the bakery?
Hey you divided different areas under the food section(which is getting big, haha). Though you really have gone to so many places in only a few months, impressive!! But there seems to be no outsiders visiting?? I tried google different combinations of “L.A., gourmet, blog, food, restaurant” and your blog didn’t come out. ^^;;
Yeah the food section is too messy so I try to organized it by area like Seat your blog. ^^;; If the music and film sections are getting too big I might start categorizing them too (but I have other plans in mind for them…^^;;). The most are East LA (where we live), Hollywood (where Joan work) and West LA is catching up (where I work now). Oh in the ‘Ramenya” entry (Kimchi ramen) there was this stranger comment on it, I dunno who she is (if you click her name it’ll link to her blog) ^^’;; I have no idea how that person found my blog. I guess it’s through name of the place. Because sometimes when I search name of restaurant on google/yahoo, I came upon someone’s blog that has an entry about that restaurant.
Ha RP it’s a nice to fantasize about alternative jobs like being a reporter of magazine/TV how like “_insert city name_ Walker” or food critic or reporter of “shops we like” section in Lucky or something, though I’m not adventurous enough. Oh yesterday when I walked around main street, I saw this lady (holding a pen and bunch of notepaper) going inside every store, walk a bit and move on and wrote down something…hmm~~ ^^;;
The part that made me self-conscious is, everytime when I met someone new (friend of a friend) when we go to eat, I have to explain over and over why I took photos of the food (which sounded really absurd to some people) “Oh I put them up on my online journal” (sometimes my friend would help explaining) “Why?” Even if some friends who knew already, they’ll start rolling their eye, “here we go again~” ^^;; Wanna give a pretentious answer “It’s L’Art de Vivre~~” 😀
Oh Seat do people you usually go out with used to it right? What about ML friends? Do they took pics too?
Hey I completely understand your predicament!! I mean I usually eat alone, which is a bit embarassing at first to take pics; if you go with friends you don’t feel as self-conscious, but only friends who already know about my blog, or ML friends who take pics themselves using digital cameras or cameras attached to their mobile phones(it is quite a funny sight when I go out with ML people because the whole gang will be fighting and flashing their cameras on the food ^^;;;), but if I go out with friends who don’t know about my blog, whom I have no intention of revealing my blog in the first place, like people from work, I would have to say ambiguous things like “oh I show the food pics to my friends in overseas countries because they are interested in Japanese gourmet” etc. Actually I went out with my boss(sort of) and the food was just too brilliant that I had to take pics and he found it very amusing and asked “do you take pics of convenience store bento too?”, I said “no, only nice food”, but the truth is, I don’t eat convenience store food at all…haha. ^^;;;