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King’s Highway (Palm Springs)

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King’s Highway, the restaurant in the same building as the Ace Hotel lobby/check-in area, is what I pictured a diner in the 70s to look like, maybe a bit hipper. Likewise, the food is a hipper version of 70s diner food.

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Upon sitting down, an interestingly dressed older woman with fantastic glasses plopped down a small jar of pickles.  She quickly gave me a look and muttered, “Here are the pickles, that’s all you’re getting, it comes with your dinner” or something to that effect.  I noticed she said the same thing to other people who sat down after us.

The pickles were intensely sour with an over-whelming taste of vinegar and a nice piquant bite to it. What I thought were slices of ginger turned out to be thin slices of potato.  I’ve never had pickled potatoes before, but these made me a fan.

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The menu doesn’t have many vegan options — I think the BF ordered about everything there was that he could eat.  We started with the couscous salad with meyer lemon dressing.  The dressing didn’t really taste like meyer lemon but actually reminded me of some sort of bottled Italian dressing.  The pistachios in the salad were probably the best thing about this salad.

Next came the white bean dip with pita chips. The dip was decent, had a hint of spice, and the chips were crispy.  It wasn’t exciting or fantastic, but solid.

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I had the stinky grilled cheese sandwich with bacon (extra) which was pretty much what I expected. The stinky cheese wasn’t terribly stinky, unfortunately. It was better than plain ol’ American cheddar cheese, but certainly not anything to write home about.  I did appreciate the basil in the sandwich, which gave it another dimension.  The bread part was greasier than I’d like, but that could have been solved if it had cooked longer on the pan and got more crispy. As it was, one side was already soft and soggy by the time I took a bite.

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There was some confusion with the waitress about the vegan-ness of the vegetable pot pie.  She claimed it was vegan and I thought it was too good to be true that a place like King’s Highway would have vegan pot pie.  Even after we asked her twice before ordering, it turned out that there’s butter in the crust and it’s not vegan after-all.  In the end, the BF got the vegetarian chili sans corn bread.  It was unexciting and had mushy, overdone vegetables, but at least the waitress was nice enough to comp it because of the mix-up.

We weren’t expecting anything too fantastic from a hotel restaurant and our expectations were met.  As a whole, we didn’t have our hopes too high for good food in Palm Springs, which was good.  The food at King’s Highway was decent — for a hotel kitchen. I stayed away from ordering anything from the “dinner only” section of the menu because the dishes were so expensive there and I wasn’t sure if the place was up to snuff.  A wise choice.

King’s Highway @ ACE Hotel
701 East Palm Canyon Drive
Palm Springs, CA 92264
(760) 325-9900

Japan Nite 2007

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I caught the Japan Nite tour last night at the Knitting Factory. It wasn’t something I would usually go to, but I thought it would be fun to check out just because it sounded strange.

The first band I saw was The 50 Kaitenz. All three band members were so cute in their rice bowl haircuts and Colonel Sanders outfits. The guitarist was incredible. He was ripping on the guitar, but made it look so effortless since at the same time he was also prancing around on stage and making funny faces. At first, I couldn’t tell if it was actually him playing the guitar because he looked so silly. My favorite song from them was the first song they played that night. I think it was called “mic check.”

The second band to come out was the Oreskaband (Ore Ska Band) which was an all girl ska band complete with trumpet and trombone players. The lead singer had a really pretty voice, which was kind of jarring since I’ve never heard a ska music being sung by such a soft girly voice before. During one of their songs, one of the girls made everyone in the audience wave peace signs with the fingers. It was funny to see a couple of the tough-looking guys with mo-hawks waving peace signs above their head.

I didn’t get to see much of the third band because I left early, but they sounded decent on the way out. When I was trying to drive out of the parking lot, there was some lame drunk guy in a big truck in front of me who wouldn’t pay the parking attendant so we waited there for at least five minutes since we were blocked in by him and someone behind us. He told her that he “lost” his ticket and she should just let him out of the garage without paying, which she refused to do. After another couple of minutes, she finally raised the road-block arm to let him out and I saw him taunting her with his supposedly lost parking ticket. What an ass. It’s times like these I wish I had a diarrhea gun to shoot at people to instanteously afflict them with explosive diarrhea.