The House of Pie and other Buildings

I'll admit I underestimated of The House of Pie. I was excited to be going there. I enthusiastically tried to get my house-mates to jump in Gerard's little blue Echo with me and have some pie (they didn't want in). But by the time we got there (10 mins later), the lure of pie-filled plates had left me and I actually wanted a waffle with bacon and eggs. Truly, I gave up the choices of banana cream and chocolate chip cheesecake or a slice of pumpkin pie rather easily, not thinking. Gerard, however, stayed true to the game plan, ordering chocolate cream pie. We were going to share.

The House of Pie is east of me, up Vermont Ave, toward Echo Park and Los Feliz and Silver Lake. It sits on the corner with its proud diner sign and a parking attendant stands in the lot to watch over the cars (part of me thinks this is all very LA). As you enter the '50s style diner with its color palette of browns, the pies are on display in their dingy, rotating glass cylinders, in the glass-protected shelves at the front counter without lighting to illuminate them. If I had looked up, I would have seen the five billboards above the register proudly detailing the extensive pie menu one would expect at an establishment called The House of Pie.

I didn't look up though. I was snobbish in my glances at the rotating pies. The menus were basic. My body really wanted bacon. I ordered a hot chocolate to go with my late-night breakfast. That would be enough.

And it was. In that moment, I really did want a Belgian waffle with one egg dry scrambled and two pieces of bacon with machine hot chocolate. But the pie. The pie was amazing.

Never before had I tasted chocolate cream pie like this. Oh, I have had amazing chocolate pies before--my g'ma makes one special for me every Thanksgiving, for which I am eternally grateful--but this was amazing DINER chocolate cream pie. The kind you can un-guiltily get away with eating, its topping a 2-inch thick layer of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles, the slice the entire size of your small serving plate. Just the few bites I had made me confident I will definitely be going back.

We chatted over the diner table, perfectly full, for over an hour, then got back in the car to explore the parts of the city I've never known and that Gerard knows so well. Up Vermont, over to Silver Lake Blvd, along Beverly and Sunset, the clock ticking past midnight, strangers coming out of clubs and music venues, all the while watching the buildings, the streets, the architecture, the lights.

Up in that part of the city, up in those small hills, there is something about the houses and the apartments and the buildings that truly is beautiful. I felt a certain comfortable familiarity comparable to the houses and neighborhoods I know in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but there's also a different edge to them that is completely Los Angeles. To try and pinpoint it would be futile, but it makes me believe more and more that LA is a under-praised beauty of a city.

There are archways and balconies and climbing flowers and tile roofs and slanted driveways. In the night, the houses have an off-white cast to them, similar but never the same twice. The streets curve and bend more there than down on Wilshire or Venice and a residential block one minute is a row of small neon restaurant signs the next.

Gerard said he likes to walk around these neighborhoods and look at the houses. That farther up in the hills there are narrow staircases that appear out of nowhere and take you to a somewhere you didn't know existed. It's a surreal city, he said. A city that pretends to be a city in so many ways. A city worth exploration.