Lunch at Fraiche

I've been trying to get to Fraiche ever since reading Frank Bruni's stellar review of it, and hearing my friend M tell me how much she loves it. So yesterday was the perfect opportunity, as I was meeting my new friend and Scrabbler, K, for lunch, and she lives on the west side. Yesterday was a perfect day in many ways. I listened to the new Gnarls Barkley album (which I cannot get enough of -- we must discuss how good this album is -- even though Miss Minky dismissed my "I think this is an all-time classic" with a withering "Yes, but it's not being played on Kiis-fm". If you can, listen to "Going On" and tell me that you're not in love) and had that springy feel in my step in my heels and little dress. The sun is shining, there's a little breeze, LA hasn't quite given itself over to the monotonous heat of summer.

I ordered a faro salad with blood orange, mint and watercress (the fine, limper kind, not the hearty, crunchy kind). It was very good. Frank Bruni and every other reviewer I've read gets very excited about the faro salad. Maybe because it was Monday, I felt that the oranges might have been sitting in the fridge overnight; they could have been a tiny bit fresher. I don't know why I ordered lebanese chicken with zhatar (sesame seeds, sumac, thyme) and as we'd made a lebanese/persian feast on sunday night, but it came out stuffed in a pita with a mini greek salad of shredded lettuce, red onions, red tomatoes and not quite as I had expected. It's an odd English eccentricity of mine that I don't really like sandwiches for lunch unless I'm on the run or at home sitting in the garden. Somehow, when I go out to lunch in heels and a dress, I rather enjoy eating with a knife and fork and hence, I don't really understand why people order hamburgers at restaurants when there are perfectly delicious ones available at In-n-Out burger, which you can eat in your car, caramelized onions and special sauce oozing through your fingers. So I eschewed the pita but for a tiny nibble to establish that it wasn't as good as the pita I bought at the Armenian bakery in Glendale on Sunday!

My companion ordered a chopped salad that seemed fine, but a little dull. Again, until anyone can beat La Scala in the chopped salad department, that's the place I shall eat them (the salami one, with extra tomatoes).

We ordered coffee and a sweet little plate of cookies came out. I tasted a golden one, soft and yellow with saffron and stuffed with crystallized ginger - utterly divine. K chose one with a big red summer raspberry in the middle.

"Why are you having lunch with a stranger" said my friend E in an email which I read in the parking lot, after telling me she was on a boat trip to Ana Capa (if that isn't eccentric, what is? - taking yourself off alone on a Monday afternoon on a boat trip to the Channel Islands). It didn't feel like lunching with a stranger at all. We felt like old friends. We play Scrabble daily, we chat online, we have children the same age, we know the some of the same people. LA is a small town; everyone is just one person away.