Hey Folks:

My first story for NPR’s All Things Considered — a taco tour with the inimitable Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco U.S.A.: How Mexican Food Conquered America — is now up online.

Please check it, like it, Tweet it, pimp it, recommend it. And remember to eat lots of tacos!!!

Besos,
C.

This past Thursday morning I crawled through a hole in a wall, entered a condemned house and proceeded to help myself to porridge. In one room were the bowls. In another, the spoons. In yet others were bubbling pots of oatmeal and stacks of brown sugar and raisins. While the victuals were tasty, in a fiber-rich, heart-healthy kind of way, the whole thing felt seriously overwrought. Beginning with the warning sign, at the entrance, which cautioned that the installation could be “physically dangerous.” (Clearly, these art nerds have no idea what it really takes to get into a derelict building.)

All of this was part of Jennifer Rubell’s latest food piece, Just Right, at the opening of her family’s art collection space, the Rubell Family Collection, in Miami’s arts district this week. Three years ago, I partook of her hard-boiled egg extravaganza. And as much as I abhor the idea of eating hard boiled eggs with a latex glove, there was a certain freakiness to the installation that I had to respect. This piece, however, felt frivolous – a way for a very well-to-do family to occupy a crestfallen old home within range of their imposing compound. An unwitting metaphor of Miami’s complicated issues of poverty, race, class and real estate.

Crawling through the hole in the wall.

An old Miami home provided an urban decay backdrop to a breakfast of oatmeal.

Room One: Bowls.

Room Two: The spoons.

“Get my nutritionist on the phone. Does oatmeal count as a carb?”

A mountain of sugar.

Stack o’ Raisins.

The milk. I was disappointed to see that these weren’t Subzeros. I mean, really…

Untitled (Rome), 1971, by Cy Twombly.

Not part of the Fisher collection, but pretty fracking spectacular nonetheless: The Mondrian cake at the museum’s rooftop cafe. I ate the Thiebaud cake. Photos of art — and cake — after the jump.

Polar Stampede, 1961, by Lee Krasner.

Bracket, 1989, by Joan Mitchell.

Che Faro Senza Eurydice (I have lost my Eurydice), by Mark di Suvero.

The Street, 1956, by Philip Guston.

Malediction, 2006-7, by Martin Puryear.

Live Ammon (Tzing), by Roy Lichtenstein.

Radio, 1962, also by Lichtenstein.

As It Goes, 1978, by Philip Guston.

Fools, 1990, by Ed Ruscha.

Das letzte Selbstbildnis II, by George Baselitz.

Untitled (Magician), by Sigmar Polke.

Kiki and Self-Portrait, both from 2006, by Chuck Close.

Valley Streets, 2003 by Wayne Thiebaud.

Joseph Beuys (Camouflage), 1986, by Andy Warhol.

Drills, 1961, by Andy Warhol.

Stele I, 1973, by Ellsworth Kelly. The rooftop cafe has a fudgsicle inspired by this piece.

Belgica Blue Tin Raster, 1990, by Carl Andre.

Unternehmen Seelow (Operation Sea Lion), 1983-84, by Anselm Kiefer.

A museum-goer inspects Melancholia, 1990-91, by Anselm Kiefer.

Stadbildt Madrid, 1968, by Gerhard Richter.

Blue Green Black Red, 1996 by Ellsworth Kelly.

And here it is, the Wayne Thiebaud layer cake: Butter cake with mandarin curd, done up in the lightest of butter cream frostings, with rose-geranium and strawberry. It was an orgasm in the mouth.

The art’s nice and all, but the museum is worth the price of admission solely for this masterpiece of a dessert. And I say this as someone who is not even a sweet-tooth.

Alls I gotta say is: Sweet. God. Almighty. (Photos by C-M.)

I’m not ordinarily a Whole Foods shopper, but I just HAD to visit the corporate HQ of America’s most blinged out supermarket chain while in Austin — and thankfully, my efforts were amply rewarded. The Whole Foods here is truly out-sized, with colors that are hallucinogenic and a baby boomer soundtrack that keeps the senses on total overload. I realized that it made perfect sense that this is a company that would emerge from Texas, a state that revels in doing everything on a larger-than-life scale. The whole experience was like entering an Andreas Gursky photo. With smells. And insane amounts of disposable plastic. And a three-foot tall chocolate fountain.

As totally insane as the whole place is, I have to tip my hat to the folks in corporate for the presence of the Bowie BBQ stand in the middle of the store. Their brisket sandwich KICKS ASS.

For roughly three years, on my trips to California, I’ve made regular pilgrimages to a small cafe and truck stop that sits near the border between the inland communities of Chino and Ontario. It’s a small, windowless corner spot with lots of wood paneling, divine carne asada and a zingy homemade salsa dispensed in Heinz ketchup bottles. Belly up to the counter any day of the week and you’re liable to find plenty of local color: dairy farmers, Mexican cowboys dispensing aphorisms and the occasional burnout blabbing loudly about a DUI.

I’m a fan of the place for two reasons. One: congenial co-owner Claudia Reca, who knows most of her customers by name (she’s run the joint for 25 years), and is so badass she can dish out breakfast burritos and tend to the truck scales while maintaining perfectly applied lip liner. Two: The setting. Taylor’s lies in a rural-suburban transition zone where strawberry fields, cattle farms and a handful of state correctional facilities face off against tract housing developments that seem to materialize practically overnight. In fact, it is possible to stand by the restaurant’s main door (which is stenciled with the motto Animals Taste Good) and see cows munching on hay on one side of the street and cookie-cutter condos on another. The old California abutting against the new, in the starkest visual terms.

Taylor’s Cafe (7049 Chino Ave., Chino, Calif.) is open Monday through Saturday, from 6:30am to 10pm. Best bets: the spectacular breakfast burrito, stuffed with eggs, stewed pork, bacon, beans and pan fried potatoes, the huevos rancheros and anything with carne asada. (All photos by C-M.)