Learn Italian at Angelo’s Deli

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It’s unfair, I know, but lately I’ve found myself at an impasse with Italian food, frustrated by the $15 price tags and sagging quality at some of my favorite red-sauce restaurants. The way I see it, I’m better off rolling my own pasta dough, feeding it through a [...]

Outdress your competition with help from First United Shoe

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
The secret to looking good is knowing where to get unique clothing and then not telling the rest of the world where you buy your duds. Unfortunately for me (and fortunately for you), I’m about to spill it.
It’s a rule that I never leave [...]

B & B Hardware has all the fixings for old houses–even your kitchen sink

PHOTO by LONNIE NGUYEN
B & B Hardware is hardly the first vintage hardware store—or even the first in Long Beach; that honor may belong to a dusty, no-name warren of a building that stood in place of the Mobil station at Anaheim [...]

Rid yourself of last week’s party fouls with a facial at Senses Day Spa

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
If your weekly social calendar reads more like the work log of a Pabst delivery person—Monday: Pike; Tuesday: Prospector; Wednesday: Red Room; Thursday: Que Sera; Friday: V-Room—then you know how bad Saturday mornings can be . . . or, [...]

Three Long Beach hookah bars in one night

EXHALE’S HOOKAH WALL by ROSHEILA ROBLES
I’m too stuck-up for chewing tobacco, too reformed for hits from a bong, and cigarettes make my fingertips reek. Plus, there’s the guilt—the lowdown-dirty-smoker shame. But that all vanishes when I smoke hookah. Inhaling honey-steeped shisha from a hand-blown Egyptian water pipe feels [...]

Aida’s Unversity Bookstore: Come for the books, stay for the parking spaces

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
There’s a routine most Cal State Long Beach students go through at the start of each new semester: they pray the classes they need are available (and that CSULB’s online registration system won’t crash this semester); begin waking up at 5 [...]

Going for broke on kitchenware at Olives, Too! and Kitchen Outfitters

OLIVES, TOO! by ROSHEILA ROBLES
It’s a shame nobody ever tells you how expensive your hobbies will be before you get hooked on them. I seem to have a knack for finding ones requiring copious amounts of time, planning and money: screen printing (of the non-clothing [...]

At Empresa Motors in Bellflower, a Cadillac Escalade could be yours for just $499 down

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Appropriately for a used car lot, Empresa Motors in Bellflower doesn’t really empresa until you get out of your car and start looking at theirs. Because who really cares about your car, anyway? Quit living in the past. [...]

Ditch the particleboard with fine, vintage furniture from OCModern.net

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
If the arrival of the IKEA catalog is cause for celebration at your home, then you also know how problematic all that cute, affordable furniture can be. Never mind the whole assembly thing—when the bulk of your furniture is made from soft, particleboard “wood,” [...]

A guide to Long Beach’s comic-book stores—there’s more than you think

COMIC BOOK GUYS by ROSHEILA ROBLES
If you live in Long Beach and follow superhero comics, there are two main ways to get your fix: one is joining the mass exodus out of the city to San Diego’s Comic-Con, as thousands of people did last week. [...]