Although the salads at Veggie Grill are plenty big for any appetite, the sandwiches are the culinary cornerstones of the restaurant. And easily the best meal between a bun is the Santa Fe crispy chickin’ sandwich. The sandwich takes the restaurant’s presumably patented chillin’ chickin’ and cuts it into a fat patty, then fries it [...]

Believe in the meatless meals of Veggie Grill

PHOTO by RICK POON
Veggie Grill has meat on its mind. It’s a topic that makes for awkward thoughts, no doubt, as the restaurant definitely isn’t dreaming about the usual fantasies of flesh. Instead, the place is far more focused on mulling over the finer points of taste and [...]

Cheap Trick stays in high school

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY
Cheap Trick live on even now because they understood so deeply what a song needed to do when it was coming through some kid’s FM radio. It was basically the Motown model, but pushed all the way through the Who and returned mussed and breathless to the [...]

Glen Glenn and the half-century of reverb

PHOTO by DOMINIQUE ANGLARES
Before it was Glen Glenn, it was just Glen Troutman: a Missouri-born country singer who in the early ’50s played country dance hall shows and made the rounds on local TV stations (including Les “Carrot Top” Anderson’s County Barn Dance on channel 13, on which [...]

Look listen vibrate Red Pony Clock

PHOTO by LIZETH SANTOS
Gabe Saucedo sings and plays guitar, organ, banjo and trombone in San Diego’s Red Pony Clock, an enormous cheery pop band famous for its everything-but-the-kitchen sink instrumentation, theremins, sousaphones and marimbas, and earnest if goofy lyrics. He grew up in San Diego—humorlessly describing his neighborhood as “the [...]

Veggie Grill
Veggie Grill’s finest fake meat comes from a proprietary blend. The chillin’ chickin’, says the menu, is the restaurant’s own unique veggie protein, something that the place dares you to taste and believe. And in the time that Veggie Grill has spent across from UC Irvine (nearing two years as we crawl towards the [...]

PWRFL Power vs. Parenthetical Girls

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Kazutaka Nomura is the accomplished jazz guitarist with the naïve voice who leads Seattle’s PWRFL Power. Actually, naïve might be too broad a term—he sounds naïve, but his lyrics run to darker topics like child-beating (against), online dating (for) and drugs (position ambiguous). Which proves again that you’re [...]