Note: I wrote this circa 2009, and it was sitting in my drafts for ages. I'll post this but I don't know what it's like now, or if they have changed their food or policies. Please bear this in mind when reading this. Thanks!
Late night eats at Twain’s – back when I had the night shift with Louisa, I had looked up this place Twains on restaurant.com, I had wanted to use a gift certificate to try out a new place to eat that managed to still be open late. Twain’s wasn’t too hard to find, the place itself was very retro and had an awesome old atmosphere and seating – the cash register was of special interest, as it was super old, and had those big mechanical buttons…so fun.
The place started getting more crowded as the night went on, and it really looked like only 3 people were manning the whole place – one cook, one waiter/cashier/host, one busboy. They did what they could but with all the people starting to stream in and sit on the patio, they were swamped.
This is what we got:
Louisa’s salad that was instantly delivered to the table after ordering, I’m guessing pre-made. Iceberg lettuce, huge chunk of cucumber, dinky croutons, ranch salad– pretty standard diner fare.
My usual order of an Arnold palmer – note the ice chunks. I have a weird appeal for the mini ice chunks, I think mainly because they usually give you so much of it and it turns your drink super cold. Love that.
Louisa’s roast beef dinner, glistening and covered in brown gravy. Really, it’s a marvel of diner food, this is what diner food should look like. She was pretty mediocre on the meat itself, and picked through the vegetables, but she absolutely adored the mashed potatoes. She had said that she was willing to revisit Twain’s just for a whole plate of mashed potatoes and gravy. That’s a serious endorsement.
Garlic bread came with Louisa’s dinner. She ate it. I don’t think there was anything much else to it.
My dinner – well, here’s some wheat toast, buttered. Not much to say about that, I like toast, this was toast….
And here’s the rest of my dinner – or rather, breakfast for dinner – Corned beef hash, with poached eggs, and hash browns. Yep, it’s a trip down carbohydrate street, but I think a good measure for how good a breakfast place is, is how they do their corned beef hash plate. This wasn’t a bad version – Poached eggs were very good, runny in the middle and mixed with the corned beef well, the corned beef itself was a little too salty, but nicely offset by egg yolk and toast. The hash browns were not my favorite– I like the grated potato style and not…well, I guess you can say these potatoes were flaked? They had a decent amount of crispiness and griddle time, definitely edible, but hash browns are not the thing to get here, for me.
Dessert, I wanted to try their dessert after reading about some of it online. Totally a mistake on both our parts.
When we asked our waiter about the available pies, I wasn’t really jazzed at the flavors, so I got a carrot cake slice, not bad, but I really was too full to eat much of it. I ate about a quarter of it before giving up. I feel bad for wasting it.
The travesty which was Louisa’s peach pie slice was unforgivable. The only edible thing was the crust, and even that wasn’t very good. Not flaky enough. The filling of the pie was so disgusting that I think it was a crime against pie. The peach slices were held completely suspended in place by a stiff glutinous substance, I guess it was supposed to be the syrupy sweetener, but it was plain gross. Never, ever again on dessert.
Also, the ending of the meal was further ruined when we tried to use the 25 dollar gift certificate, and the waiter insisted that we could not use it yet, as the computer system mistakenly let us buy the certificate. So, no 25 dollars off.
That was upsetting. But maybe we can use it later?
Twain's Restaurant
12905 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
Neighborhood: Studio City
