Hash House A Go Go

As I swing the diner door open I see Nini pouting in the waiting area with her arms and eyebrows folded, clearly upset at the news the hostess has just given her. I had used my girlfriends’ arrival as an opportune excuse to revisit Hash House A Go Go, which is located about a mile away from San Diego Airport. I can’t blame her for being angry with me. She has just flown in hungry from SFO, specifically instructed to skip breakfast by yours truly. Lesson 1: Save your appetite. This I had learned during my last encounter with the mammoth portions of what they call “twisted farm food” served here. After spending the past 20 hours building up my appetite, and the past month visualizing myself actually eating more than the third of a plate that was my limit during my last visit, I wasn’t going to let an extra hour & a half wait distract me from my primal goal of gluttony. Nevertheless, under the circumstances I felt obligated to expedite our seating. A gray-haired man in a polo shirt stomped away from the podium grumbling, “…this is ridiculous…,” and I recognized an opportunity. A sincere smile and a few kind words were all it took to be seated almost immediately at the bar.

After the unexpected gesture of hospitality we felt obligated to order some drinks. A potent Bloody Mary came with a skewer of pickled green beans, cornichons, and olives. Everything about this place feels heavy: industrial design, steel furniture, rock music, high-alcohol drinks, high-carb food, & the platters it is served on. With Depeche Mode blasting in our ears, we waited for our meal to arrive, distracting ourselves from our empty stomachs by reminiscing about the dinner we had a month prior at the now occupied table across a packed dining room.

As a warning of what would follow, we were each presented with a biscuit the size of a softball, served with butter & honey. We both wished we had just brought it home to enjoy the next day in order to save as much room in our tummies as we could for the main courses, which followed not too long after…

Her Pan Seared Chicken was strewn with fried leeks and propped up on a stage of fried polenta triangles, roasted asparagus thick as cigars, and creamy mashed potatoes, with grape tomatoes and mushrooms swimming in the moat of Madeira cream sauce that encircled the tower of food.

My Wild Boar Pot Pie was erupting with yams, broccoli, peppers, gravy, and of course wild boar, which was dark, lean, full-flavored, and nothing like pork. The cracker crust bowl was unusually thick and not as flaky as I like, but probably as delicate as it could be considering the half gallon of pie ingredients that it was used to contain. The mashed potatoes that the cracker bowl was balanced on were decent, but together with the cracker there may have been too much starch on the plate, especially in proportion to the amount of gravy.

Both dishes could have done without 2 things: the mashed potatoes and the fried angel hair garnish (presumably simulating hay). They only add unnecessary height and calories, and take focus away from the fried polenta and the cracker crust, in the chicken and boar dishes, respectively. Then again, the culture code for food in America is “fuel”, and perhaps it is this emphasis on quantity that appeals so much to active lifestyle San Diegans whose purpose in eating out might be to refill their tanks.

Sauce on the edges of the plates made me think that maybe the kitchen was messier than it should be. My initial instinct was to hate on the overdone rosemary branch garnish that seemed to be protruding from everyone’s plate. But the aroma of its oils made me feel like we were sitting in the same forest our chicken & wild boar played in.

When my Sage-Fried Chicken Benedict came I had no trouble finding the trademark rosemary branch violently protruding from the chicken breast, but I did have trouble finding any suggestion of sage. I was expecting chicken fried in a batter containing sage. What I got was a bacon-wrapped chicken breast over two more slices of bacon, smothered in a chipotle cream that could have used more chipotle. The bed of fresh baby spinach was extremely helpful in rationalizing to myself why I could get away with eating all that bacon. Their signature “hay” garnish of fried angel hair made yet another appearance, only this time it was positioned on top of the mashed potatoes, and underneath everything else, making it impossible to remove.

We left that day once again with a bag of leftovers that had us feeling like we had placed an order for pick-up. You might say this is part of the experience, and I for one am someone who assigns value by how many meals you can actually squeeze out of one order of food. But breakfast is really something that is best eaten fresh. This brings us to… Lesson 2: Share entrees. The house charges a $2.50 “sharing fee” to keep diners from eating family style, but this can be avoided by having your friends just order sides. So the bag of leftovers isn’t entirely unavoidable.

We spent the rest of that day not eating and wondering why people seemed to line up at Hash House only for breakfast & brunch. Nobody seemed to be saying anything about the dinner menu. I knew I would definitely be coming back, but it would not be for breakfast. Our dinner experience had been fantastic. Our leftovers were very good the next day. Breakfast leftovers are never good. And for dinner you can still get signature dishes like Griddled Chili-Crusted Indiana Maple Duck Breasts, Crispy Indiana-Style Hand-Hammered Pork Tenderloin, and the Sage Fried Chicken with hardwood-smoked bacon waffle tower, the New York Times favorite. On top of all that, there’s no line for dinner. Their dinner menu might be one of San Diego’s best kept secrets. And I, for one, would like to keep it that way.

Lesson 3: Avoid dinner rush