A recent return to Los Angeles led us to revisit one of our favorite restaurants. There's nothing all that special about Islands, although they do seem to have a well-deserved reputation for excellent skin-on french fries showered with secret spices. If you mention Islands to someone, they'll probably mention the fries. Aside from that, it's one memorable element is probably that it uses "hang ten" surf culture as its gimmick, from the plastic tropical birds and thatch roofed hostess stand to the cutesy menu item names and endless surfing footage that loops on all the TVs. Prior to last weekend, we hadn't eaten at Islands since 2012 shortly before we moved back to Texas. And so there was a certain pang of nostalgia as we took a bite of the Hula Burger (see? cutesy). We started thinking about just how intertwined our 20s and 30s had been with Islands...
Our earliest memory of Islands dates back to 1999 - that's 16 years ago people - when we shared tacos with a film school friend to discuss movies and pop culture, like when we had dinner there after witnessing the abomination of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. That was in Pasadena. When we moved to West Hollywood, there was a closer Islands store in Century City with awful parking - that was where we had many mid-90s dinners with the ex-girlfriend (not always cheery in the numb, waning days of that relationship) who lived close by and that one late-90s Saturday lunch after a grueling morning of flag football with a married couple who soon got divorced and dropped out of our life. And then we started to frequent the Islands in Glendale (often paired with a trip to Ikea) - that was the one we went to when our parents visited, the one where I was the first to tell an old friend that his ex-girlfriend was getting married, the one where I argued on the phone with a car salesman who was playing car salesman games. That was also the one we first shared with our girlfriend (who became our fiancee and then our wife) and, eventually, our daughter (the plastic birds weren't dumb to her, they were a source of amazement).
No, nothing special about Islands. Except everything that happened to us and our friends on all those visits in those vinyl booths.
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