No matter how glorious the Los Angeles sunshine and how beautiful the people and how chill and inviting the life style, you’ve got to say goodbye at some point if you, like me, actually live somewhere else. Over years of regular visits, I’ve honed my departure ritual to soften the sting. Booking a midafternoon flight out of LAX leaves room for half a day of assorted activities (buying some sort of fabulously expensive juice, thinking about driving to the beach and then not driving to the beach, and so on) with plenty of time for the most important thing, which is lunch.
No matter where I’m staying, my last lunch in L.A. always takes place at the Apple Pan, a seventy-five-year-old burger joint whose wood-panelled interior is mostly taken up by a U-shaped dinette counter studded with burgundy vinyl stools. The Apple Pan is one of those Los Angeles restaurants famous not for its glitz or its elegance or its Instagrammability but for its sheer intractability in the face of change. A soda, should you order one, comes in a white paper cone balanced in a metal-handled holder. The countermen wear short-sleeved white shirts and peaked white-paper caps. Even the room itself eschews the modern convenience of air-conditioning in favor of open windows and a brace of ceiling fans. Most enduring of all is the menu. The Apple Pan is known in equal measure for its burgers—they’re smallish, in the Southern California vernacular; dressed with a smoke-kissed hickory ketchup, mayo, and pickles; and tidily wrapped in white paper—and for its pies, which are tremendous slices of devastating sweetness.
An hour and a half before I plan to arrive at the airport, I arrive at the Apple Pan, suitcase in tow. My order never varies: a hickory burger with cheddar, a side of fries, and a slice of banana cream pie. If you find yourself in L.A., do yourself a favor by dropping by the restaurant and replicating my order to the letter. And here’s the real trick: just before you’ve finished eating, flag down one of the countermen and ask him to make a ham sandwich to go. Then—and this is key—eat it on the flight home. I try to hold out until the plane crosses the Rockies, but on particularly hungry afternoons I’ll have taken the first bite as early as Arizona.
The Apple Pan’s ham sandwich is simultaneously unremarkable and exquisite. The menu, with characteristic efficiency, describes it thus: “Our own baked ham served with mayonnaise and lettuce on choice of bread.” This undersells what is one of the world’s great straight-shooter lunches: a small mountain of thinly sliced meat, pink as rose petals, beneath a similarly lofty pile of thick-cut iceberg lettuce, the whole thing gobbed with mayonnaise. (My choice of bread is almost always rye, though there are no wrong choices.) A to-go order comes wrapped in white paper; it’s thrown into a sack alongside a plastic container of pickles, which inevitably spills some excess brine that then gets soaked up by the sandwich. When bitten into, during the inhumane ordeal of commercial air travel, this mammoth creation—both oddly nostalgic and obscenely indulgent, maybe a bit like Los Angeles itself—feels like a small, rebellious act of pleasure.
Many of my favorite place-specific foods would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate at home, but the Apple Pan’s ham sandwich can be reproduced to a T with the most basic of grocery-store ingredients. Two slices of bread, soft and untoasted, both spread thickly with more mayonnaise than seems appropriate. A generous portion of fresh-sliced deli ham (“off the bone,” if your deli carries it, though any unflavored variety will do) and an almost preposterously thick wedge of lettuce. I’ve made the sandwich countless times; it’s always flawless. And yet it never quite quenches my desire to get another one right from the source.
Some other food-departure rituals worth considering:
New Orleans
The city is full of muffulettas, but none quite stack up to the original, from Central Grocery. I have a hypothesis (untested, perhaps unprovable) that the only thing that can improve this great wheel of meats and cheeses is the strange microclimate of an airplane. Much like how a sea voyage turns plain old fortified wine into Madeira, flying deepens and melds the muffuletta’s flavors, turning a superior sandwich into a phenomenon.
San Francisco
Lug your luggage into Zuni Café and order the righteously famous chicken for two, for one. Eat what you can, then ask them to pack the rest to go—to pick at on the plane, of course, but also to save all the bones and scraps for later kitchen use, as the foundation of a remarkable chicken stock. (Credit for this is due to my friend Tom, a person of uncommon food genius.)
Chicago
If your flight out of O’Hare is on a weekend, and early-ish in the day, make a pit stop at Pan Artesanal Bakery and buy up absolutely anything they’ve still got in stock. A loaf of one of their breads, wrapped up tight, makes for a week of exceptional post-travel sandwiches. Maybe try one with ham? ♦
