Cali Sandwiches

Alright do you guys ever go to Vietnamese sandwich places? The thing is there’s really no reason not to, because Vietnamese sandwiches are the best kind of sandwich after grilled cheese sandwiches and they are always the cheapest kind of sandwich. I’ve never seen anybody charge over $3.50 for a Vietnamese sandwich. At Cali Sandwiches, at 3030 Travis Street, their most expensive one is $2.70. K guys seriously I’m a college student I obviously think that’s amazing. +6

Cali Sandwiches is a pretty stupid name for a Vietnamese restaurant, I mean I think we can all agree on that. I mean Cali Sandwiches sounds like it should serve vegan food and host Ron Paul rallies. But on the inside, it looks like it’s alright to be called Cali Sandwiches! I mean it’s very bright and sunny in there, with white walls and a white floor, I dunno, it just kind of seems West Coast. + There’s palm trees out front, which doesn’t seem obnoxious to me. This time. +3 And it’s completely filled with white people. In Cali Sandwiches defense, it is downtown, and I did go on a Sunday; I’m just saying it could skew our racial makeup. I was actually surprised anybody was there at all, sometimes when you wander into downtown Houston on a Sunday it’s hard to tell if there was some kind of alien apocalypse and you’re the only person left on Earth and you’ve missed your chance to have to repopulate the human race with George Clooney or if you’re just the only person who cares enough about Houston to venture forth into the world. -9

Anyway. There’s this refrigerator in C.S. (I’m so tired of typing the word sandwich it doesn’t even look like a word to me anymore) and right on the front of it is a sign that says “No Smoking”. OK guys seriously? Who hasn’t missed that whole movement? What person has lived under a rock for so long that they don’t know that you can’t smoke in restaurants anymore? And why, when the crawl out from underneath that rock, does C.S. assume they are going to be the first stop? And I’m not saying they didn’t have good sandwiches, they do. (I typed it again maybe can we agree on “the s word”?) I’m just saying that there aren’t any rocks in the general area, certainly not any big enough for a human person to be hiding under. If I’m going to be crawling out from underneath a rock, going someplace to stuff my face is going to be my first stop, I’ve only been eating bugs and dirt since approximately the seventies to miss this social movement. Personally I’d choose somewhere closer to my rock. Not only that, but I don’t think he’s rolling his own cigarettes underneath that rock, he’ll have to go to a convenience store, and I’m sure he’ll have a conversation with the clerk:

“How’s it going sir?”

“Pretty well. I just crawled out from underneath a rock, man. Now that I’m free and living in the daylight, I think I’m going to take this pack of cigarettes and then go smoke every single one of them in Cali The S Word.”

See? The clerk would stop him! He’d have to! There’s nothing American’s hate more than people smoking cigarettes in front of them, except maybe the French! I’m just saying the sign was a little redundant and a little pointless, and if they really cared about increasing the quality of eating at Cali The S Word, they could have just put a giant picture of my face there. -21

Now I’d like to complain about some things that I think are gross, and you guys can chock it up to my not understanding ethnic cuisine or really whatever you’d prefer. So. On their menu, they advertise an avocado smoothie. Can we all just stop and think about this for a minute? It just doesn’t seem right to me. For one thing, I’m not really into fitness smoothies or anything like that: if I’m going to put in all the effort of drinking a smoothie, I want it to be a really fruity smoothie with lots of added sugar. You can’t really add sugar to an avocado smoothie and make it taste good. For another thing, I thought the point of smoothies was that you didn’t have to go through the hassle of chewing. Right? But you don’t really have to chew avocados if you don’t want to, I mean they’re a pretty tender animal, you can just gum them for a bit and then let your body do the rest. It’s like a banana. And then for another thing, there’s just some part of me that’s rejecting this for nameless reasons as “gross”, and if that’s my instinct then action hero after action hero has told me to follow it and I’m going to go ahead and give Cali the S word a -8 for those. And then the other thing is that on every table they have three bottles of sriracha sauce. They have extra hot sriracha, which, guys, was EXTRA HOT, and they have regular sriracha, and then finally they have this weird brown stuff that’s in a regular sriracha bottle but is NOT regular sriracha. Is it? I mean is this what happens to sriracha when it sits in the bottle for too long? It gets brown and sweet? It was in what looked like a regular sriracha bottle, I’d complain about it being misrepresented to me but I can’t read half the words on those things anyway so for all I know they warned me and I just didn’t have the sense to know. Either way it looked nasty and it tasted pretty nasty as well. -8

That’s about it! If you have any questions or comments, please email me at arbitrarycriticism@live.com!