I know these lists move magazines. I know because I can't wait to read them even when I know that they are going to be infuriating (not that this one is overly so). It is an mixture of rage and vindication that surges up my throat into the back of my mouth when a favorite is either included or omitted. It is an uncomfortable combination of wanting validation and wanting to be smarter or hipper or whatever than the listmakers, and every option works both ways, so if my favorite place is on the list I am both validated in print and devalued by the making of this place that I found and loved available to the general public to come in and form a line in front of me and use up all the tomatillo salsa. And, if my favorite place is omitted it works in reverse.
This is the phenomenon I call the Yamo Effect, after one of my favorite hole in the wall restaurants. Yamo is an awesome Burmese lunch counter run by several women who span a couple/few generations. It's all short order stuff, stir-fries and tea salads and rice plates and cold noodle and curries. Every dish is $5.25. You heard me. Except for some appetizers, which are $3.75. The place is just wide enough for a long counter with stools on one side and workspace on the other. It gets crowded fast. It has been in heavy rotation for me for better than a decade. In the past few years, though, it has become immensely popular with many of the skinny-jeaned/giant-optics-framed youth who have become the genpop of my once proudly Mexi-boho neighborhood.
I don't begrudge the the restaurant its popularity or the newcomers their places at the counter, really; by rights this place should be more popular than free beer endorsed by Oprah and each and every one of the ladies that works here should become Roseanne Barr rich. What we are talking about here is our own little neighborhood Tu-lan, after all, with every potential Tu-Lan drawback--the grime, the grease, the limelight loving cockroaches, the freelance parking attendants/doormen, the byzantine system of ordering and serving--answered in spades. Yamo makes Tu-Lan look positively expansive though. Like I said before, it gets crowded fast, and it is just one cook and a couple of servers, so the line at the wok can back up pretty fast. And there I am, just waiting for my goddam black bean fish, stuck behind a couple of people talking about bike culture and PBR, wishing I could pull Marshal McLuhan from some nook, not so much to refute the very idea of a so-called "bike culture" as so there will be someone older than me in the room.
So Yamo Effect is my annoyance at the Jenny-come-latelys in line in front of me and their sense of discovering this place that I already fucking discovered. It is my annoyance at their taking so long to discover the place, and now that they have, thinking that they have achieved something other than lunch, and doing all of this in front of me in lines, deliberating over the simple menu like it is goddam Rumi. The Yamo Effect then, ultimately, comes down to my annoyance at people acting like me after me, and /or in line in front of me (For the record, I order quickly, especially if I have had a lot of time in line to ruminate on the menu, or if I'm in a taqueria or cafe. Step it up, genius, they have lattes and cappucinos. Pick one and get outta my way.)
I didn't say I was going to be sympathetic. Or even interesting. Or even make sense. I just said 7x7 made a list, and I had a few issues with it. I guess the primary one is that I didn't make it. Another is Katana-Ya. It is pretty rare that I would steer anyone away from barbecued pork, but, I have three words for you: Fried chicken ramen.
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