I'm going to HNL tomorrow and will be stopping at LAX for 3 hours. Do any of you know any nice place like a restaurant, etc at LAX that we can go to ? If there is nothing special we'll just hit the CRC so no problem here.

Thanks for any help !

Encounter is a very nice and fun restaurant and bar. It's that huge multi-arched futuristic looking themed building out in front of the terminals. You can walk to it.


[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited 08-28-2000).]

Daily Grill in Terminal 2 (pretty sure that's the terminal it's in).

Never, repeat NEVER eat at an airport restaurant in the USA. Grab a free hotel shuttle to your favorite hotel and eat there. Always cheaper and better. The hotels keep re-flagging, but Hyatt (1st) and Marriott (2nd) are my nice LAX favorites.

Ditto PremEx as usual. Encounter is a unique experience.

If you have time take the free parking lot shuttle to lot C and watch the 747s land over your head.

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If you have the inclination, people watch...then find a strategic spot and aircraft watch.

If you use Mister Nice's suggestion, just don't go to the LAX Hilton for a meal. Bleah! You'd be better off at the Carl's Jr on the next block. I stopped staying at that Hilton just because the food is so awful.

...and if you DO go to Encounter, get the Calamari. It's excellent!

Encounter gets my vote too. If you're there during the day, there's also an observation deck above the restaurant.

QuietLion, shhh on Lot C...

A utilitarian suggestion...

Head over to the Bradley Int'l Terminal and get yourself an INSPass so you can fly through immigration!

JL

Thanks guys for all the info. We'll probably go to Encounter
Sounds pretty good !

Thanks and see you all in 10 days ( hopefully with the trip report )

Walk over to the In and Out Burger.

Greatest fast food in my opinion.

Get a cab and go over to the LA Wine Company. It's over towards the Marina and is within 5 miles. The only problem is what to do with the wine that you buy. <G>

Perhaps we could do a wine tasting in a board room at a airline club!!

Originally posted to FIDO-Cooking Jan 1999: I straggled into Encounter and was given an excellent table with a view of the Emirates Airlines terminal. I had either rare ahi tuna in mind or else a filet steak; but neither of the treatments they were offering sounded
all that interesting - the tuna was done with things that either I didn't like or was allergic to, I forget; the filet was presented the same way as it was several months ago when Manny and Benita and I ate there. It was between the NY steak and the veal chop. The
latter won out, because it was to be served with "habanero chili sauce," and the steak had cream sauce.
I started with an order of "sauteed mixed mushrooms," which came as a huge mound of regular mushrooms with a few shiitakes thrown in to avoid a charge of fraud. It was tasty but wildly over peppered with white pepper, a flavor I can do without. This was okay with the
rosemary loaf and the French baguette in the bread basket. Then I went on to the veal chop, which I ordered medium rare. What came was this puny overcooked thing, and I sent it back after dissecting it and finding not a drop of pinkness. The waitress, who appeared to
almost be expecting me to do so, said no problem ... came back about 15 minutes later with a humongous giganto chop. Looked like a cut of prime rib, you know, the kind that has the bone hanging over the side, that sort of thing. A $50 chop at half the price. Guess
what. It was dead raw in the middle. I did a bunch of surgery on it and had as much properly cooked veal chop as I could eat, off the edges and surfaces; I ate around the middle and was left with a perfectly good 4-oz veal cutlet on my plate, completely raw. The
habanero sauce was an ordinary brown sauce that was thickened with dried cayenne pepper and possibly a hint of dried habanero powder. It had a modest kick to it, but the flavor was such that I couldn't imagine anyone but me or my father actually enjoying it. Along
with came a big mound of vanilla-flavored mashed sweet potatoes (excellent - try it sometime - just like bourbon mashed potatoes but suitable for a Ruth), some very nice baby asparagus, some very nice baby carrots, and some shriveled and nasty baby green beans.

I hope that was entertaining if not too edifying or encouraging. Here's the rest of it:
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Originally posted in FIDO-Cooking 1/99, cotd: I drank beer through all this. Interesting thought. I didn't go to the bathroom until I arrived in Boston; maybe it was 3.2 beer?
LAX is in a state of total chaos. We boarded through a plywood tunnel in the new Terminal 8; Manny remarked that it looked like a third-world country (a common criticism for airports these days - when Benita and I had arrived in Birmingham this summer the air
conditioning at the airport was out, and they had these puny fans all over the place trying to circulate the air); my view is that no self-respecting third-world country would allow its airports to be in the condition that many US airports are finding themselves in.
And there were all these contradictory signs, which meant that I worked off a good portion of my calories wandering to and fro: there isn't an entrance that I could find to Terminal 8; you have to enter through Terminal 7, which says quite clearly "International";
but I didn't know that and went all the way to Terminal 6, where it turns out that the old United counters are taken by Delta; so one hoofs to 7, where the international check-in is, and then, thoroughly confused, one is eventually directed to 8, which is like at
the edge of nowhere. I got checked for hidden explosives. They didn't find any. I'd been checked for the same thing in Phoenix as well. Do I look like a terrorist? Who knows.

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Cheers
Michael *G