Apple Pan or alternatively “Showdown at the Larry David Corral”
Our hickory burger expedition to the Apple Pan started on a great note. Traffic was light. The fall air was crisp and perfectly complemented the November sunshine. To top it all off, the parking spot right outside opened up! Nothing could stop the awesomeness that was this Saturday afternoon. Nothing!
Let me make a brief aside here to explain the line system to the uninitiated. The ‘Pan consists of one long counter that is usually filled to capacity. One enters the room and waits patiently behind the counter until spots open up. Everyone in the room waiting who gets there before you gets seated before you. Everyone in the room who gets there after you gets seated after you. It is a time-tested system that has operating at the ‘Pan for the 10 years that I have gone there. Every once in awhile some yahoo comes by and claims that if the seat directly in front of you opens up, you have a right to that seat regardless of when you came into the room. That is NOT the system and usually this person is straightened out really quickly.
So my friend Jon and I are enjoying our good karma when it all came to a screeching halt. In strolls in the frailest, oldest 90-year old woman in a wheelchair with her two daughters. The word frail does not even begin to describe this woman. If Miss Havisham from “Great Expectations” morphed with Adam Sandler’s grandmother from “Happy Gilmore”, you would be left with this woman. Except in a wheelchair.
I immediate sense something amiss. I don’t know why, but I immediately think to myself, “this wheelchair-bound woman’s daughters are going to try to jump the line.” And five minutes later, when 3 seats open up on the other side of the counter, they make a break for the seats! This would have constituted a line-jump of 3 parties. THIS SHALL NOT STAND.
I half-sprint over to the seats now occupied by a frail, elderly wheelchair-bound woman and her two daughters and firmly declare: “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be rude, but WE WERE HERE FIRST.” We proceed to displace the handicapped party to order our hickory burgers. The integrity of the line system at the ‘Pan having been preserved, we eat our double-Tillamook burgers and banana creme pie in relative, if uneasy silence.
7 hours after the meal, I ask Jon if we would have enjoyed the meal more if we had simply let it go and allowed the women to break the rules of the line.
“Yup” he softly replied.
And thus our otherwise perfect Saturday was irrevocably blemished by my unwavering enforcement of a hamburger counter line. - H. Lee
P.s. I regret nothing and if I had to do it over again, I’d do the exact same thing.
Apple Pan, 10801 W Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90064, (310) 475-3585
