What Was Eating Eve Babitz?

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Staring into a coffee spoon at Canter’s, with the deli’s famous ceiling reflected back at me, I couldn’t help but wonder how Eve Babitz saw the kaleidoscopic autumn leaves at 3 a.m., blasted out of her mind on LSD and soaking up Sunset Strip with a bagel and lox.

I had flown to Los Angeles the night before, just a few months after Babitz died at age 74, to eat in her footsteps. A smoked fish platter seemed like a good way to start. Canter’s is among Babitz’s restaurant haunts that’s still open, serving the same meals the writer, groupie, artist, and great defender of L.A. dares readers not to crave in her essays and fiction.

Babitz announced herself a food writer from the dedication of her debut Eve’s Hollywood—where crab puffs, deviled marrow bones, and See’s Candy get equal billing with Annie Leibovitz and Obertrol—to the tuna sandwich cravings she recorded as she recovered from life-altering, third-degree burns. She had better known vices, for sure. “I only learn anything through my body,” wrote the equal opportunity pleasure seeker in Black Swans.

However, I fell in love—and identify most—with Babitz as an epic eater, and in her honor, I engaged in the culinary equivalent of squalid overboogie: fat carnitas burritos, hot dogs, too many martinis, loukaniko for breakfast, mounds of pasta, caviar.

At Barney’s Beanery, “just this wreck of a West Hollywood chili joint” with “so much Jim in the air” (as in Morrison), Babitz seduced the who’s who of the L.A. art scene. When I showed up already tipsy, the band stickers, a High Life (Babitz’s choice Rainier Ale is no longer available), and a cup of chili with raw onions resurrected Eve on the cheap.

The more-is-more writer really did love mingling sex and pungent foods. Babitz frequented red-sauce stalwart Dan Tana’s, “where everybody picks each other up and eats garlic.” Her favorite spinach salad, dressed with a punchy anchovy vinaigrette and loaded with blue cheese, is a meal in itself, and I smelled her ghost in spaghetti aglio e olio.

Babitz played a lady on the Polo Lounge’s pink patio for afternoon Bloody Marys and Irish coffees or a light lunch (“they don’t believe anyone should eat more than three shrimp despite what they charge you”). People-watching with a McCarthy salad and Champagne is still one of the more fabulous ways to spend an hour in L.A.

For a more carnal affair, I drove downtown to Cielito Lindo for taquitos. Filled with beef, fried in lard, and smothered with avocado sauce, Babitz ordered eight at a time (I can’t imagine eating more than four) and confessed to licking her plate clean in “The Landmark,” an essay dedicated to M.F.K. Fisher.

The closest I felt to full Babitz was at Musso & Frank, two martinis deep and a table piled with throw-back dishes from the 103-year-old restaurant: oysters, blue cheese-stuffed celery, crab louie, escargots, fettuccine Alfredo, calf’s liver, and Babitz’s go-to sandabs and creamed spinach.

Lili Anolik, Babitz’s biographer, took the writer to Mussos in her final, reclusive years. Babitz was sober. The sex dried up. But the sandabs, slathered in lemon-butter sauce, remained—for Eve and all of us chasing her glory.

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