Desperately seeking Arby's. With the Hollywood location closed, I set out to find my first beef 'n' cheddar
Growing up in Los Angeles, I passed the 10-gallon Arby’s hat on Sunset Boulevard frequently. I always viewed the fast food chain, known for its roast beef and cheddar sandwiches, with mild curiosity, but never quite enough to actually venture inside.
Arby’s came up in conversation over the years with my good friend Jo Stougaard, typically after a few libations. Her first job as a teenager was working at an Arby’s in West Covina. She was often flabbergasted by the fact that I’d never been. "Really?" "But you grew up in Los Angeles." "Never?" "Still?"
We said we’d go together to the one we passed so often on Sunset Boulevard, someday.
Someday never came, and then it closed. Earlier this month, the Arby’s shuttered after 55 years in Hollywood, citing increased food costs, inflation and the new minimum wage law for fast-food workers in California. The hat, which often seemed as tall as the sky, was a landmark in the city. Even I romanticized the restaurant, a real slice of a dying Americana. Fans lamented the loss to the neighborhood, already a hyper-modernizing area populated by salad and sushi chains just down the block.
Stougaard looks back at her four years working at the Arby’s on North Azuza Avenue in West Covina fondly. The year was 1979. She remembers having to answer the phone with a cheery “America’s Roast Beef Yes Sir.” She can still picture the button she hit with her hip to steam the buns and the way the hunks of raw meat arrived in plastic pouches before they were roasted in the oven and sliced. She remembers the giant plastic buckets of coleslaw she mixed and the potato cakes she fried. Back then, the chain served triangular hash browns in place of fries.
And she remembers the Arby’s lovers, the name her colleagues assigned to the couple from the dentist’s office down the road who would come and have sex in a van in the back of the parking lot. The dentist was married. The woman was much younger, his employee, and not his wife.
When I learned of the Hollywood closure, I called Stougaard to let her know we’d never get our Sunset Boulevard Arby’s date.
“My favorite was the classic beef and cheddar on an onion roll,” she said. “It was so compressed the cheese melted into the bun and the meat. It was like one glob of comfort. And that horsey sauce!”
I like beef, cheddar and onion rolls. Horsey sauce sounds like magic sauce. Why had I been sleeping on Arby’s all these years?
Invigorated by a new determination to try the chain, I set out to find the closest Arby’s to central Los Angeles. Without the Hollywood restaurant, I’d need to travel south to Inglewood, farther southwest into Long Beach or Huntington Beach, or north into the San Fernando Valley.
A sense of nostalgia for a restaurant I’d never visited led me to the location in Huntington Beach. It’s one of the few wagon-style buildings left with its own hat sign lit up in neon lights. There is a cow design in the tile floor of the dining room. Like the Hollywood location, this one was also built in 1969.
It’s not nearly as crowded as the In-N-Out next door, but there’s a steady line on Wednesday evening. I ignore the more recent menu additions like the fried chicken sandwich and wraps and focus on the original sandwiches. I leave with a paper bag filled with a classic roast beef, a classic roast beef and cheddar and a classic roast beef and natural cheddar (for a $1.09 additional charge), a small order of curly fries, a Jamocha shake and a four-piece mozzarella sticks. I don’t believe mozzarella sticks were available on the original menu, but I happen to enjoy mozzarella sticks and never hesitate if I see them on a menu.
I found a seat on the patio and unwrapped the sandwiches under the neon glow of the sign. Though the classic roast beef is advertised as having a sesame seed bun, all three of my sandwiches were served on an onion roll, the tops burnished and scattered with specks of toasted alliums. The parts of the bun that had been toasted before steamed were tough. The untoasted steamed patches were pleasantly soft.
I never truly understood the meaning of “thinly sliced” until that evening. The roast beef was shaved impossibly thin, the greyish-pink ribbons nearly translucent. The texture was slightly rubbery, like an indistinguishable lunch meat. And there was a gush of salty liquid with each bite, with none of the chew I’ve come to associate with roast beef, or any meat.
The beef on the beef and natural cheddar was draped on a limp slice of waxy cheese, and the bottom bun was smothered in what the chain calls Red Ranch sauce. It brought to mind an ultra sugary honey barbecue.
The classic beef and cheddar swaps the slice of cheese for a pale sauce that tasted suspiciously like the cheese sauce you fashion out of milk and the powder packet from the Kraft instant macaroni and cheese boxes.
As instructed by Stougaard, I squeezed about half a packet of the horsey sauce onto each bite. The sting of the creamy horseradish exponentially improved anything it touched.
I don’t know that I’ve had a more enjoyable, or curlier, curly fry. Each one featured a tight ring of potato. I even counted 10 intact rings on one fry. I was tempted to save it, but decided to eat it instead. The mozzarella sticks were hard logs of cheese in the middle surrounded by thick breading saturated with grease.
I sucked down the Jamocha shake, which was advertised as chocolate and coffee-flavored. I reached the bottom of the cup without ever detecting the coffee.
It turns out that I have not been sleeping on Arby’s all these years. But I’m glad I tried it. And if I ever get a craving for curly fries, creamy horseradish sauce and a decent coffee-chocolate shake that presents as chocolate, I know just the wagon-style building to visit.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
