Photo by Ted Soqui

The crowd at the Best Fish Taco in Ensenada, getting ready to laugh.

It's just after 10 p.m. and already five comedians have done their thing when comic Eddie Pepitone strides up to start his set. Short, bald and decidedly unhinged, Pepitone gives the air of a blue-collar Buddha: a wizened, workaday sage who happens to be slightly crazy-eyed.

Getting right to the point, he starts his trademark screaming.

"Let's address the elephant in the room," he shrieks. "We are out-fucking-side a fish taco place -- things are not going well for ANYONE!"

Pepitone is in the outdoor faux-cabana of the venerable Los Feliz taco hut Best Fish Taco in Ensenada -- a spot that looks like a cross between a Corona Light commercial and Keanu Reeves' man cave. Normally you'd come here to eat fish and/or shrimp tacos, and gulp down any number of canned sodas. And yet, for the 11th time on alternating Tuesdays (the first and third of every month), the hip, the punk and the snarky are crowded here under stage lights, listening to some comedy.

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Kristen Veng-Pederson

Martin Cizmar lost 100 pounds in less than a year, and all he had to do was give up Slurpees.

Well, he also biked to work occasionally. And quit drinking full-calorie beer. What he didn't do was try the Paleo Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Cookie Diet or Jenny Craig. He didn't join a gym, and he didn't shell out for expensive pre-calorie-counted meals. Instead he just ... ate less. And it worked. He chronicles the results in his new book Chubster: A Hipster's Guide to Losing Weight , a food guide with a practical side.

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photobucket (bella_13_SPMS)

So far, no signs of the apocalypse for the startup-company-for-startups kickstarter.com, a website successfully proving that frugal, unemployed Americans do care about things enough to donate a dollar to a dreamer.

February brought about two million-dollar projects that amazingly surpassed their fundraising goals, and of course about a million projects that weren't worth two dollars.

Surfing though the ideas of its hopefuls, we found a few Los Angeles-based, Los Angeles-bettered projects worth looking into your Google wallet for, in no particular order:

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Photo by Calvin Lee

Main course inspired by Ed Ruscha's painting LACMA on Fire

"You screwed up," chef John Rivera Sedlar told Getty curator Andrew Perchuk in the months before Pacific Standard Time began. The sprawling, Getty-funded celebration of postwar SoCal art should have included food. But Perchuk, already working to facilitate exhibitions at 60-plus institutions and organizing his own show, felt he had plenty to worry about besides appetizers and entrees. Later, though, after the frenzy surrounding PST's launch subsided, he decided Sedlar was right: PST should include food.

After all, didn't gallerist Everrett Ellin open the Chez La Vie café beside his original West Hollywood gallery in 1958, to serve the art-viewing public? Didn't dealer Virginia Dwan install working fountains by sculptor Jean Tinguely in homes of collectors before hosting a progressive dinner, plying guests with Champagne as they bussed from house to house? And hasn't Al's Café, the 4-month-long pop-up restaurant artist Al Ruppersberg staged in 1969, where he sold plates of art rather than food, become almost mythic for the way it made conceptual art a social experience?

The official PST menu, which debuted Saturday at Sedlar's year-old West Hollywood restaurant Playa and will be available to all diners starting Tuesday, Feb. 7, is far sleeker, honed and literal in its approach to food-as-art than anything I imagine Ruppersberg, Ellin or even the posh Dwan served when they dabbled in dining years ago.

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Courtesy of DooD

Andrea Carrano of DooD, and his dog George

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Andrea Carrano was raised in Italy, which means he grew up with table-fed canines. That also was true of his brother-in-law, Ali Niroomand, who grew up in France.

"Very few people were buying store-bought dog food there," Carrano says. "My parents would give the dogs basically table scraps, chicken leftovers and brown rice."

Fast-forward a few decades, when, weary of industrial-size bags of puppy chow and lethargic pets, the Carrano and Niroomand families again began feeding their pups homemade food. They noticed a world of difference: Their pets' tails were waggier and their breath was almost pleasant (which, for a dog, is saying something).

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Away from street performers dressed as sort of sexy cops and cardboard Transformers, the new Rolling Stone Restaurant faces the California Pizza Kitchen on the upper floors of the Hollywood and Highland Center. In front of the restaurant, tourists mosey around, mouths open, cameras out, photographing the details of the mini-Vegas-meets-tiny-Times Square-styled complex.

The restaurant's exterior is mallish, the interior is dark and faux industrial Chicago sleek. A few stop young tourists stop to film the restaurant's menu displayed on an empty hostess' kiosk, then slowly pan up to the iconic Rolling Stone logo. They get their shot, turn around and leave.

Even for tourists, the Hollywood and Highland Center has all the appeal of a colon cleanse; just get it over with.

It is here that Rolling Stone chose to launch the brand's first's foray into a dining establishment, which will act as a test site before launching another restaurant in New York City, probably in midtown.

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Is that lemonade in your cup? Beyonce did the master cleanse for her role in Dreamgirls

In our new column, First Person, L.A. writers tackle the good, the bad and the funny about life as they know it.

Deciding to go on the master cleanse in December was either inspired or idiotic. Since I got the idea while in the far-too-familiar haze of a wine buzz, I blame it on the alcohol.

You're probably aware of the idea, if not the details. The cleanse, also known as the lemonade diet, went mainstream when Beyoncé used it in 2006 to lose weight for her role in Dreamgirls. These days, buying 15 lemons, a jug of maple syrup and a canister of cayenne pepper in L.A. telegraphs exactly what you're up to -- and no one lifts an eyebrow.

But the fast, which requires eating no solids and drinking a juice made from the above ingredients for no less than 10 days, wasn't created to shrink starlets. A health guru concocted the plan in the 1940s as a detox. As the Weekly's assistant music editor, I was going out too much and drinking too much of whichever poison was placed on the bar in front of me. I needed a detox, desperately.
But in December? The season of open bars and heavily laden buffet tables? I faltered until a friend gave me the side eye. "The most hard-core chicks I knew in college never lasted more than three days." That sounded like a challenge.

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Nanette Gonzales

Breakfast for dinner

Also check out our slideshow by Nanette Gonzales on The Pancakes and Booze Art Show
Some gallery owners organizing a show might draw inspiration from their college degrees in art history. But when Tom Kirlin curated his first art show, he was inspired by college memories of drunken pancake breakfasts.

Three years ago, Kirlin, a 33-year-old Arizona native, was working in Hollywood as a cameraman when he rented a warehouse downtown and threw an art, alcohol and pancake party for an artist friend.

"It was something that I always did in college," Kirlin says. "You'd go out and drink all night long, and then the only place that's open for 24 hours is IHOP."

The Pancakes & Booze art show, billed as the largest underground art show in Los Angeles, takes place locally about once every three months now. The latest installment, a "Best of" show representing over 100 Pancakes & Booze artists, happened this past weekend.

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The The Postmodern KFC at 340 N. Western Avenue in Koreatown. Get it? It's a chicken and a bucket!

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The reports that the mayor wants Occupy L.A. to leave City Hall raise the question: if they do have to leave, where would they go?

The occupiers have already expanded to obvious places like UCLA and Bank of America Plaza. L.A.'s own Wall Street has been slightly occupied for years now (it is smack in the middle of Skid Row, after all) and most of their other options seem worse than where they are. The city at one point offered office space at a former B. Dalton bookstore, though that offer was rescinded and rejected.

So what about those other places that we Angelenos love to hate, or the ones that we love to love a little too much -- the places that might as well be occupied?

Here are our suggestions for places in L.A. for the occupiers to consider.

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