By L.E. Leone

le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

Don't think the chicken farmer doesn't have a new favorite coffee house in San Francisco too. Spike's, on 19th just off of Castro. With bins and bins of beans and beans framed by some pretty beautiful tile work, the smell of coffee alone in this little joint is thick and rich enough to hold your eyes open.

So it was a good time to read, so I was reading. And every time I looked up from my book I saw something else good to look at. They have bubble-gum cigars. They have all kinds of cool candies. They have Pop-Tarts, in addition to all the usual coffeehouse fare: pastries, bagels, and doughnuts according to the menu on the wall but I didn't see any doughnuts.

But my favorite thing about my new favorite coffee house is that they have grape pop – in a bottle. They have other kinds and colors of sody pop too, but it was the grape caught my wide open eyes because I know lots of places that have bottles of root beer, orange, cola, et cetera, but who the hell else has grape?

Now, if I can only talk old Spike into serving barbecue, to go with it... Dream on, you say, but I think Spike might be a dog, so this could be easier than you think. Dogs love barbecue almost as much as chicken farmers.

Anyway, it was first thing in the morning (not that I won't eat barbecue for breakfast; try me, Spike) ... so I had some oatmeal with my coffee. And that's all well and good and healthy and all, but I can't really review it because it was only a package of that instant just-add-water stuff. Wait, what am I saying? I can review that. It was great! It cost 75 cents, same as a bubble-gum cigar, if I remember right.

But oatmeal ain't a meal, so I went down to my old favorite coffee house, Java Supreme (which still rocks, by the way), to wait with two more cups of coffee for Earl Butter to wake up. We were going to go downtown to the public library to see Jack Kerouac's typewritten manuscroll on display. On the Road not being a meal either, exactly, we found this sushi place on Van Ness advertises 50 percent off. My new favorite sushi place. Sushi King, it's called.

Now, you figure, OK, if they're going to give you 50 percent off, then it stands to reason the sticker prices are going to be twice what they should be. I speak Cheapese. So I was not the least bit fazed or discouraged to see that saba, for example, was priced at $4 an order (two pieces). Should be two bucks ... is two bucks. Perfect.

So we ordered some saba, some snapper ($4), hamachi ($5.75), shrimp ($4), eel ($5.50), surf clam ($4), squid ($4). What else? Yeah, one roll, cucumber, for good measure ($3.99). You're good at math: Twice the price, half off, sunrise, sunset, the Earth turns round and round, time marches on, and all is well. Right?

Football highlights on TV. Late '70s, early '80s on the radio, beautiful day outside, good miso soup, Kerouac's looming, Butter's cracking me up, here comes our order and every piece of sushi is about half the size of a full-grown piece of sushi, throwing off all the math. We've been double-crossed by my new favorite sushi place.

King Sushi, Sushi King, I don't believe in karma, personally, and maybe you don't either. (Lord knows I don't believe in Jesus Christ.) But I believe in you because I had you for lunch. That's why you're my new favorite sushi place. You exist! If you want to do right by the chicken farmer, you're going to have to check your math. I do believe in math, and I do believe that half-sized twice-the-price sushi needs to be 75 percent off, by my calculator, to even out and boil down to Cheap Eats, which is roughly a buck apiece, two bucks an order for the cheap stuff – the saba, snapper, squid, etc.

The surf clams sure were pretty. But this is not high-end sushi. Some of it wasn't even that great. The saba was weak. And I'm done talking about it now because I already know what the moral of the story is, so to speak. That there is no justice. I knew that. I know that. So why do I keep expecting it?

Answer: Too much coffee.

SFBG

SUSHI KING Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner: Daily, 5 p.m.-10 p.m. 800 Van Ness, SF (415) 775-5800 Takeout available Beer and wine AE/MC/V Wheelchair accessible