I don't cook much, but I still love browsing through cooking supply stores. Sur La Table is such a place, filled with gadgets I'll never use, at prices I can never justify paying. But again, it's fun to browse.
A new one will open up at the Irvine Spectrum soon — the second in OC — occupying the space vacated by The Sharper Image, which was also another place I loved to window shop, if only to ask the perennial question, “Who buys this crap?”
Of course, the answer to that is: practically nobody.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.