I really don't want to turn this space into nothing more than YouTube videos and dishing about my latest celebrity sighting, but I do have a good story today. (My best celeb story of the weekend is not a sighting per se, but I'm not posting it here; I'll tell people about it privately by request, maybe. Actually it's not a good story, but it's a treeeeemendous first line of a story.)

Los Angeles has an amazing variety of food, but for reasons that I can't explain it's really bad at two things--Chinese takeout and real pizza. You can get brilliant upscale Chinese food, but the takeout is inevitably painful. Pizza is its own rant. You can get shit like the inexplicably popular CPK, and you can get Domino's or (thankfully now) Papa John's. But if you want pizza that is plausibly Italian and has the toppings God intended you to put on a pizza (pepperoni and maybe extra cheese), it hard to come by. And don't throw the "health food" thing at me--the city has the best fast food burgers on Earth three times over, and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Denny's and a donut shop.

Given all that, I've been wanting to try Mulberry Street for a long time. The backstory here is that actress Cathy Moriarty had the same gripe I have a while back, and so she decided to open a New York-style pizzeria. She opened it right in the heart of Beverly Hills. So I went looking for it today. I have to say that it's pretty cool to have that kind of dive-y pizza place right there on Beverly Drive, and it's cool that Moriarty works there herself. There was a woman taking phone orders who was plausibly but not definitively her, and I didn't feel like taking the chance and saying the only thing I'd want to say to her. ("Soapdish is one of the most underrated comedies of all time, and I loved you in it.") The other cool thing about Mulberry Street is that they've got really high-quality headshots of celebs on the wall, and not just has-beens and never-weres.
But even better, there are some cool juxtapositions--my favorite being the Michael Jackson headshot, displayed right next to (and only slightly less prominently than) Hillbilly Jim.

Anyway, this is simply a long way of getting around to explaining why I was walking down Beverly Drive tonight after parking, and how I therefore ran into (not literally) Pete Sampras waiting outside another restaurant. Normally that's a pretty good sighting, but it was even better today when I realized it was the first day of Wimbledon. I also loved the fact that he was wearing basketball shorts and gave off a vibe that suggested he wears them everywhere and no one says a goddamn thing about it.