Weekly Culture Collection is a column that gives the best things to eat, see and do near Pepperdine, Malibu and the surrounding Los Angeles area. It’s like The New Yorker’s Goings on About Town section but not as high-brow, and there is no dandy with an eyeglass. It also has nothing to do with New York.
This week’s collection gives the best things to eat, see and do for Halloween weekend.
EAT
Various Locations
Salt & Straw is known for their outlandish ice cream concoctions. Think buttered mashed potatoes for November flavors and their signature Black Olive Brittle & Goat Cheese. Beyond the weird, there is also the good, the spectacular, and perhaps, more fitting, the spooktacular.
Salt & Straw’s Halloween flavors rise to the same level of weird as buttered mashed potatoes, and perhaps, far more strange. “Creepy Crawly Critters” looks like mint chip ice cream at first glance but replace the chips with real dark chocolate covered crickets and coconut toffee-brittle mealworms, and its a concoction fit for a “Fear Factor” competition. There’s also Dracula’s Blood pudding, a mix of spices, cream and real blood pudding fit for, well, likely no real person’s culinary palate.
There are also tamer flavors with nicer names like “The Great Candycopia,” a mélange of homemade candy mixed with butterscotch ice cream, “Freckle and Hyde Potion,” a sorbet of sorts populated with convoluted ingredients (i.e., coconut ash coated pop rocks), and “The Essence of Ghost,” an ambiguously described ice cream described by Salt & Straw as a culinary experience where “jets of tasty gray pass through the deep foggy sherbet.”
SEE
ALL NIGHT HORRORTHON AT THE AERO THEATRE
Oct. 28 — 7:30 p.m.-11 p.m., 1328 Montana Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90403
The Aero Theatre — formerly a 24-hour movie theater for aircraft workers working odd shifts — will be transformed for Halloween into the grounds for a bona fide all-night “Horrorthon.”
The films shown are not the canonical Halloween flicks, a movie in the “Scream” franchise, a Stephen King movie or a mild Disney Halloween movie like “Halloweentown.” Rather, movies like “An American Werewolf in London,” “Popcorn,” and “The Tingler” are some of the obscure movies at the Horrorthon. Marketed as the “rowdiest and most bizarre sleepover you’ll ever attend” by the Aero Theatre, the “Horrorthon” subverts the traditional sleepover experience and transforms it into something singular and arresting. Free food, giveaways and bizarre special appearances by a wide cast of characters are all part of the all-night “Horrorthon.”
DO
Oct. 27 — 3 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Malibu Bluffs Park
What kind of carnival begins at 3 p.m. and ends at 6 p.m? A carnival in Malibu, where the median closing time for stores is 4 p.m. and evening plans are obliterated. The annual Malibu Halloween Carnival is perhaps more geared for the young crowd. There’s a costume parade, games and bounce houses that might elicit frowns if eager adults dared to encroach upon what we righteously deign youthful territory. Rightfully so, as an adult in a bounce house surely cannot end well. But there will also also food trucks, like Border Grill and Sweet Suite Dessert Truck that are equally enticing for kids and adults alike, a unifying element in “kid” territory.
It might not be possible to consume Dracula’s Blood Pudding, attend an all-night “Horrorthon” of obscure Halloween films, or crash a kid-friendly Halloween Party in a single weekend. But perhaps a short reprieve from schoolwork and obligations via activities that veer on the fantastic and flavors that more than push the envelope is exactly what is needed to inaugurate an early Halloween celebration.
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