This is kind of like trying to describe love.  The kind of love you just suddenly feel and then find yourself musing  “I just knew” to all your friends… the kind of love that floats over your heart, effortless and pleased with itself.

My Love of this week (this month, this year) is Miss Peaches, and nothing but Miss Peaches, the small, painfully appealing hole-in-the-cupboard soul food joint on Lankershim blvd just north of Burbank in North Hollywood.  Lord SAVE me now, did I just suddenly sleep through a plane flight and end up in Baton Rouge?  Or wherever they make amazing Southern food that I never even knew existed in Los Angeles?
I scurried in late on Monday night to visit my foodie friends Jordan and Vivien and immediately forgot I was anywhere but Miss Peaches.  The kind of unique forgetfulness you get when you’re at home for.

Thanksgiving, melding seamlessly into the traditions of comfort, love and unquestionable acceptance.  As welcoming as one’s own kitchen.  Or in Miss Peaches case, some long lost, Southern grandma’s kitchen, made evident by the sweet, theatrically decorated sink beside our table, the jam jars used for water, the thrillingly exposed kitchen where the chefs roamed about as though we all shared the same blood.  But it wasn’t the interior design that made Miss Peaches so remarkable, rather the seamless sudden magic of real food that ran it’s unseen course through the life of it’s surroundings. The food that indeed stops time.

Miss Peaches offers a choice of solid Southern dinner entrees, like pan fried catfish, BBQ chicken, fried chicken, fried pork chops, to name a few, all of which come with a choice of two sides.  Blissful, classic sides that are deeply embedded in the American lexicon of consumption: Baked beans and coleslaw, rib-sticking-pic-nicking potato salad, collard greens and yams…every one of these sides was an iconic, fully realized version of itself, but the yams, oh the yams, so dense and sweet, sticky and spiced like a

Christmas carol on your tongue, they were by far the joy of the night.  “Goddamn the yams!” declared Jordan, as we somberly nodded and savored, widened our eyes or stared at each other with simply stupid grins. And that was the second, tamer version of praise.  The first is only available to those with cable TV.

As for the entrees, Vivien’s fried chicken was so unfathomably juicy that, to again quote Jordan, it seriously “ricochets” off the tongue.  This is serious business folks.  Fried chicken is not my forte in the least, but it doesn’t take a veteran to know that you’ve found a winner when you’re tongue starts having sex with what you’re eating.  I think it’s safe to say this is Miss Peaches specialty.

I didn’t taste Jordan’s BBQ chicken which appeared small at first but was ultimately very filling and generated even more spontaneous praise for it’s deep, dark red and lovely looking BBQ sauce called “daddy’s sweet sauce”.
As for me the meatloaf struck my fancy with chewy, sweet edges of tomato paste and what tasted like small wedges of biscuit inside the loaf.  The whole heavenly hunk of it was smothered with creamy brown gravy and I slowly ate without having to tell myself to take the time to slowly eat it.  Spontaneous magic is Miss Peaches, making happy, leisurely Southerners of us all.

The only time I wasn’t lusting over my homecooked meal was when my wandering eye trailed over to the modest cake displays.  Lemon iced cake, Gooey Butter cake (should be renamed Heroin Cake) a towering Red Velvet cake slice scattered with pecans… all for just $3.50.  My God Miss Peaches knows how to hit it home.  We didn’t even have the nerve to try any cake, however, saving our reverence for the Big Bang theory dinner we had just completed.  Even better the idea of “having an excuse” to come back merely for dessert rises a child-like geyser of joy inside me akin to knowing that there’s going to be another advent calendar tab to open when you wake up.

Lunch specials on Friday and Saturday, in addition to the dinner entree’s at a cheaper price, serve pulled pork and pulled beef sandwich specials.  Yet another special trek to Miss Peaches looms happily in my future.

Perhaps in all of this what I’m really trying to say is Miss Peaches filled a gap in my stomach and my heart that I hadn’t even known was missing.  She gave me not merely a setting, but a home for my social, foodie outings.  She gave me what might be that elusive “American” food I rarely see and have only loosely attributed to diners or coffee shops.  I can’t believe I’ve never had food like this before. But 10 years on Lankershim blvd. and I had to go only once to feel like my soul had been slipping away all those years to build a relationship with her.  Miss Peaches is not simply the creation of a “home cooked” meal, or home-spun atmosphere, it’s the magic of a real home.  Not to mention the owner is possibly the coolest, most easy-going Dad of the restaurant world I’ve ever met.

Miss Peaches

5643 Lankershim Blvd.
North Hollywood, Ca 91601

Tel: (818) 760-4924

$-$$

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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