Friday Funny: Al Fresco on the Freeway

The Onion is so quick to satirize and so close to the mark it can be hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

The latest example: an article about restaurants opening for dining on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. 

In an effort to provide residents with a way to more safely patronize restaurants without fear of contracting Covid-19, Los Angeles officials announced a new initiative Tuesday to designate open-air dining areas along the 101 freeway median. 

The Onion is a totally fake, satirical news site, but this bit of mirth was obviously inspired by real pictures of the massive parking lot for a complex of malls in Glendale, California—a city located just to the the northeast of Los Angeles—set up for "outdoor" dining. As a former resident of Glendale, I can tell you that the parking lot in question is very much a disincentive for visiting that location, but that didn't stop restaurants, and diners, from seeing an opportunity for a touch of normalcy. A much less satirical article by Alissa Walker provides a dispatch from the experience of eating there, and reports that the experience wasn't all terrible.

Any statue observer and lover of Los Angeles will note an error in The Onion's headline, however. Around here, it's THE 101.