Solo traveler extraordinaire. Looking for vegan food.
Seabirds & Shelbys 5.17.25
My favorite Long Beach vegan restaurant closed, and I’m sad. It feels like there’s nothing to eat in Long Beach anymore. Fortunately they still have one location in Orange County, but part of the fun of eating out is that you can put in a to-go order and then eat it at home in your pajamas (which is easy when the restaurant is 0.6 miles away but trickier when it’s 19.7 miles away). This is their most famous dessert, the Chaffle. It’s churro batter pressed into a waffle shape and dipped in cinnamon and sugar topped with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and chopped walnuts.
They have the best tomato soup and grilled cheese. The sandwich is cashew gruyere, basil avocado pesto, and American cheese on Old Town sourdough.
My favorite brunch entree is Chipotle Florentine. It’s polenta cakes topped with spinach, avocado, tofu rounds, chipotle hollandaise, and green onion (with a house salad).
Fortunately for me, my dad wanted to attend the Carroll Shelby Tribute and Car Show at the Segerstrom Shelby Event Center, which also happens to be in Orange County (only 11.1 miles from Seabirds), and he invited me to attend and go out for vegan food afterwards.
The Segerstrom Shelby Event Center is part museum part event space. They donate their profits to The Shriners for Children Medical Center and The Carroll Shelby Foundation.
The building’s parking lot was too small for the show, so they filled the streets of Irvine with cars.
Carroll Shelby signed a lot of dashboards in his day.
The building next door turned out to be the Shelby Legendary Cars dealership. I’ve never seen so many Shelbys in one place, it was so cool. (They also had prices on the windshields, the lowest was in the mid-$80,000s.)
The tribute part of the event included a rev. It was so, so loud (which is good because if Carroll Shelby is able to hear from wherever he is, he would have heard this).
