Fish tacos. Nick Croce. Normally, when someone mentions San Diego to me these rather disparate words come to mind. There’s nothing mysterious about my thinking of fish tacos: Rubio’s in San Diego features them and they’re super. It seems that after first tasting a fish taco in San Felipe, Mexico, Ralph Rubio returned to San Diego to hand-craft his own recipe and introduced America to the fish taco in 1983. I can tell you first-hand that he did a heck of a job crafting.

Why the city reminds me of Nick Croce –– now that’s a little more esoteric. I used to work with a man by that name, and I always think of him when I pass by Croce’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue in San Diego. I’ve never set foot in the place, but I vow to do so in March. Why March?...

I may be the only person in North America –– maybe even the world –– who can make this statement: I have no desire to drink coffee in the morning. I don’t need it to wake me up, and I don’t crave it. In fact, I have another distinction, though not as rare. On workdays I don’t eat breakfast. I’m just not hungry early in the day and I don’t run out of gas before lunch.

Don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy a good cup of coffee with dessert at dinner sometimes. My wife likes it more than I, though, but if she even has a cup of decaf after 10 a.m., she maintains that she won’t sleep that night.

So the bottom line is that you probably won’t be seeing the Bernstein family featured on a coffee commercial on TV.

A friend of mine is, to my thinking, a sommelier of black licorice. I’ve lost track of the number of brands he has given me to try. The smoother the better, he says. I have, as you probably know, fairly strong opinions about food and drink. But I must say that when it comes to black licorice (there are favors like strawberry, but my friend does not acknowledge them), I have trouble differentiating among the good and the bad.

Their most noteworthy characteristic is this: They all get stuck in your teeth. With all of the advances in food science, you’d have thought they’d have fixed that problem. They seemed to have done a pretty darn good job smoothing out peanut butter, so why not licorice?

The licorice problem, then, makes an item in this week’s ACS Weekly PressPac very intriguing to me. It seems that scientists have discovered medicinal properties of licorice root.

I’ve never been a big fan of the needle-in-the-arm inoculation, but it never really bothers me. Likewise, I never have had a problem donating blood or giving a sample to the lab. But when it comes to that simple pricking of the finger for certain blood tests, that’s where we get into uncomfortable territory.

 

It’s not that I feel some intense pain; it’s just a slightly unpleasant experience for me. A few times I’ve had the health professional take a sample from my ear lobe, but that wasn’t a great improvement. Through the years, I have had a special kinship with diabetics, who have had to experience daily needle-pricking for their lifetimes. And whenever I hear about a breakthrough in the blood-testing process for them, I am very happy.

Some people go with the flow when it comes to food. If their mashed potatoes are not piping hot they won’t ever complain to their server. If their coffee could be a little warmer, they drink it anyway. If their entrée doesn’t really look like it was described on the menu, they let it go.

 

And then there’s yours truly: The wait person’s nightmare. If my food is only warm, look out! If the fish sauce doesn’t taste quite right, I’m on it.

 

And added to this philosophy about food, I have very special likes and dislikes. Let me give you just one example: I like ice tea, provided it isn’t diluted with 150 ice cubes. But I don’t like hot tea, unless it’s chai. And I like my chai with milk, the English way.

I know this will jinx me for the rest of my days, but in the name of journalism I am going to say it anyway. I have an amazing immune system and I have no allergies. Diseases and ailments that plague most mortals have passed me by. As an adult, I have never had the flu and I just started taking flu shots a couple of years ago. I have never had an ear infection. I have not had a sick day in the past decade, except for a four-day absence because of a very sore back.

 

So it sometimes is hard for me to feel other people’s pain, unless they have something serious, of course. There was an exception this week, however. You can add pink eye to the list of things I don’t get, but for some reason a report about this apparently annoying malady caught my eye, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Sometimes I like to live on the edge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m probably not likely to climb the Washington Monument (when they fix the earthquake cracks) without a net. But when I’m feeling good and the stars are in alignment I might just surprise some people.

 

Let me give you an example. Even when I’m wearing a nice new white dress shirt and my favorite tie I have been known to visit an Italian restaurant and, rather than go for the safety of the penne or the corkscrew pasta, I order the spaghetti. And I do this this after my history of twirling the long strands around my fork and splashing myself with the rich red sauce more times than I can remember. Once, I cleverly kept my shirt and tie spotless with a linen napkin tied around my neck. I was very proud of myself.