Pickled eggs at the 100-year-old Joe Jost's in Long Beach

I like to make up fantastic stories for people I meet in bars. I can talk for hours, fueled by just a sip of vodka and my imagination.

The deeper the bar, the better. In a dark room where it's always night, the $3 I pay to see a cover band consisting of the owner's brother, nephew and neighbor is well worth the price of admission. Is the woman who winks at the drummer while sipping her Chardonnay his mother, his girlfriend or his director?

Pubs are a very special thing, where most people I meet have lives far more interesting than mine, and far more interesting than the ones I could ever imagine for them. It is a world that exists here and now for me and no one else.

My current favorite is Joe Jost's, the nearly 100-year-old bar in Long Beach (it's 100 years old in August). I'm decades late to Joe Jost's fan club, but I'm still a current member.

On the way back to our cars after lunch in Cambodia City, a friend introduces me to the bar. He utters the words “pickled eggs” and “100 years old” and despite the plate of lok lak and bowl of rice noodle soup we just finished, I can't resist.

It's just after 2 p.m. on a Monday. The afternoon sun shines through the dusty windows and there is a cheerful atmosphere when drinking at Joe Jost's.

Without a free bar stool or a free seat at one of the scarred wooden tables, we find a strange half-table that reminds me of the tables from middle school with the chairs attached. It's probably meant for two, but three of us squeezed in.

The customers are mostly men who look like my late grandfather, stuffed elbow to elbow, guzzling schooners of golden beer and scooping up pretzel sticks and neon-colored pickled eggs with genuine zeal. The 1972 Rolling Stones shirt on a man in the corner was most likely purchased at the actual concert and not at Urban Outfitters.

A moose head shares the property with a surfboard on the wall. Behind the bar are bottles and bobbleheads, dozens of framed photos of sports teams, men with cars and surfboards, and plaques of unknown origin. This is just the front bar. In the back are pool tables and hanging calendars with women in bikinis.

There's a line to order, but the bartenders are efficient. The couple in front of me buys a hat from one of the dozens on display. They are tourists who heard about the bar from a friend who recently moved to the area. Could you also buy a shirt?

I ask the bartender if it's that busy every Monday at 2 p.m.

“Sura is,” he says. “It is always a lot going on.”

I order a Joe's Special, the first thing on the menu on the board. It's a makeshift sandwich with a pickle skewer nestled in a split Polish sausage and a slice of cheese on two pieces of rye bread smeared with spicy mustard. Then I look around and ask what's in the paper bowls in front of every other chef at the bar.

“It's the Joe's Special without bread,” the bartender explains. “Like a charcuterie board.”

Here the term charcuterie board is more of a state of mind. I'm ordering one of those too.

Another bartender begins cutting up a sausage with a thin, white-handled knife that looks like the one I lost at the dollar store in my college dorm room. He stacks the sausage slices on a paper bowl filled with pretzel sticks. He slices two pieces of white cheese and puts them on the stack. Then comes a splash of mustard, a slice of red onion and two cucumber sticks. He hands the plate to the bartender who took my order and starts on my sandwich.

“Do you want a pickled egg?” He asks. He realizes it's my first time.

I do.

With a slotted spoon he fishes an egg out of a tub that used to contain individually wrapped candies in a pharmacy. He tosses some banana peppers into my bowl, then sprinkles some black pepper on the egg before handing it to me.

While waiting for the food, I google the bar and find an article from LA Taco that tells me the bar goes through more than 450 pickled eggs per day. That seems about right.

The root beer tap the bar is known for isn't working, so we order cans of Barq's. The two specials and three sodas cost me $14 including tip, and the entire exchange takes about two minutes.

I pierce a sausage with a pretzel stick, dip it in a little mustard and top the meat stick with a piece of cheese. Am I doing this right?

The mustard is the kind that gets up your nose and leaves a tear in your eye. I appreciate that the pretzels are fresh and salty. There is nothing profound about the egg, firmer than I would ever cook an egg, but strangely addictive in texture and taste. I'm starting to understand why this place has been around for 100 years.

Joe's Special has everything that makes a good sandwich. The rye is pillow-soft and has a crispy crust. The sausage is warm. The cucumber spear is sour and crispy. There is enough mustard to get you into a state similar to sobriety. The cheese slice doesn't melt completely, but rather melts into the bread. You can grip the whole thing with one hand. You can put down your drink and use two of them.

If you offered me this combination of ingredients in a different setting, I might decline. But with alternating bites of sandwich, pretzel and egg and a sip of ice-cold root beer as the sounds of the bar lull me into a pleasant afternoon haze, there's no other place I'd rather be. And nothing else I would rather eat. Rapture appears on a Joe Jost's special at 2 p.m. on a Monday.