Weekends are crowded at Echo Park Lake, but it seems a portion of the hood likes to sun-and-run at El Matador, too. A Sunday visit to the beach, north of Zuma, brought us face-to-face with lots of people we see in northeast LA. We ran into two pairs of folks from Echo Park and one group from nearby in Glendale. Our friend and EP neighbor Roger Guenveure Smith, a mid-afternoon arrival at the shore, said he ALWAYS runs into Echo Park neighbors at El Matador. He suggested a carpool sign-up at Chango Coffeehouse. Not a bad idea, not a bad idea at all. Meanwhile, Jonathan Lethem's hipsters in his latest novel wouldn't go to any beach other than Matador. But Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet characters all seem to be from downtown and Silver Lake, and I didn't spot any of them this past Sunday.