Restaurant critic Jonathan Gold has been mapping the cuisine and cultural diversity of his home town Los Angeles for three decades and is the only food writer ever to have won a Pulitzer Prize.
He talks to Kathryn Ryan about discovering, eating, and writing about food of all types in LA, from hidden haunts in strip malls to food trucks serving spicy tacos.
Photo: supplied
Gold studied composition at UCLA, but realising writing music was not going to pay the bills, he took up a job as a proofreader and copy editor at a local paper before taking up a role as the classical music critic for the LA Weekly.
A year later the publisher proposed a new restaurant section and was looking for a food editor.
Gold took the role, thinking, “I could at least take my friends out for meals.”
It was during senior year at university that Gold started experiencing Los Angeles through food. He set himself the challenge of eating at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, a long stretch of road that runs through some of the city’s most culturally diverse neighbourhoods.
“I started at one end by a Coca-Cola bottling plant and every day I would go to a different place and I got about 15 miles down the road, but it let me know the city that I hadn’t thought about before.”
“I had always found food a useful prism through which to view communities,” he says.
Sometimes professional geographers call him up, because he tends to know where immigration is going “maybe more quickly than they would because a restaurant or a café or a counter at the back of a grocery shop is often the first thing that will appear in a community, even before the churches”, he says.
He never visits a restaurant he is reviewing just once, and instead prefers to go back numerous times, and to sample the chef’s best meals, even if the restaurant might try to steer him towards the more “accessible” dishes.
“You go to these restaurants and they want you to feel good so they will try to serve you sweet and sour pork, even if sweet and sour pork is not a dish that exists within 4000 miles of wherever it is that you happen to be.
“In Korean restaurants they will always try to serve you barbeque because they know non-Koreans like barbeque, but you try to eat what other people are eating.”
If he is unfamiliar with the resaturant’s particular cuisine he will eat there more than five times to ensure he has a comprehensive understanding of the food and its origins that he is writing about.
One particularly tricky dish was a stinky tofu, which he said smelt like garbage that had been left outside for two weeks in the summertime.
“I realised that the problem wasn’t the food, it was the fact that I was coming to the food from a place that was unable to appreciate it, and I went back and I went back and I went back…
“And after 17 times, I don’t think I got to where I loved the food, but I at least understood enough to write about it. and yes, I did write about it in a way that said, you’re not going to like this, but…”
A lot has changed in the Los Angeles restaurant scene since Gold first started writing about it 30 years ago, and it's impossible to discover restaurants the same way it was when he was the only person writing about them, he says.
“A new restaurant with an untranslated menu from an obscure part of Hainan can open in the San Gabriel Valley and before the first week is done there will be 3 blog reviews and 14 reviews on Yelp,” he says.
The most interesting thing going on in LA at the moment is the arrival of the ‘second-generation chefs’, who Gold says are, “the people who would have been the children of the people I was writing about the first time around”.
“They are Americans in every single way and a lot of them have been classically trained and they come back and instead of trying to do French food or trying to do Italian food the way past generations have done. They are looking at the flavours they have grown up on and the food is often… brilliant.”
When asked what exactly it is that he writes about, Gold says he writes about food and he writes about restaurants, and he’s always had one aim in mind.
“One of the things that I’ve always tried to do, is that I have tried to get people into neighbourhoods and other parts of their city they wouldn’t normally go to.”
Jonathan Gold is in New Zealand for Wellington on Plate, including a screening of the documentary based on him, City of Gold.
