Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  Before heading back, Gold wanted to check out a fast-food restaurant called Malan Han Noodle, in yet another mini-mall. “This place in China is the equivalent of McDonald’s,” he said as he approached the door. “It’s the biggest chain, and it’s owned by a big petroleum company. The noodles it serves are a specialty of Lanzhou, which is known for being one of the most polluted cities in China—and for its hand-pulled noodles.” Inside, Gold sat down and ordered a couple of bowlfuls—large round noodles in beef broth, noodles with brown sauce. The kitchen was visible from the dining area. “Note the Mexican guy rolling out the dough and tossing the noodles,” he said, tucking into his soup. “I don’t know why, but that always makes me extremely happy.”

  • • •

  In foodie mythology, Gold’s traverse of Pico has the significance that Siddhartha’s search for enlightenment does in Buddhism. Kate Krader, the restaurant editor of Food & Wine, says, “The fact that he saw the potential of every restaurant, big and small, fancy and humble, has empowered a lot of people to see the glory in the coffee that’s served at their coffee shop, not to mention the person who’s making the perfect grilled cheese sandwich just down the block from them.” Without him, Krader says, Yelp, a site where amateurs post reviews, would not exist as we know it. For Yelpers, tweeters, bloggers, and other eating documentarians, Gold is also the one to beat.

  Javier Cabral, a would-be protégé of Gold, started writing a blog called The Teenage Glutster: Food, Adolescence, Angst, Hormones and a Really, Really Fast Metabolism when he was sixteen and a junior in high school. (Now that he’s of age, he blogs at The Glutster.) When I first met him, at a Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant with Corinthian columns, wedding bunting, a mural of Angkor Wat on the wall, and the whiff of cleaning fluid in the air, he was nineteen, six feet three, and weighed 135 pounds. He was wearing a purple hooded sweatshirt, a T-shirt with a picture of a pineapple on it, and thick-soled purple leopard print T.U.K.s. At the time, he was living with his parents, first-generation immigrants from Mexico, in the back room of their secondhand-furniture store in East Los Angeles.

  In addition to being Cabral’s “food role model,” Gold was his informant on this restaurant’s unofficial Cambodian menu. From it, Cabral ordered steamed coconut fish cakes, king crab with scallions and jalapeños, and a salad made of a bitter, green, mulberry-shaped fruit. “Sdao is a typical herb in Cambodia,” he said. “Like a broccoli texture with a super-medicinal aftertaste. It’s a shame they don’t have deer today, which is why I came.”

  In his early teens, Cabral told me, he was “non-food-conscious,” eating fast food all the time. When he learned about PETA, he became a vegan. “I started to get brainwashed,” he said. “But that was my gateway, and it led me to get more interested in food.” The real transformation came when, in an act of self-preservation—to get away from the temptations of East L.A.: punk rock and beer—he decided to move in with his sister in Alhambra, in the San Gabriel Valley, so he could attend “a high-achieving Asian-driven school.” He picked up an LA Weekly looking for information about punk shows, and noticed that many of the restaurants being reviewed were within walking distance of his school. While his classmates went in packs to In-N-Out, he’d go alone for Szechuan takeout, which he’d eat in the back alley. “I learned from Jonathan Gold that food writing doesn’t need to be so hosh-posh, snobby, and froufrou,” the Glutster told me. “It can be ghetto.” So he started his own blog. “At first, I was the only food blogger in L.A. with no pictures, because I couldn’t afford a camera.”

  Several years ago, the Glutster’s mother took him to a healing mass at La Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, his local parish, in the hope that it would cure him of his fascination with food, which she finds worrisome. He left before the service ended, and, taking a walk around the neighborhood, came upon the day’s true “revelation,” as he put it on his blog: a Oaxacan spot, Moles La Tia, that served twenty varieties of mole. Later, Gold reviewed the restaurant and credited the Glutster with the find, thereby putting him on the food-blogging map.

  Over lunch, Cabral told me it had been five years since he ate fast food. With Gold’s guidance, he has explored delicacies from the neighborhood where he grew up—goat stew and tongue tacos—which he’d never tried before. He eats his way through any food festival he can score tickets to. At one, he ran into his mentor after trying food from every vendor and sometimes going back for seconds. “So, Mr. Gold, how do you deal with this nasty, disgusting feeling of repulsement?” he asked. “Ach, you’ll get used to it,” was the answer. Cabral’s solution was to walk the five miles home to East L.A.

  Not long after his discovery of Moles La Tia, Cabral found out about a place called Pal Cabron, which was serving street food from Puebla, the state just north of Oaxaca. In a post that reflected something of Gold’s penchant for the earthily figurative, he rhapsodically chronicled the “Avocado, Chipotle, and the ever acquired taste of Papalo, an herb that smells like if a really thirsty deer just walked on top of it.” In other words, it tasted of deer pee, and that was a good thing. This time, when Gold wrote up the restaurant, a week later, he didn’t cite the Glutster’s review. Cabral tweeted in protest—“J. Gold . . . give me credit!”—to no avail.

  Pal Cabron, which has since closed, was in the heavily Mexican neighborhood of Huntington Park. Bricia Lopez, whose parents opened Guelaguetza, the city’s first Oaxacan restaurant, is a glamorous young fixture of the L.A. food scene. She started Pal Cabron with her brother. They decorated the inside of the restaurant with bright colors and murals of dishy women, each embodying a different saucily named sandwich from her menu: La Tuya (Yo Momma), La Tetanic (The Double-D), La Muy Muy. The doorway was painted with the screen icons of Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. The place, according to its décor, was a product of foodie social media; survival, in this off-the-beaten-path location, would depend on Gold’s pilgrims.

  After we had gorged on Cambodian food, the Glutster suggested we make a trip to Pal Cabron, to get his favorite cemita, a sandwich of seasoned lamb and quesillo, served on a crunchy, house-made sesame roll. He was emboldened by his recent reviewing triumphs. “Gold used to be my role model. Now he’s—dare I say it?—my competition,” he mused. “A role model‒slash‒supercelebrity‒slash‒archenemy.” Cabral has many times offered himself up to Gold as an assistant; he wants to help him put together a long-promised follow-up to Counter Intelligence, a compendium of reviews Gold published more than a decade ago. But Gold has been elusive. “Probably he’s scared because he knows I’m going to dethrone him one day,” Cabral speculated. He walked through the restaurant and chose a table facing the back wall. There, Bricia had commissioned another mural, this one depicting Jonathan Gold, eyes cast down and smiling over a little double chin, next to his LA Weekly review. His arm was outstretched, with one hand gently touching the Glutster’s computer screen.

  • • •

  To Gold’s readers, his reviews have the ontological status that The New York Times has for people who follow the news: he doesn’t write about it because it is; it is because he’s written about it. In the spring of 2009, he published a column titled “The New Cocktailians,” about the movement of dandified bartenders who pair suspenders with tattoos and treat drinks as a culinary art, shopping at farmers’ markets for fresh produce and educating customers about the origins of the gin fizz. By fall, all food-minded Los Angeles understood, without knowing exactly how or why it knew, that a cocktail moment was in full swing.

  Then Gold hosted a benefit event at Union Station, the train depot downtown. There were concoctions from New Cocktailians (Manhattans made with Luxardo cherries, champagne drinks with absinthe-citrus foam), paired with morsels from some of Gold’s favorite highbrow places. Gold, wearing a gray suit and a pale pink tie covered in pink velvet polka dots, stood with Ochoa at a cocktail table. “The chefs are going to freak out if you don’t eat anything,” she said, and went to get him a plate.r />
  Ochoa came back with a pig slider and a pig’s ear, a deep-fried, molten triangle, uncomfortably soft. “I definitely encourage a certain kind of cooking,” Gold said, popping the ear and then the slider into his mouth. Then he went to search for bacon-wrapped matzoh balls: the ultimate transgression.

  The food nerds were out in force: bloggers from the local sites that track Gold’s every move. Neil Kohan—thirty-one, receding hair, camera slung over his shoulder—sipped a Manhattan and declared Gold the Thom Yorke of food writing. (His blog, Food Marathon, chronicles his eating itineraries, many of them heavily informed by Gold.) Another blogger urged Gold to try her drink—twelve-year-old Scotch, ginger syrup, fresh lime juice, soda water, and crushed ice, also made from Scotch. He sipped. “It’s delicious,” he said. “But something about it tastes a little like pool water, too.”

  Following in Gold’s footsteps can be hazardous. For many years, at the Weekly, Gold produced an annual list called “99 Essential L.A. Restaurants.” Ken Baumann, an actor, attempted to eat at every one, but ended up having part of his colon and small intestine removed—Crohn’s disease—after ticking off only twenty-eight. Gold’s last list for the Weekly came out in the fall of 2011. Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, and her husband, Christopher Noxon, a writer, decided to tackle it. They are committed eaters and devotees of Gold, and they felt they needed some way to structure their dining. “If you have a curator and you have a project that allows you to focus down, it gives you clarity,” Noxon says.

  By June, Kohan and Noxon were on their sixtieth of the “99”: Lukshon, an upscale restaurant owned by Sang Yoon, the chef Gold credits with starting the national plague of “Changes and Modifications Politely Declined” when he added that language to the menu at his burger place, Father’s Office. I met them there for dinner.

  “Jonathan Gold says we have to get the squid, and we listen to Jonathan Gold over all things,” Kohan said as we sat down. She had on a red cardigan and cat’s-eye glasses. Noxon, thin and fair, added tea-leaf salad, Manila clams, Chinese black mushrooms, garlic pork belly. The waiter suggested lamb belly roti; we got two. “He’s got a tender tummy, which was a problem initially,” Kohan said. “I have an iron stomach. My mother cooked like a cafeteria—mediocre food and a lot of it.”

  “At a certain point, I would have taken a pill for daily caloric intake,” Noxon said. “Now I get angry if I have something that isn’t delicious. I get depressed.”

  Once they both cared, choosing where to eat grew complicated. “It was hugely contentious and difficult,” Noxon said. “An unbelievable ordeal. Where are we going to eat? What continent?” Sometimes they would spin the globe to settle it. Now they have three children, who bicker in the car on Saturday mornings about whether to go to Golden Deli, a Vietnamese spot in San Gabriel that is perennially on the “99,” or to La Cabañita, in the far-flung town of Montrose, for Mexican. Charlie, the eldest, is thirteen. “He is the most adventurous, and the most limited,” Kohan said—allergic to dairy, sesame, and cashews. A few years ago, he decided to keep kosher, though his parents aren’t observant, and now he avoids pork and shellfish, except on Purim. “He found a loophole in the literature that says on Purim you are ‘not yourself,’ so for one day a year it’s blue crab hand rolls and pork soup dumplings, the things he misses.”

  At the end of dinner, Noxon said, “Those mushrooms are amazing and I will crave them.” They were meaty and deep, with a touch of smoke, like the dregs of a pot of Lapsang souchong. They agreed that the food was tasty, but that it was the kind of place that years of reading Jonathan Gold had taught them to deplore: inauthentic, impersonal, what he calls an “AmEx restaurant.” “It’s really good, but it’s bullshit,” Noxon said. “Third generation.”

  • • •

  In a fancy restaurant, Gold will wear a rumpled suit and a soft bluish button-down and pay with a credit card issued in the name of his high-school algebra teacher. He has special cell phone numbers that he uses just for reservations. “It’s like The Bourne Identity in slow motion,” he says.

  The first piece he wrote for a “slick”—the now defunct California magazine, edited by the late Harold Hayes—was a review of Chasen’s, which had been an entertainment-industry staple for fifty years. To Gold, it reeked of Reaganomics and other things that he despised. He wrote that it was “a swell place to celebrate a seventy-fifth birthday or a contra incursion,” and that the famous chili was “distinguishable from a bowl of Dennison’s only by a couple of chunks of sirloin, a 1,600 percent price differential and three guys”—the servers—“who look like they stepped out of a 1935 gangster B-movie.” He has his regrets. “Although I didn’t do Chasen’s in”—it was around for another decade—“I certainly put a lance in its side,” he says. “But, looking back, I really miss Chasen’s. And kiwi vinaigrette and magical caviar snakes and braised cantaloupe with black corn fungus and all the things I thought were the future back then—a lot of that food was just silly.”

  Accessible food has always been of greater interest to Gold—but it depends on what you mean by accessible. “The democracy of really fine dining is something I’ve always liked about L.A.,” he says. “In New York, the most expensive restaurant is always the best. That’s not necessarily the case here.” In 1990, he started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown, next to a working dairy farm. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in. They ordered what he had ordered: slimy bamboo salads, fermented fish, and intensely spicy dishes—authentic regional Thai food that the owners, Bill and Saipin Chutima, were worried the customers would send back. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue, made a pilgrimage (the Chutimas said that his postprandial cigar was disrupted by the stench of cows), and so did Mark Bittman, of The New York Times. When the Chutimas moved to Las Vegas and opened a new place, Lotus of Siam, Gold called it the best Thai restaurant in North America; in 2011, Saipin, who does the cooking, won a James Beard award. Gold, who has a competitive streak, put it this way once: “As the Italians say of Christopher Columbus, when he discovered America, it stayed discovered.”

  As a kid, Gold guzzled hot sauce. Several years ago, on a tip from a diner who had discovered a secret, untranslated menu of southern Thai specialties at an ordinary strip-mall Thai place called Jitlada, Gold paid a visit. After eating there a few times, he brought his friend Carl Stone, the composer, who carries a card in his wallet that says, more or less, in Thai, “Yes, I know I’m not Thai, but please give me the food as spicy as I request.” They ordered kua kling, a dry-beef curry, and asked for it “Bangkok hot.”

  The kua kling was the spiciest Gold had ever had. “It was glowing, practically incandescent,” he told me. “You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. It’s an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It’s not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don’t understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time—its flavor—as you taste details of fruit and turmeric and spices that you didn’t taste when it was merely extremely hot. It’s like a hallucination. You’re floating in some high, tasting the most magnificent things you’ve ever tasted in your life. I’ve never been able to get them to make it that hot again.” Stone said it hurt to pee for three days afterward. He said, “I thought, How in the world could I have gotten the clap?”

  That day, the owner, a voluble woman named Jazz, came over to their table and started chatting. She mentioned that she had been praying every day in her Buddha room for Jonathan Gold to come in and review her restaurant. Did they know him or know what he looked like? she asked. Stone says, “I was going to throw out a red herring—‘He’s tall and thin with a full head of hair’—but Jonathan started laughing and introduced himself.” Gold, in his review, praised the “delicious, foul-smelling yellow curries” and the “strange, mephitic fragrances” of wild
tea leaves and stinky beans, and said that Jitlada was “the most exciting new Thai restaurant of the year.”

  • • •

  Mark Gold, the youngest of the Gold sons, runs the marine conservation organization Heal the Bay; he finds Jonathan’s eating habits atrocious and enumerates his brother’s gustatory offenses on his blog, Spouting Off. “I have gone to dim sum in San Gabriel when he tried to order shark fin soup,” Mark wrote. “I said OMDB! I went to a restaurant with him in Chicago when he was the lead grub guy at Gourmet magazine. There, he nearly ordered wild-caught sturgeon until I complained vociferously.”

  Right before I met him, Jonathan made his first trip to Seoul. When he got back, he wrote about eating live octopus, or sam nak ji, which he described as “one of the most alarming dishes in the world.” After the piece came out, Mark told me, “Needless to say, I did not participate in that sadistic torture of a wonderful marine animal. I’m not going to eat live shrimp. I’m not going to eat octopus. I haven’t had shark or swordfish in twenty-five years. I said to him, ‘What do you think an octopus is? You need an ecology class.’ He’s all, ‘It doesn’t have a backbone.’”

  Of course, Gold didn’t need to go to Korea to eat live octopus. One night he took me to a divey strip-mall restaurant with a picture of a smiling mermaid and a halibut on the sign, and a Korean golf show playing on the television set. He had guessed based on the halibut that they’d have live shrimp and sam nak ji. “If you’re going to have live halibut you’ll have sam nak ji,” he said. “It’s like ham and eggs.” It turned out they were out of shrimp—the next shipment was coming at eleven o’clock that night, flown in fresh from Korea—but they had the octopus. “How do I put this delicately?” he said as we sat down. “It’s a very male food. We’re going to get a lot of winks and nods.”