Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  Selling food depends on euphemism—if we really knew what we were eating, the thinking goes, we would reject it—and often critics further empurple the industry’s own florid prose. Gold is a disabuser, a champion of the real. His descriptions repel as much as they beckon; the pleasure of his prose, in the service of ghastly sounding dishes, is itself an argument that something can be awful and delightful at the same time. Sea cucumbers, he writes, “breathe through their anuses, and when attacked, some of them defend themselves by farting out sections of their poisonous, sticky lungs. The particular, ganky texture expressed by the title ingredient in bird’s-nest soup is supposed to come from the fondness of the swallows in question for impaling and sucking the mucus from sea cucumbers.” Writing about a Uighur restaurant in Koreatown—“a nondescript corner dining room where northeastern Chinese cooks prepare the Beijing version of Xinxiang barbecue for a Korean-speaking clientele”—he recommended what he called “the winciest dish in town: a sharp, glistening steel skewer stabbed through thin coins of meat sliced from a bull penis, which bubble and hiss when they encounter the heat of the fire, sizzling from proud quarters to wizened, chewy dimes.” To him, blowfish-eating is “heightened by danger, flavored with death.”

  As the patron saint of foodies, Gold rightly suspects that he has encouraged what he calls the “dining as sport” crowd. “These are the guys who say, ‘I’ll see your live octopus and raise you a chicken foot. Oh, so you’re going to eat small intestine full of undigested cow’s milk?’” he said. “That’s actually a good dish. You can get it at just about any taqueria, but you really have to trust the guy.” One avid reader told me, “He has a lot to do with people eating at restaurants with a C from the health department. He trumpeted that really loudly, like ‘I do not care! This is going to make me sick and I’m interested in endangering myself.’” Another told me that he was once laid up for two weeks after eating Korean beef-liver sashimi at a restaurant recommended by Gold. “I feel that because he’s willing to eat this stuff, it’s almost like a dare,” he said. “I have to try it, even if it’s horrifying.”

  Alice Waters, the chef at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, and the mother figure of organic, farm-to-table dining, says that Gold is a harbinger of where American eating needs to go: toward diversity, away from monoculture. Gold reveals, before the U.S. Census Bureau does, which new populations have come to town, where they are, and what they’re cooking up. In 2009, he announced a migration from Mexico’s Distrito Federal. How did he know? Because you could now get DF-style carnitas in Highland Park, “loose and juicy, spilling out of the huge $1.99 tacos like Beyoncé out of a tight jumpsuit.” It was the same month that the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first two U.S. cases of swine flu, both in California, which had most people looking askance at pork. Gold looked at it sidelong, and bit. He recommended the tacos de nana—pig uterus— “chewy yet forgiving, pink and yet not, whorled in swoops and paisley shapes that defy Euclidean geometry.”

  Early in my apprenticeship, Gold took me through Historic Filipinotown. Filipino is one of the few kinds of cooking that Gold can’t stand. “It’s as if you took the worst of the U.S., Spanish, Asian, and Pacific Island cuisine and mixed them into one thoroughly unwholesome . . . I try, I really try,” he told me once. Our destination was the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, which was started in 1953 by immigrants from New York and is, he says, the single source of every good bagel in Los Angeles.

  Looking back, I could have been hurt. Bagels? I got the sense that Gold, who is a gentleman, didn’t want to scare me, at least not right away. We got four water bagels and three salt. In the car, tearing hunks from the one he had designated a roadie, he said, “You probably don’t eat bagels. Too pure.” It was a damning view of my potential and a barely veiled challenge. In any case, Brooklyn Bagel was only a pit stop. We had just had a so-so Guatemalan meal (chiles relleños, tamales, pounded-pumpkin-seed stew, and kakik de gallina, a chicken dish that he’d never seen on a menu before), and were on the way to Mama’s Hot Tamales Café, off MacArthur Park, near Langer’s Deli (the source of the city’s best pastrami). “This is one of the gnarlier, gnarlier drug zones in L.A.,” he said, circling Mama’s block. “I was here with my mother, on our way to Langer’s, and people were trying to sell her crack.” An apartment where he lived for ten years, until the 1992 riots trashed the neighborhood and he moved to Pasadena, was just a couple of miles away.

  At Mama’s, we had a chicken tamale with red sauce and a pork tamale with green. Gold took a pound of coffee beans to go, and then we swung back west, to hit a Peruvian restaurant owned by Koreans that sits in a median, next to a car wash, and specializes in spit-roasted chicken and grilled beef heart. “It’s not the best grilled beef heart you’ve ever had,” he said. He was picking up a chicken for supper and, since he was there, ordered a fermented-corn drink and half a chicken to stay. I smiled weakly and said nothing. At that point, I hadn’t had any grilled beef heart, ever, as I’m sure he had deduced.

  Gold eats at three hundred to five hundred restaurants every year. “Food rewards obsessiveness,” he says. His friend Robert Sietsema told me that, during three years starting in the late nineties, when Gold was working in New York as the restaurant critic at Gourmet, Sietsema, who was the restaurant critic for the Village Voice and presumably accustomed to eating a lot, gained twenty-five pounds. “We really put on the feed bag,” he said. Not long before we talked, Sietsema said, Gold had visited. “He and I went on a typical binge. We started with porchetta sandwiches, then went to David Chang’s bakery for focaccia with kimchi, then we had salty-pistachio soft-serve ice cream, cookies, and coffee milk. Then we went to a pizzeria famous for its artichoke slice, where we also had a Sicilian slice, and then we took the train to Flushing and visited a new Chinese food court and had half a dozen Chinese dishes there. Then we went to the old food court down the street, visited three more stalls, and had a bunch of things, including lamb noodles, and then Jonathan had to go to dinner somewhere. After dinner, he stopped by my apartment, and we went out to another three-course dinner.” Sietsema told me, “Jonathan once said, ‘We don’t write about food, we write about eating.’”

  • • •

  When Gold took the job at Gourmet, maître d’s around the city hastened to get a bead on his appearance. The word went out: “Biker.” Wednesday was bear night in the West Village, where he lived, and he became an object of desire. “I felt like I was walking around naked,” he says. Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman—“another hairy Californian”—and for Mario Batali, though, according to him, “I’m much better-looking than Mario.” Gold was a music journalist in the eighties and nineties. His hip-hop name, given to him by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, is Nervous Cuz. He is sly and erudite, withdrawn in person and in print exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone, who has titled many of his pieces after restaurants that Gold has introduced him to, considers him the S. J. Perelman of food.

  Gold grew up in South Central, the eldest of three boys. His mother, Judith, was the librarian at a rough public school, a witty, lively woman who had been a magician’s assistant and a minor theater actress. His father, Irwin, an aspiring academic, studied under Joyce-scholar Richard Ellmann but got polio before he could finish his dissertation. He became a probation officer; Roman Polanski was one of his cases. The filmmakers behind the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired used Irwin’s copious, finely written probation report in their research. He was passionate about classical music, literature, and comfort food (Chicago-style hot dogs, all-you-can-eat buffets, lunch-counter burgers); aiming to please him, Jonathan took up cello, reading, and eating. In spite of his efforts, he failed to win his father’s approval: Irwin claimed never to have read his columns. After his father died, Jonathan cleaned out Irwin’s car and found a complete file of his columns in the trunk and Verdi’s Requiem in the tape deck.

  At sixteen, Gold left the house. It was the late sev
enties; he stayed with friends and, he says, in the months before the Iranian Revolution, squatted in Beverly Hills houses that had been bought but not yet occupied by families from Tehran. On the strength of his cello playing, he went to UCLA, where for a time he lived in his practice room. During his freshman year, Gold took a course in cultural geography and was assigned to make an ethnic map of a block of Beverly Boulevard not far from downtown. The city’s variegated, unassimilated complexity began to dawn on him. At a laundromat, he saw Salvadorans saving dryers for Salvadorans, and overheard Mexicans who spoke not Spanish but Nahuatl. The 7-Eleven, he noticed, was owned by Koreans. Just as important, the block included Shibucho—one of the first Japanese restaurants, Gold says, to expel patrons for ordering California rolls—and he tried sushi. Later, for a class that he took with the performance artist Chris Burden, Gold made a piece that involved going to every Jewish deli in the city and buying two water bagels using only pennies; one he ate and one he saved to hang behind plastic on the studio wall. That was how he discovered the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery.

  After graduating UCLA, Gold was living on Pico Boulevard, above a kosher butcher in an Iranian Jewish enclave, and working at a legal newspaper downtown. Taking the bus east on Pico every day, he passed through Korean, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Oaxacan, and Jaliscan neighborhoods. As an experiment, he set out to try every restaurant—places that served pupusas, chili fries, Korean barbecue—along the boulevard. He gave himself a year, at the end of which he planned to join the Foreign Service, so that he could go off and have adventures around the world. When he was finished eating Pico, he realized that he could have just as exotic a life without ever leaving Los Angeles.

  For years, Gold’s itinerant eating seemed purposeless; then, suddenly, as with the caterpillar in the Eric Carle book, there was a glorious, fully realized point to it. John Powers, a film critic who met Gold at the Weekly in the mid-eighties, when Gold was a proofreader there, says, “He has the flâneur instinct. In all those years, when his peers were very busy professionally writing, Jonathan was professionally wandering around not writing. By background, inclination, and practice, he has always been the one who knows the most stuff close to the ground.” Even now, his approach can be exhausting and, to others, anticlimactic. Jervey Tervalon, a novelist who often accompanies Gold on his food tours, remembers weeks spent looking for good blood sausage soup. “The relentlessness of that search!” he said. “The leads led here and there and finally ended with a big frothy bowl of something that looked like it had a scab on top.”

  At the Weekly, when Gold was in his mid-twenties, he met Laurie Ochoa, a beautiful, dark-haired intern who had just finished college, and wooed her with dollar seats for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl and a slice of his mother’s peach pie. They got married, over a roast pig, in 1990, and she has been his dining companion and first reader ever since. (She was his editor at Gourmet and at the Weekly.) They have two children, Leon, who is ten, and Isabel, nineteen. Isabel grew up on tentacles but can’t abide anything spicy; Leon has spent his childhood ordering chicken and rice in places that specialize in blood and tripe.

  The formal rigor that Gold applied to his early eating jags has become a recurring motif. He likes a culinary picaresque, and often takes the kids. They have accompanied him on hot dog, hot chocolate, and gelato sprees. The day he decided to find the city’s best espresso, he traveled with David Kendrick, then the drummer for Devo. After twenty-seven shots, Gold—sweating, trembling, and talking too loudly—met up with Ochoa and some friends for dinner. He started to panic and begged the group not to get dessert. When Ochoa ordered tiramisu, he burst into tears, ran out of the restaurant, and took the bus home.

  • • •

  Los Angeles is an immigrant city positioned between two major foci of historical necessity eating, Latin America and Asia. This is where Gold concentrates his efforts. Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. “I have my thing,” he says. “Traditional—I hate the word ‘ethnic’—restaurants that serve some actual hunger people have, rather than something they tell themselves they must have.” Plus, there is George Orwell’s rule of thumb: the fancier the restaurant, the more people who have dripped sweat into your food. For a period in the late eighties, Ochoa told me, Gold had a theory that you could tell a great restaurant based on three factors: the curtains in the window, the look of the sign, and the music that was playing (the worse, the better). One day, in Westminster, a Vietnamese enclave, he found a place with all the indicators, down to the perfectly tattered lace curtains. “We order and the waiter says, ‘You don’t want this dish,’” Ochoa said. “Now, we’ve been told that many times. We said, ‘No, we really, really want it.’ ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. We said, ‘We want to eat what Vietnamese people eat.’ So they brought the dish out finally. It was boar, and the pieces actually had hair still on them. At this point we had to eat it because we’d made this whole big deal. It was pretty foul, and it wasn’t just the hair.”

  Gold drives twenty thousand miles a year in search of food. “I go into a fugue state, like the Aboriginal dreamtime, when you go on long, aimless walks in the outback,” he says. “That’s how I feel driving on the endless streets of Los Angeles County.” Any given afternoon will find him heading east from Pasadena into the far reaches of the San Gabriel Valley, an expansive territory of suburban cities and unincorporated towns northeast of Los Angeles whose culinary significance Gold has long asserted. “When the world’s great food cities are being discussed, Paris and Tokyo and Taipei and Rome, it would not be unreasonable to include among them . . . San Gabriel, Calif., population 30,072, which up until a few years ago was noted chiefly for the patty melts at Sandi’s Coffee Shop,” he wrote in 1992. “Consider this: the city of San Gabriel has at least 50 restaurants worth recommending, far more than Beverly Hills or Cincinnati, and scarcely fewer than Los Angeles’ entire Westside.”

  Over the past thirty years, the San Gabriel Valley has transformed from working-class white suburbs of faded bowling alleys and German restaurants into a place where it is possible to live quite comfortably speaking nothing but Chinese. In the seventies, Frederic Hsieh, a Chinese immigrant, successfully pitched the San Gabriel Valley city of Monterey Park to wealthy Taiwanese as “the Chinese Beverly Hills”; by 1990, according to The Ethnic Quilt, a book about the demographics of Southern California, the city was 36 percent Chinese and known as Little Taipei. Eating in the San Gabriel Valley, Gold has observed that, unlike in New York, where immigrants quickly adapt their cooking styles to reflect the city’s collective idea of “Chinese food,” the insular nature of Los Angeles allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the restaurant owners’ villages of origin. “The difference is that in New York they’re cooking for us,” Gold told me. “Here they’re cooking for themselves.”

  Gold’s car is a green pickup: toothpicks in the cup holder, mint-flavored Scope in the passenger’s footwell. “Alice Waters gave me total shit when I bought it,” he told me. “I told her, ‘You know how many organic turnips I can fit in the back of this truck?’ I just thought it was beautiful. It’s big, and I’m big.” One day, we alighted at a mini-mall in Rowland Heights, deep in the SGV. “This is the rich Chinese neighborhood,” he said. From his pocket he pulled the folded-up flap of an envelope, which was covered with notes scrawled haphazardly in pencil. He wanted to try No. 1 Noodle House, where the specialty is Saliva Chicken. “So hot it makes your mouth water, which is the best of all possible reasons it might be called that,” he said. He had learned about the restaurant in the Chinese-language Yellow Pages. Gold doesn’t speak or read any language but English; he has strong deductive skills, and Google Translate helps. When in doubt, he points.

  The noodle shop was closed. Gold consulted his notes, and we drove a hundred yards to another mini-mall. “We just did something very Californian,” he said. “Drove from one shopping center across the stre
et to another.” There was a Szechuan restaurant with a string of red chilies draped over the door and a B in the window, a grade given by the county health inspector and posted by law. (Gold subscribes to another rating system, where A stands for “American Chinese,” B is “Better Chinese,” and C is “Chinese food for Chinese,” but he admits that, for years before the grading system was in place, he walked around with constant low-level food poisoning.) He sat down and perused a menu that had been awkwardly translated into English: “Steamed Toad” was the name of one entrée. The waitress came, and he pointed to dam-dam noodles, dumplings, wontons, pork, and a fish special. From a cold case, he chose pig’s ear. It was my first. It was oddly flavorless, but the texture reminded me of biting on a knuckle, unstable and unforgiving at once. “Some places they just slice the ear,” Gold said. “Here they sliced it and pressed it into a kind of terrine, so this is probably a good place.” As I chewed, my hand kept wanting to reach up and touch my own ear as a reference point.

  “Cha, please,” he said, ordering tea.

  “Huh?” the waitress said.

  “Cha—tea,” he said.

  “Oh, tea.”

  The fish arrived, blue-lipped and bathed in chilies and oil. “Spicy,” Gold said, tasting it. “The dumplings are good, too. And I suspect they smoke their own pork here. It’s good, but I don’t think it’s enough better than the other good Szechuan place, which is twenty miles closer to L.A.” The food was heavy. “They’re cooking the peasant version of these dishes,” he said. “Oil is a sign of generosity.”