"If you were the guy who lifted my cell phone last year you may have noticed that the camera roll is rich in taco snapshots." "My inner life tends to be measured out in radishes, meat and limes." "If you peered closely at the tiny images trying to figure out who might spend so many of his days in proximity to small tortillas." "You may have inferred that a startling number of the tacos came from a single source." "Guerilla tacos, a tiny operation that pops up a few days a week in downtown Los Angeles." "Guerilla tacos is a pretty singular taqueria the creation of Wes avila whose culinary training came under Alain ducasse in Paris." "Avila was crafting tacos in empty storefronts or stairwells or garage spaces deep downtown and there were rumors about tacos made with diver scallops weird vegetables and Sushi grade yellow tail." "When I published a list of the best dishes of 2013" "I included his taco made with roasted squash rubbery oaxacan cheese and a hint of chili and charred tomato." "The tortillas don't seem to be made to order but they are fresh and toasty enough." "The taco equivalent of the energy of what Chinese cooks sometimes call" ""the breathe of the wok," is in full effect." "A ducasse disciple, quitting his job at an haute cuisine pop up to serve charred octopus tacos on a downtown street corner." "You're not gonna find cooking like this anywhere, but la." "I'm an la guy, I drive." "I am, I am my truck, my truck is me." "I'm going a slightly screwy way." "I got off on the 10 instead of the 5 which I probably shouldn't have." "Everybody in the world has an idea of what Los Angeles is." "Everybody thinks they know what Los Angeles means even if they've never been here." "And if you live in Los Angeles, you're used to having your city explained to you by people who come in for a couple of weeks stay in a hotel in Beverly hills and take in what they can get to" "within 10 minutes in their rented car." "The thing that people find hard to understand I think is sort of the... the magnitude of what's here." "The huge number of multiple cultures that live in the city who come together in this beautiful and haphazard fashion." "And you know, the... the fault lines between them are sometimes where you find the most beautiful things." "I mean, I became a food writer completely by accident but it became what I aspired to." "The idea of celebrating, you know the... the glorious mosaic of the city on somebody else's dime was just completely fun and completely exactly what I wanted to do." "I mean, I kept feeling as if I was getting away with something." "There definitely is a Jonathan gold Los Angeles and it's a Los Angeles that a lot of people didn't know about." "He, like Raymond Chandler showed you a vision of Los Angeles that was a new vision." "Jonathan changed the food writing world because he was one of the first restaurant critics which was, who was perfectly happy in.." "I guess I even think happier writing about the hard to find small restaurants in tiny little communities." " Hi, how you doin'?" " Good." "How are you?" "Can I get a huarache de with flor de calabaza?" " Flor de calabaza huarache?" " Yes." "Sure." "You want cheese on that?" " Yeah." " Okay." "He was going to these places where food critics didn't always go and he went to mom and pop places where generations of tradition were being passed down in the cooking." "La is great that way because you don't have to travel far to taste like you traveled far and... and I think that's what made him such an interesting writer because he was so curious about that type of cooking." "This is a little sauce right here from my grandmother." "She, she came up with this, with this sauce so my mom just wanted me to bring you guys some so you can taste it and see how good it is." "It's really, it's really, really good." "There's salsa de semillas inside." "Yeah, salsa de semillas." "It has peanuts, garlic, hojuelas.." "It's really good." " Thanks." " You're welcome." "The saddest moment in boyle heights street food most aficionados would agree was the evening the breed street vendors were finally chased from their scene." "This gathering had always been rousted by the cops every so often." "It was amazing how quickly the circus turned into a deserted parking lot." "But Carmen castellanos, the soul of antojitos Carmen had been working boyle heights since the 1980's and after a brief stretch on a sidewalk next to an mta building sight she scraped together the funding for a real restaurant" "just around the corner and brought along her family." "Other la restaurants began as street food but none quite so vividly as antojitos Carmen." "You want these guys to succeed." "He became a, a... a figure of the democratizing movement in, in culture, not just in writin' not just in food writing', but in the ability to tell stories about America and the city of Los Angeles in specific" "through a series of, you know restaurants and food experiences that other people weren't writing' about." "He gave it value." "It's good." "So, Alice, we.." "I wanted to talk about some of these, pieces we wanted Jonathan to do." "Good." "Suggestions rather." "Right, well, I, I feel the most important thing and we've talked a little bit about this before is the grand central market piece." "It's true, it's at that tipping point." "It's been a symbol of a certain kind of Los Angeles for a very long time." "As it's been redeveloped or the new restaurants are coming in or the... the new fancy butchers it's gonna stop being this sort of place that you associate with the smells and the tastes and the.." "The look of that part of Los Angeles into being the sort of precious artisanal you know, aren't we special to pay" "$35.99 for a skirt steak kind of market." "You know, can a pupuseria exist next to, a fancy cheese store?" " Yeah." " Is that the challenge that these, that the owners now face?" "It is." "I mean, I like a lot of the new places and I shop there all the time but you have to have a place where you have like the, the tastes of sort of last century Los Angeles existing with the... the modern taste." "There's something cultural about it, and there's something about it that has become part of Los Angeles that I think is sort of magical." "It's like when do you start cutting into the flesh and bone of the market?" "And that's, that's a hard question to answer, and I think that would be something really interesting to address." "Yeah." "I..." "I'm hoping we can get to that piece sooner rather than later." "Whenever we talk about criticism in New York.." "Jonathan gold's name always comes up." "We're always like, I wish we had Jonathan gold as our chief critic in New York because I think he's very fair." "I think what separates Jonathan from the rest of the critics is that his empathy level is higher than anybody else's and I think that shows in his... in his writing but this is what pisses me off about j." "Gold." "I was in a place that did very esoteric chine.." "Korean chicken barbecue." "I was like, "this is great." "I'm not gonna tell anybody about it."" "And then, in the corner I see Jonathan gold's review and I was like, "motherfucker."" "He knows every place." "I don't know how he does it." "You know, I don't know any Korean that knows more about" "Korean food than Jonathan gold." "I don't know anybody that knows every taco stop." "I was at the wrong truck, there's another fish one." "I know." "That one's good too." "The... the cuatro vientos has, it has always been down there and sometimes the line is longer." " Un taco!" " Ready to order?" "Yeah, sure." "You guys tweeted about a, tostada this morning, that sounded really good." "What was that?" "Yeah." " Yeah." " Okay." "I met Jonathan pretty much right away." "He walked into the newsroom." "He look, acted like he owned the place practically and I thought he was one of the bigger writers." "It turned out he was just a proofreader at the time and I was an intern." "He invited me up to his apartment for his mom's, peach pie so, that... that changed a lot." "He sent roses the next morning." "Thank you very much." "When I woke up this morning and saw that tweet it's like, I know I have to come here." "Yeah." "It's very super spicy." " Good." " That looks great." "It's amazing for us, people like him, that, that writes." "He said that, these tacos are number 1 for him and, a... actually we're in the process of getting a loan from the bank to get another truck done." "People asking us to go to orange county and San Diego." "Here, I'll hold this." "I gather that it's unusual for people who've married as long as we have, to wanna hang out together so much of the time, but we kind of do." "You know I've been wanting you to do the piece on anonymity for a long time?" "There's still that old idea of a restaurant critic has to be anonymous, but you know.." "Laurie doesn't edit my pieces anymore but she has this odd ability of getting the best out of her writers." "And that's, we're doing an excerpt?" "Maybe, like, 1, like, 11 inch little story." "The weird way that she does it with me is probably, maybe not great for the marriage but it's, she suggests something and.." "I'll, like, say that's a really.." "N... no, that's not the way it works, but in the way of, like explaining to her that that's not the way it works" "I understand how it does work." "I mean, other people have written about it, but not... not in the way.." "I don't think in the deeper way that you want to do it." "You think the history of anonymity in a restaurant?" "That'd be, that'd be very cool." "It would probably be ideal to be anonymous." "I mean, I..." "I was certainly was in the early part of my career." "I mean, I would go to spago, basically looking like a punk rock kid with my friend who had one pair of pants." "And... and we were not being ushered to the nice table by the window but any cri, any critic who does restaurants is gonna be recognized soon enough." "Especially, in the age of social media where somebody will tweet your picture before you've gotten your first cocktail, right?" "I mean, the people who disguise themselves probably aren't getting away with it nearly as much as they think they are." "I'm wearing this mask because I'm an anonymous critic which means that none of the restaurateurs or very few of them recognize what I look like." " Oy, gevalt." " I almost... you didn't know that I was gonna wear this thing?" "Well, I heard that you were.." "I believe it's a positive value, other people disagree with me but I'm always wanna on the side of the consumer and, have a meal experience that's a.." "Just like what a normal person would have." "People have told me that there's pictures of me in the kitchen but it's with the mask on." "I mean, I think it is essential to get an unbiased look at how a place is cooking because they will treat people that they know are writing about them very differently." "Ruth reichl did that famous review of le cirque where she went in disguised as this sort of frumpy woman and got treated like garbage and then the next week went in dressed as herself and was treated like a queen and wrote a parallel review." "I do all the stuff you're supposed to do." "I always reserve under different names" "I switch up the names I reserve under" "I switch up the phone numbers that I reserve under." "I mean, I have a whole series of throw away phones that I use just for reservations." "It's... it's kind of like the it's... it's kind of like the fat man's version of the "bourne identity," I think." "Sir, nice to see you again." "How are you doing?" " Good." "How are you?" " Awesome." "That's really good." " Bonsoir." " Bonsoir." "Hello." "I never know when Jonathan is coming." "I don't know the night before, you know, I don't know." "It's really the last minute, you know, I never have a reservation for Jonathan gold, 6 people." "No, it's another name and boom, he's here." "Panic in the kitchen." "The beans, the beans are fucking al dente, man, you eat the beans?" "You have nothing to do, John?" "You have nothing to do?" "No, I have stuff to do, but.." "But what?" "I'm always excited to cook for him because Jonathan gold is a critic who is very open to trying new things." "My god." "That's insane." "I saw the corn on the cob when I came in so this is amazing to see it turned into this." "This is great." "So what makes ludo ludo?" "Part of it is growing up as a chef in a way that almost nobody does anymore." "You know, having the good fortune to work his way up in the kitchen with three of the most interesting chefs in France and I think the way he just.." "He loves Los Angeles." "He... he likes working with the produce here he likes the kind of people who live here." "He wanted to do something that was personal that... that meant something to him as a chef and Los Angeles has always been the place certainly in the United States, where you can come and you can..." "Reinvent yourself." "Sometimes as a chef we don't see what we create." "When Jonathan gold gave me an amazing review for ludo bite in 2007, I did not realize what I create but Jonathan opened my eyes." "Wow!" "I just realized I created a new concept." "Food and writing have gone together throughout history." "If you look at France in the 18th century or China in the 12th century, there wasn't just food there, there was food and someone writing about it food and someone thinking about it and that relationship is what turned food from fuel" "to food into an art form." "It's true of literature, it's true of plays it's true of all cultural art forms that writing is what made them digestible so to speak by the masses." "You're trying to tell a story make that experience into something much bigger but at a certain point, everyone" "I mean, look at yelp, it's such an American thing where everyone then believes they are the critic and they are the expert." "You know, now everybody thinks" ""I can go to a restaurant and write what I think about it."" "And if I use words like toothsome, you know, then, "hey, I'm..." "I'm a food writer."" "They all seem to use the word amazing now." ""It's amazing!" "The Mexican corn is amazing!"" "You know, it's like, amazing doesn't tell me anything." "What is the role of the critic is a question that's being asked and I think every area of culture right now because it's, like, "well, why do I need a food critic"" ""if I have yelp, and why do I need a book critic if I've got Amazon reviews?"" "I think what a critic brings to the table is knowledge." "You know that he's done his homework." "You know, if you're really interested in a subject you are gonna find the critics that... that speak to you that you don't always agree with but that, that speak to you that you feel you'll learn something from" "that you... you found a new way of seeing something after reading what they had to say." "The biggest thing in restaurants over say the last 40 years has been the introduction of diversity." "When Craig claiborne in the '60s was reviewing expensive restaurants in New York they were almost all French." "Then as you start to get cuisines from all over you can't look at cuisine as a singular thing anymore." "There can be a thousand different restaurants that are great in a thousand different ways." "Two pieces of legislation in 1965 and in 1986 increased the number of migrants abolished standard quotas which favored migration from Europe opened up, I... immigration to a much wider range of people." "La was a leading edge in diversity population growth." "The immigrant population has defined the country." "It's defined Los Angeles." "We are what we are because of our diversity." "Green bean.." "Carrot, bell pepper.." "My name tui." "I'm the chef of jitlada restaurant." "I came America in 1996." "I never went to cooking school, but I learned from my grand mom." "She teach me everything, you know, like.." "What is this, what is that.." "Like, you know, how to grow the lemongrass how to grow the coconut, how to grow the turmeric." "In 2006, I bought jitlada restaurant but at first we lost money." "We're going to jitlada right now." "It's my favorite thai restaurant in Los Angeles." "It serves all kinds of thai food but what it specializes in is the extremely spicy, aromatic pungent cooking of Southern Thailand." ""Warning, if you do not eat spicy food, do not order this."" "The... the spicier it is, actually the better it tastes because the flavors come into balance because that's the way it's designed." "He have very good palate on his tongue because he can separate, like, "you have this in here."" "I..." "I start laughing." "Especially with my thai coffee." "No one in the whole wide world, even my family doesn't know what I put in there, but he know." "I learned from the customer that Jonathan gold important for the people in America." "And then one day he came here and they all laugh and they say." ""Jonathan gold in front of you."" "And I remember my leg, shaking like this, like" ""my god, is it Jonathan gold?"" "But still I didn't know who is him, just the name." "Well, thank you." "If she, if she brought it out with this then you know it's hot." "This is extra chili that you can pour on the beef if.." "It's, it's spicy enough." "No, it's fine." "Oof." "After he writes about our restaurant the people, they waiting, you know, before we open." "They bring the newspaper." "I want to eat Southern thai food, and after that we are the famous restaurant everyone know." "I, I feel, like a, so proud, you know if she like to learn in America, you know?" "Bye, thanks again." "Your, your food is always so good." "Well, thank you." "One of the amazing things about Los Angeles is that there really is a thereness beneath the thereness." "And of course, some people think what the hell is this place?" "I think that you can build a city any shape you like as long as it works." "And you say, "works, Los Angeles works?"" "Everyone tells you that it doesn't work." "Reyner banham's book came out in the early '70s and he was the first person who, I think made sense of Los Angeles for an awful lot of people." "The changes that were occurring in Los Angeles were typical of a lot of changes that were happening in other cities in this country." "And somehow or other, Los Angeles had got there first." "Right then, Los Angeles needs some explaining because it's normally regarded as an unspeakable sprawling mess though certainly not by me." "Pretty much all cities in the 19th century the 20th century, grew from the centre outward." "Los Angeles was different." "You were getting a post modern arrangement whereby their peripheries were more important than the centre." "And all of these different centres have grown and they collided with each other into one giant megalopolis of 18 to 20 million people." "And the city is so large and so sprawling and so diverse that it allows for the, the interseses between the major spaces to be occupied by people to create what they want." "And this is where gold, as a critic of urban living comes in." "He provides a map for us." "His culinary mapping becomes a cartography of the region and through leading us, we come to understand our city." "Los Angeles is a lot of self-contained communities." "We have communities of people here who are not cooking for tourists and they're not cooking for the newspaper critic and they're not cooking for the glory of it." "They're cooking because they're filling a specific need that their community has." "Because of that, it becomes almost the..." "Anti-melting pot less a melting pot than sort of a great glittering mosaic." "There's no end to the fun in the San Gabriel valley." "And this is, El monte proper." "Ca... can't you feel the electricity and excitement in the air?" "People not from Los Angeles sometimes don't understand the beauty you can find in mini malls." "That's probably the best dim sum in town at the moment." "That's the remaining, Chinese islamic restaurant." "This, this is lupe's, this is the place I love." "In case you think I love everything the stuff in that restaurant is absolutely disgusting." "That place we just passed called pho huynh is famous for boiled ox penis in your pho." "That place, has like the best, nim nong." "You... you have another pho place." "Yeah, there is it." "It says, "pho Kim."" "Or pho Kim?" "Which is.." "Sometimes they don't, like, think these through." "This is yee-Lou which is interesting because it's a really old-fashioned" "Chinese American place that's been taken over by Chinese who are doing Chinese American food as an exotic food for Chinese people to eat." "In here is a nanjing kitchen which specializes in this duck dish that's just.." "I'm not sure it's the most pleasurable duck in the world but it's perfect in its way." "It's sort of a, a boiled duck with absolutely all the fat taken out of it." "But there just happens to be you know, in this completely ordinary place there, there happens to be extraordinary food." "It's the miracle of entry level capitalism I think." "My name is genet agonafer, and I'm from Ethiopia." "I cam 1981, Valentine's day with my son with my 5-year-old son." "Lemeneh tefera is his name." "I moved to la to provide my son with education and I was working as a waitress for many years." "I raised my son being a waitress for many, many years." "And that adorable son is my grown son now." "I have another picture." "This is when he graduated from medical school and he's been practicing medicine for 12 years." "This space opened up and my generous son took cash advance practically on all the credit cards he have and opened it for me." "I was very busy at first, and then 9/11 came and then just completely at a standstill and my son was pumping money to keep the place alive." "And then all of the sudden, the review came and I was, like, "my god."" "Every day I would have people out lining up." "Celebrities come." "I could not cook the doro wat fast enough." "But for me, it was so important to tell my son I could succeed and whenever he comes here, now he's just so proud." "It takes a special temperament to be a food critic." "You need to have, you know, a mixture of, sort of ego, and, and-and interest and obsessi with food that very few people have." "My first year out of college, I was working downtown as a proofreader, and I was bored out of my mind." "So I decided to make it my project to eat at every restaurant on pico boulevard." "Pico boulevard is kind of Los Angeles' back porch." "It goes through a remarkable swath of town." "There's a place called the El Salvador cafe on the eastern end." "That was one of the first salvadoran places in town and way at the Santa Monica end was a place called tom's no. 5 which had my favorite chili fries in town." "Those were really good chili fries." "Pico, in a certain sense was where I learned to eat." "I also saw my first punk rock show on pico, was shot at fell in love, bowled a 164 witnessed a knife fight, took cello lessons raised chickens, ate oki dogs and heard x ice-cube hole and Willie Dixon perform" "though not together." "It was fascinating to go every night and to sit into a place and have my plate of rice and beans or my papusas and listen to the dialogue around me to look at the stacks of newspapers people were reading" "to, you know, seeing what was on the TV that was perpetually on in the corner to see what people were talking about." "I gradually started to find things out that I didn't know." "The Mexican restaurants weren't all just Mexican restaurants and they were from different regions of Mexico." "This was the time in the early '80s when the wars were bad in central America a lot of people migrated to Los Angeles." "And they started out selling street food then they opened little restaurants and by the time I was in the middle of my project they had colonized an entire strip." "I learned this very quickly as a journalist that if you randomly go up to somebody on the street and start talking to them they're probably not gonna talk to you they're gonna think you're odd and brush you off." "But if you're doing it in a restaurant.." "You have a context in which to be so you'll sit down and they'll feed you and they'll be nice to you, and maybe there'll be some gossip." "It was the year that I got to know." "Los Angeles as Los Angeles." "Hello-o-o." "Hello, there, darling." "How are you?" "Okay." "You saw what I wrote, right?" "I answered somebody's tweet." "I said, you know, "yeah, he'll do a Kuala Lumpur restaurant"" "but what, there's, like, one of them." "Yeah, and... and then another person said" ""he'll run out of restaurants in koreatown."" "I..." "I refrained from saying, there are 900 restaurants in koreatown." "It's not gonna happen in your lifetime, buddy." "I seem to be going through a Korean foods fixation." "Welcome back to "good food"" "it's that time where we check in with our resident gourmand on where to eat this weekend in Los Angeles." "So where are we going?" "We're going to a restaurant called soban." "And what is their specialty?" "They're specialty is galbi Jim." "They're famous..." "I remember the first time I went to a Jonathan gold approved restaurant from the "la weekly"" "and, you know, you drive into a mini mall and you're, like, "really?"" "You know, "really?" "I'm not gonna be waylaid?"" "I'm..." "I'm not gonna be mugged walking into this place?" "And you walk in and it's, like, "yeah, it's people it's just people."" "This isn't the El bulli of sandwich shops but he does, kind of, use his toys in making them which makes a lot of it fun." "He's so much more than a food writer." "Jonathan is a cultural commentator who uses food and restaurants as a way of creating these little commentaries on modern life." "I've been eating lately at chego, the new restaurant from kogi auteur Roy choi, the architect of the truck-based restaurant phenomenon, and the only chef I know whose food is capable of attracting several hundred people to an eagle rock parking lot at midnight." "Chego specializes in rice bowls wavy, baroque constructions that splice all the flavors of the city into great splooshes of combinatorial DNA." "Pickled watermelon radish, sauteed ong choi crumbled cotija cheese and a spurting slab of pork belly that's been burnished as lovingly with Korean chili paste as a '64 impala show car has been rubbed with lacquer." "David!" "Kogi's taco is a new paradigm of a restaurant an art directed take on Korean street food previously unimaginable in both California and Seoul." "Cheap, unbelievably delicious and unmistakably from Los Angeles." "Food that makes you feel plugged into the rhythms of this city just by eating it." "We're working on some new dishes right now." "This is, it's summertime here in Los Angeles so we're working on a tomato, watermelon, goat cheese thai basil, soy, chili, lemongrass dish." "In all of my properties, the only litmus test is when we eat it, can I just throw this down and say, "fuck."" "If we say that, then, then, then the dish makes it to the menu." "The small kitchen keeps us together, keeps us focused." "There's nowhere to move around so you have to be really creative and move here, boom." "It's all about muscle memory, boom, boom, boom." "It's fun, it makes for a lot of jokes too because we bump asses with each other all the time." "Especially right here." "This is the danger zone right here." "You know, the weird thing about my... my first interaction with Jonathan is, he helped me figure out what we were trying to do." "Kind of like," this is what kogi is."" "We're kind of, like, this justice league of, like, kind of weird, warped super heroes that came together to feed the city, you know." "When he writes about me, he understands.." "And is able to articulate the little kind of secret, you know.." "You know, tangled webs I have inside that I'm trying to put out into the plate." "He, like, understands it." "I never explained it to him." "He gets exactly where that came from." "Like, we were trying to recreate.." "How Asian kids grow up and eat in their home and what their refrigerators look like but also how stoners eat." "In that first review, he was able to capture that moment you know, of... of what was happening." "Anthony!" "I kind of like that Italian beef." "They have those Italian beef sandwiches that's marinated." "Alice always said it was marinated because it was such crappy meat that they have to marinate." "Modern food writing starts with Calvin trilling." "He was saying, that, you know, everyone reveres these French restaurants that no one wants to eat at and you know, and it's the, the colloquial food that's really important, and I think that's, you know" "that was, like, the battle call for both Jonathan and for Robert and then for a lot of people who have followed after." "Alright, what are we gonna do here, Jonathan?" "You're the guy, you're the expert, you're the food guy." "I was probably a sophomore in college and I, I was house sitting." "Among the books in the study was "American fried"" "you know, Calvin trilling's first book." "And I read it, and I was utterly fascinated by it." "I read "American fried" and "Alice, let's eat"" "so many times." "Yeah, I..." "I imitated him absolutely blindly when I started." "Trillin was writing about eating he was writing about the culture of eating and it was obviously the way to go." "You know, I always say that if I'm in a strange town and I don't know where to eat, I go up to the motel clerk grab him by the necktie and pull him over the counter" "just to get his attention and I say, "not where you took your parents"" ""for their 25th wedding anniversary" ""the place you went to the night you got home after 13 months in Korea."" "And the second place is really good." "And I think your... your idea has become almost the norm now that if you're gonna be a newspaper critic or a writer in a, in a big town, you better you know, know among the 6 good rib stands" "which, which is up and which is down." "Why?" "That didn't used to be true." "This... this is, king taco which is beloved." "It's not necessarily my favorite but it's very good tacos, you know, pretty good al pastor and one of the great things about it is they actually have a truck parked outside the restaurant sort of this canopy, place of honor" "and if you come on a weekend night, there'll be an hour wait for the truck, and you can walk right up to the counter at the restaurant itself." "I've had the tacos at the truck and at the restaurant and it's correct, you actually do want the ones from the truck but it's, I've always wondered why the taco honors the truck so much." "My theory is that taco eating is..." "It's almost a verb." "Taco should be a verb, right.." "The... the, the tortilla, the tortilla's hot, the... the, the meat's hot they combine, the sauce is sloshed on it and then you're almost eating it in one continuous motion from the way it comes from the grill to the guy to the counter." "I know it's overly romantic." "Yeah." "Yeah, that was a great place." "And speaking of that.." "If, if we're looking for somebody for the picnic if we're doing a sandwich thing.." "I mean, there's some interesting people doing sandwiches right now, but, Fred Eric has this new place attached to his tiara called delish." "I'm definitely a great procrastinator." "I suppose when I need to have an attention span for something." "I..." "I have an attention span for something, but.." "It's... it's, it's hard, it's hard to explain." "So for some reason you wanted that, right?" "Yeah, that was great." "I think that's perfect." "I mean, o... otherwise I would have sent the call away." "A... as is my want." "Keep as new.." "Maybe if the Internet went away but even before the Internet, I mean, I would always find you know, 12 books and 17 magazines" "I had to read before I could finish an article." "Now, I have the attention span of a gnat." "Being Jonathan's editor it's like being someone's, like, teenage stalker for me." "I knew he won't turn his piece in even if he agrees to do it and then I realized that what it was gonna take would be, you know, bordering on psychotic levels of, of e-mail and phone and text harassment." "I'll call when I get back." "You know, actually I went to somebody who specialized in writer's block." "I mean, that was her thing, and she just threw her hands up and usually I do writer's block, I do people who can't write." "There's something that keeps them from writing yet you publish 150,000 words a year." "Clearly you're writing." "That, I'm not, I don't deny that what you're experiencing is something, but I have no idea what it is." "I mean, I could sit down and I can say that" ""you need to do this piece a week early"" "but I end up like, you know, torturing one paragraph for you know, 3 and a half days and then somebody calls and starts yelling at me and the rest of the piece will be done in an hour and a half." "So..." "Alright." "What else we need to talk about is what you think you might be doing in terms of reviews for the next couple of weeks." "I think next week will be, this new szechuan restaurant in.." "Surprise, alhambra." "That, is called the chengdu taste." "Like, there's, there's a dish on the menu called intriguingly enough.." "Little sister's spicy rabbit." "Yeah, great." "I don't think they're actually cooking... rabbit?" "It's rabbit, but I don't think it's, like, the little sister's rabbit." "I think it's in the style of.." "The way a little sister would make it unless it actually was..." "I sort of regard him some days as my younger much smarter little brother and I'm the first born, and I'm the responsible one and I have to make the trains run on time and he's the funny, smart, talented one, and I," "there's probably some love buried down there deep inside but" "it's, sometimes the role is difficult to play." "So, how difficult, alright is it gonna be to photograph there?" "Is there gonna be a language barrier?" "There is gonna be a language barrier." "We need to take care of that this afternoon." " Okay, I'll do that." " Okay,   you come up with the cattle prod" "I'll come up with the copy." "Awesome." "Chengdu taste." "Everybody's excited about it." "Not 'cause we haven't had chengdu style food here before but the sort of freshness, the, the vividness of the flavors the fact that everything is not just lashed with oceans of chili oil makes it sort of a really appealing place." "One thing that I try never, never to do is to pretend expertise that I don't have." "I like to come to it the way that I assume most of my readers are gonna come to it.." "That I don't necessarily, no more than they do and I find out chengdu is the largest city and the capital of sichuan proper." "It's inland, so there's probably not gonna be a lot of sea food.." "Although these pictures are all, like you know, abalone crab." "I very rarely take notes in a restaurant." "I'm more involved in, sort of, observing the music of the meal." "I mean, you could take notes when you're having sex too but you'd, sort of, be missing out on something and I go to restaurants usually 4 or 5 times before I review them." "In the case of places where the cuisine is unfamiliar to me" "I may go many, many more times than that." "I think my record is 17." "Let's get the..." "The fish with green chili." "They... they don't have that chicken dish you like but they have,   that's okay." "I mean, I don't..." " And the wonton with..." " Okay." "I've been thinking that you'll like the water boiled fish." "A lot of, sichuan peppercorn.." "Hi, how are you today?" "Nice to see you again." "Nice to see you too." "Thanks." "I mean the sense of discovery of eating something you've never had before is exhilarating." "But what's even better I think is you get through the exhilaration you go through the infatuation phase for the next couple of meals and then maybe if you're really lucky, you get to the place of understanding." "I mean, I wouldn't pretend to know anything at all about Burma from having had two dozen Burmese meals, right?" "But there was, certainly a point where I thought" "I knew something about Burma for having that and it's, like, seeing a movie or something like, seeing a documentary." "It gives you the illusion of understanding things and maybe you have a different context to put things in and sometimes that's, that's all you can ask for and sometimes that's enough." "No shortage of bean sprouts." "The book that we oughta write would be some sort of popular, populist thing on all these communities and who runs what and all the stuff that I always wanna know the answer to." "Between the two of us, the number of hours spent not writing that book.." "It would be, it would take a lifetime not to write that book." " Yeah, sure." " Okay." "You will probably find this chengdu style cooking lighter, cleaner, and less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night with chili oil induced nightmares." "The food is still quite spicy, flavored with a vast array of fresh, dried, pickled and ground chilis." "The almost electric charge of the peppercorns brings out the flavor of the filets and chilies." "The taste flits around your lips and tongue with the weird vibrancy of a flashing las Vegas sign where the pepper sauce with the wonton obliterates everything in its path like a mysteriously pleasurable punch in the mouth." "The little secret that people don't get about." "Jonathan's writing is the way he uses the second person." "He'll start a review something like you probably have found in the past that deer penis is not really worth the effort that the, that the amount of gristle and fat and bone is just to high in proportion to the amount of stringy meat" "you're able to pull off, but that's because you've never had deer penis at this vietnamese restaurant that specializes in it." "In the first paragraph, he's formed a bond with the reader." "You know, you and I are people who eat deer penis and you know even though the readers even though 99.9% of his readers has never ordered or eaten deer penis he brings you to his table in a way that" "I've never seen another restaurant writer do." "It takes great writing and great storytelling to elevate food criticism to what Jonathan does and Jonathan was the first pulitzer prize winner for food criticism." "The fact that someone could write about food in such a way as to get the attention of people not in the food world but in the journalism world, in the cultural criticism world to me was hugely significant." "I think the fact that he got the pulitzer for food criticism sort of put the stamp on food as a, a subject worthy of, of serious inquiry." "Thank you, - are you guys interested in wine?" " Coffee is fine." "Thank you." " Right." "Sounds good." "Have you ever been on any kind of a diet?" "Have you ever made any sort of dietary restrictions?" "No." "I mean, you've read all the stuff that, like cooking is actually what makes us human." "Right." "I had to explain to my 4 year old." "Like, what's the diff.." "It was like, she's like, "we're animals."" "I'm, like, "yeah, we're animals." She's like" ""so what makes us people?"" "And I was like, "well, we cook."" "And she seemed satisfied with that." "That's the difference between me and a monkey because I will puree the banana for you and he will just throw it at you." "So what's, what's your next thing for "lucky peach" going to be?" "Or what ideas can I steal from you and then put into "lucky peach?"" "I'm taking hagfish and you threatened to take me to the hagfish restaurant." "I didn't threaten you, did you go to the hagfish restaurant?" "I have not yet been to the hagfish restaurant." "I didn't think that you were fucking with me but your description of the hagfish.." "Well, the first thing about the hagfish is that it's not really delicious." "It's like eel, only a lot worse." "Really?" "Like muddier?" "Blander?" "It's bla, it's blander and the filets are gelatinous but sort of everything about the hagfish is bothersome, right?" "The fact that it's this weird hybrid of a vertebrate and invertebrate it's really sort of an early species and the.." "It has a cranium, but it really has no other bones." " And then the slime thing." " And the slime thing." "You could put a hagfish in a 5 gallon bucket of water and the bucket will turn to solid slime in seconds." "Jonathan doesn't write about food because it's weird like that's not, I don't think that's ever a sole motivator though he is, like, uniquely good at finding horrible things to eat." "He writes about it because people eat it and that's a part of their culture and their world and if you learn about that, then you're connected to them." "Now we're going down Westwood boulevard and towards, what was for so many years junior's deli, which was the deli my family grew up going to." "For, reformed Jewish families in Los Angeles sometimes like your deli is more telling of who you are and what your status is and how you grow up than the show you went to." "If your family went to Nate'n al's you were, you were kind of fancy." "If your family went to.." "Labels table, you were probably pretty close to working class, but if your family was going to junior's, you were, you were doing alright." "You ever been here before?" "No, I never have." "It's kind of like a social scene in Tehran that's reproducing itself, like 30 years later." "That's cool." "It's funny that everybody thinks we had this sort of like gourmet upbringing, right?" "Just remembering the stuff that we ate when we were kids." "What do you mean?" "Iceberg, salad.." "Orange jello, French fries cream wafer sticks, and Dr. pepper." "That was like the perfect meal." "What are you talking about?" "When you describe it like that, it sounds like one of those typical last meals that prisoners request.." "Before they go to the electric chair." "We just had that a lot." "We did have that a lot." "So have you eaten any endangered species lately?" "Yes, I had an ortolan souffle." "It was, it was delightful." "My brother and I are pretty different." "I mean, he's an environmentalist." "He lives to save the ocean." "And I'm the guy who bought the truck that was the single most polluting vehicle in consumer reports that year." "I'm not proud of it, but mark definitely pointed it out to me." "Dinner at the gold table was always a blood sport because all 3 of us brothers were always ragging on each other all the time." "How can you say, "okay, this is an amazing Sushi place"" "and say, "don't eat the blue fin"" "when you're still getting people to go to that place?" "Well, I'm, I'm subtler than that." "Yes and no." "You're the one who was on a Korean whale eating tour." "I have to be an environmentalist because Jonathan's eating everything I'm trying to save." "The question is whether or not you go to the point o... of using a regulatory mechanism to have this country lead by example." "I've often thought that one of my biggest achievements was getting my brother to write and op-ed piece on a bill that we were pushing to ban on the sale of shark fin products in the state of California." "Believe me, I'd like to see, you know shark's fin soup banned tomorrow.." "It took me 4 months to get him to write that piece but I read his piece and my anger melted away." ""But as much as you might love conpoy" ""dried flotation bladders, crab eggs, braised fish cheeks" ""and the other esoterica of cantonese seafood cooking" ""it is hard to work up an appetite for the bitter taste of extinction."" "I had people who worked on the bill say that that was one of the most critical aspects of the entire campaign to get the bill passed, and so the power of how well he writes really made a big difference." "My dad always wanted to be a writer and he was very talented." "My father was probably the most overeducated probation officer in the history of Los Angeles county." "He really wanted to be an English professor." "He was all but dissertation in American literature but la county probation paid a lot more than being an English professor." "So, our household was all about culture and we were just exposed to, you know, any book we wanted." "Doesn't matter what our financial situation is that book would appear." "There was always music playing usually my dad's infatuation with either mahler or Italian opera." "And there was the idea that the culture of the nation was sort of like flowing through our living room." "What are you working on?" "Well, yeah." "Okay, so here, here, here it is." "I remember this." "This was in your painting class." " Yeah." " Dark stuff." "Isabel has always drawn, even when very young, 4 or 5 she used to paint and draw pictures like incessantly." "I mean, it must be hard living with writers, right?" "I mean, people who are who basically judge or you think judge every single sentence that you say." "Maybe that's why she went into cartooning." ""Cold okapis!"" "Looks like I have, like, a split lip like a dog, that's good." "I hope my kids have grown up with culture in the way that I grew up with culture." "I mean, I do this thing where we go to a museum and we stand in front of a painting for half an hour and we talk about the painting and every single thing about it." "And the idea of being able to spend that much time with your child and having that dialogue about it is... is just wonderful." "These are all like members of the congress or something, right?" "Yeah, yeah." "None of them were so stoked about these, right?" "I mean, I think he was the first caricaturist." "And he was very vicious in his things but he was also like really accurate." "Well, you might not have to see eyes on that one." "It's like when you're writing something and you're just describing something as a, as a writer you can't list every single detail." "You've gotta pick just a couple of details that let the reader see and then they'll build the person up in their imagination." "And so, like this guy, you know, he's round and he's squat and he's froggy and, you know, like there's nobody in the world with a nose that's that big." "In just a few months, la Tia has already established itself as one of the most serious Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles in complexity and deftness." "I always end up with the quail in the traditional black mole so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it." "Spicy as a novella and bitter as tears." "Mole whose aftertaste can go on for hours." "La Tia's mole negro appears so glossy and rich that I'm always tempted to test its consistency by stabbing an index finger into it and the resulting stain lingers as long as the empurpled digits of patriotic Iraqi voters." "The last time I was as inspired by glossy black it was part of Charles Ray's infamous sculpture ink box and it was enshrined in a major museum of art." "Hey, this is garth Trinidad from kcrw and I am here with Jonathan gold, food critic and writer who actually got his start writing about music." "Yeah, I was the classical music critic at the "la weekly"" "before I did anything else and then later got to write about Los Angeles hip hop." "So we're going to be talking about some of his favorite songs as part of the kcrw guest dj project." "Can we talk about the song that you picked" ""flow my tears" real quick." "Sure, I was a classical music geek growing up." "I was locked in a, small room with my cello for most of my adolescents." "I played, you know viola da gamba." "That's the way to get the chicks I'm telling you." "John dowland was probably the hit composer of the elizabethan era, a little bit afterwards." ""Flow my tears" was more or less the "stairway to heaven" of like 1620." "My dad wanted a string trio with the three brothers and I was the worst violinist player ever." "Josh was probably the worst viola player ever and Jonathan's the guy who had some talent and really stuck with it." "He knew every single opera and every classical music piece." "They used to have a contest on the radio on classical music and opera trivia that he would excel and dominate on." "He didn't grow up with rock and roll the way most of us did just because his parents were mostly listening to classical music and because he was so obsessed with the cello, that was.." "The cello was kind of his whole life." "So he experienced like there's a kind of radical shift when he heard, you know, punk rock for the first time." "You brought, okay, a track from the germs, "forming?"" ""Forming" is the first la punk single ever recorded in Los Angeles." "Punk rock is sort of what got me out of my shell and somebody dragged me to the whisky to see a show of, you know, x and the screamers." "I was just.." ""You can do this?"" ""It's possible to do this?"" "And it was as transforming as anything I've ever done." "I think punk rock is one of the things that's really helped shaped his world view and his ideas as a critic." "The idea of disruption and, and pushing boundaries." "When Jonathan came in and was first a critic the fact that the "la times" was reviewing, you know a burrito place, was disruption." "That's delicious, I love mezcal." "Mezcal on an empty stomach." "Welcome to la." "My dad was a mezcal maker in oaxaca and things were going really bad for my dad in '93 and that's when, the peso devalued so there was an economic downfall in Mexico so he decided to move here." "So he just started kinda exploring la and this area where we are right now koreatown, there was a lot of latinos and a lot of people from oaxaca that lived in the area." "So my dad opened a little food stand and it became very popular among people from oaxaca because they just knew that's where you went to get oaxacan food." "So he was like, you know, " ""let's open up a restaurant."" "It was this little hole in the wall, maybe like 6 tables and we opened like a little alley it was like totally illegal." "So one day my dad walks in and was like" ""where are all of these white people coming from?"" "Because there were all these white people." "Somebody was like, "don't you know you were in the 'la times?" "'"" "in fact, Jonathan gold reviewed the restaurant before the Spanish speaking media." "And now the restaurant's run by my sister, my brother and myself, and we sit 300 people here." "These are so delicious." "The grasshoppers?" "They're so delicious." "I think there's 2 things, I mean one, it's insects and two, it's a whole animal, which is still really hard for Americans." "I mean, if we're going to survive as a species we're going to eat insects." " We are." " I mean, unless we're idiots." "For us, the oaxacan community we owe him a lot because in oaxaca people are really looked down on because we come from an indigenous background and to have someone put it out there and say come and taste this oaxacan food." "I think it even helped me as a person to embrace my culture because people cared about my food and people cared, and people were really like" ""your food's like, your food's cool"" "and I was like, "yeah, my food's cool."" "Hello." "He's a funny guy." "The don of dogs." " How you doing, Duane?" " What's up, big guy?" "Same old, you?" "Hot dogs." "So, so you're, you're back to the cart." "I'm back to the cart, we're doing it big again." "We did this just to let people know hey, what's happening, we're about to get back open." "It's cool because I'm getting a lot of my old customers who were hot dog cart customers, pulling up saying" ""I could have sworn, I saw your little peanut head" ""standing over there, so I had to come back over here and see what your hot dogs were like."" "Earle's wieners is opening up!" "28 years, since what '86?" " '86." " '86" " crenshaw suave, baby." " Lotta dogs." "There's no tidy way to eat one of these." "I've always felt a little uncomfortable about claiming hood." "I grew up in south la, but I obviously my family moved out before.." "When I was still very young." "We had moved there, or my parents had moved there in the late '50s when my dad was a teacher at audubon junior high school which was this sort of beautifully integrated school." "There were, you know.." "There were lots of black kids and lots of white kids and lots of Japanese kids, and it seemed like that was gonna be the future of la and he wanted to be part of it, so he moved into the community." "Some of my earliest memories are of the riots in 1965." "You know, sitting at the top of our hill and, and seeing the fires burn down below of seeing the tanks go along crenshaw boulevard and after that the neighborhood changed." "We're here with Jonathan gold." "So you brought funkadelic with the classic "maggot brain."" "Maybe you remember in the old days when you could actually buy like, soul records in liquor stores." "I was 13 or 14 when I was trying to buy you know, beer on a false ID." "And I picked up "maggot brain" because I loved the cover." "Got home and put it on and the guitar solo." "Eddie Hazel, it's just amazing." "It just keeps flowing." "It has a sort of, majesty that you expect from somebody like, you know, Wagner the concept of the endless melody the one that goes on forever." "Almost all of blues guitarists just Peter out in the middle, they have nothing more to say so they did the wa wa wa, but Eddie Hazel doesn't." "He always has something new to say, and the tune and the chord progression keeps folding in on itself and showing itself in all of these you know, wonderful miraculous ways." "Please join me in welcoming Jonathan gold." "Thank you." "Hi." "I, in some ways I think come to you as an emissary from the world of failure a rare citizen of the wide country where things do not turn out exactly as you've planned." "I'm here to say that that's okay." "Still, when I wake up in the morning" "I don't feel like a semi-successful writer a chronicler of Los Angeles" "I feel like a failed cellist which was more or less my ucla experience." "But all of us, especially those of us in the arts experience failure, and it is this experience of failure that makes us strong that helps make us who we are." "Did my ucla acquired knowledge help me when I wrote about hip hop in the 1980s?" "Not directly, but it was a way of listening that gave me a way to understand the music in an important way." "Did my experience in writing about opera and new music have anything to do with food writing?" "Yes, as it turns out, on a very basic level criticism is criticism." "An Aria is in some way equivalent to a well-cooked potato and both the comprehension of form and the ability to describe abstract sensation which I learned to do as an undergraduate in music and art courses here, turns out to be exactly" "what I needed to know." "I think the great human ill is, contempt prior to investigation." "Jonathan takes that idea.." "It's a really comfy idea for a lot of Americans and he just, he just blows it the fuck up." "Jonathan gold is my guest dj." "Okay, man, so you brought some la gangsta rap." "Some Los Angeles gangsta rap and you brought "g thang" from, Dr. dre, snoop dogg." "Now, listen, the rumor is you were in the studio a lot of the time with them when they were actually recording "doggystyle" and stuff like that." "Yeah, yeah, I was." "This was when you were really writing about a lot of that music during that time." "Right, la hip hop was great, but nobody ever heard it." "Everybody just heard the New York stuff and dre was the guy who figured out how to slow it down, made it gangsta." "Chronic, I think was the total breakthrough album." "It crossed over to the bouncing cars to the hanging out and barbequing in the park." "It was less about bang bang bang and it was more about, this is the neighborhood you live in and you're enjoying it and ya'll are invited to the party and there's something beautiful about that." "You know, after the Los Angeles riots there was a lot of hand wringing about what had gone wrong in this city and there was a movement to like get to know who your neighbors are but long before the riots and after Jonathan gold" "was introducing us to people and to neighborhoods." "There's a certain level of utopian thinking in his work." "There's a certain level of dedication to asking the question how we live." "He talks about the miscegenation between races in essence appearing over the table." "Those food nations become an integral part of the way he sees Los Angeles in a way Los Angeles comes together." "There's so many different ways to tell stories about Los Angeles, and of course, telling stories through food is one of the ways Jonathan gold does that." "And the piece he's going to read represents another way of talking about Los Angeles in a moment when, the fabric of the city kind of looked like it wasn't going to hold." "So, Jonathan." "This is an older essay written, the week after the, the riots in 1992 and..." "It.." "Well, I'll, I'll, I'll read and you can, you can hear." "I can't tell you how much I love Los Angeles." ""It is 8 o'clock and the light has started to fade"" ""as I sit on the floor of my apartment"" ""staring at the spot where the rain not so much dripped"" ""as oozed from the door jam."" ""For the last decade or so"" ""I have lived in a creaking apartment"" ""probably swank in its day"" ""that has been home to a dog trainer"" ""a fiddle player and a series of writers"" ""in a smartly column building in an aging neighborhood"" ""nobody has yet bothered to name."" ""Downstairs a baby cries out in Spanish"" ""in the distance the ghetto boys"" ""boom from a passing truck."" ""For the fifth time, in about an hour"" ""I think about the other parts of town"" ""the ones with croissant shops on the street corners"" ""and air conditioned shopping malls"" ""and neighbors who look like me."" ""Before the fires of April, there were 14 different kinds"" ""of ethnic restaurants within a 5 minute walk."" ""Now, there are just 10."" ""For a while, everything in the neighborhood"" ""seemed just a little more ominous."" ""The Saturday night gunshots a little louder."" ""The omnipresent sirens and helicopters"" ""a little closer to home."" ""When you spend some time in my neighborhood"" ""you'll learn the rhythm of the place."" ""The mornings when the Mexican's food truck"" ""shows up on the corner."" ""The hour when Filipino teenagers"" ""snack on liver buns and Coca-Cola at the pancit shop."" ""The peaceful time in late afternoon"" ""when the Avenue flows majestically."" ""Guatemalan women walk home from Ralph's"" ""with bags of groceries"" ""balanced expertly on their heads."" ""Salvadoran construction workers crowd"" ""into the local Korean noodle shop"" ""for steamed dumplings."" ""In this neighborhood, most of us are just passing through."" ""Transients on our way to more permanent homes"" ""in long beach or huntington park."" ""We are all citizens of the world."" ""We are all strangers together."" ""But to my Korean landlords, this neighborhood is home."" ""I have been awakened before dawn"" ""by the rhythmic thud of their pounding garlic"" ""into paste on the back porch."" ""I've stumbled out the door with an armful of wet laundry"" ""only to find all of the clotheslines"" ""taken up by drying fish."" ""I've also come home from work to find the back stairs spread"" ""with leaves of cabbage, curing in the hot sun."" ""Even when their son was shot"" ""a half mile south of here"" ""there was questioning of their sense of place."" ""The landlords keep to themselves and so do I."" ""I often wish that they would invite me over for dinner."" "Thanks." "Alright, man, you brought some Louis Armstrong." "We gotta talk about Louis." ""tight like this," why did you choose this track?" "I think it's by the best driving music there is."