Anything That Moves (3 page)

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L
os 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 street 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.”

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.”

•   •   •

I
n 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.

•   •   •

T
o 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.