Jonathan Gold profiled in the New Yorker

Dana Goodyear's profile, almost a year in the making, calls the LA Weekly's Jonathan Gold "the high-low priest of the L.A. food scene." Subscription required to read the whole piece, but here's a taste:

Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the free, alternative L.A. Weekly. He abides by George Orwell’s rule of thumb: the fancier the restaurant, the more people who have dripped sweat into your food. 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.” He sees Los Angeles as “the anti-melting pot”— the home of true, undiluted regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas.

Goodyear writes: "There are people who consider 'Counter Intelligence,' a collection of Gold’s columns that was published in 2000, one of the great contemporary books about Los Angeles."