Jonathan Gold

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Driving While Hungry

Jonathan Gold
Photos by Anne Fishbein THE CARHOP IS DEFUNCT. THE LAST DRIVE-IN THEATER has been shuttered. The drive-in church in Garden Grove brought its act indoors long ago. As far as I know, drive-in shoe repair, drive-in psychics and drive-in art museums are as dead as the Hupmobile. Although in Los......
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Chile Scenes of Summer

Jonathan Gold
Chung King‘s fried chicken with hot peppers is the red of silk pajamas, the red of firecrackers, the red of the Chinese flag, a knoll of crunchy dark-meat cubes subsumed under a blizzard of fried chiles. If Chuck Jones had ever decided to draw something spicy for the coyote to......
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Original Sinaloa

Jonathan Gold
When executed properly, machaca, a sort of red-brown heap of fried beef jerky, is one of the great dried-beef dishes of the world, an intense distillation of the flavors of the Mexican West, all salt and smoke and heat, with a slight marine smack that I like to believe comes......

Silver Clouds

Jonathan Gold
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, I WAS standing next to the Brooklyn Bridge when the first tower fell, close enough to feel the shockwave, to absorb the burnt-plastic reek that had already begun to make its way across the river, to hear the terrible, distant roar. Twenty-five minutes later,......
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Pho West, Young Man

Jonathan Gold
In some parts of Los Angeles, Vietnamese noodle shops are as thick on the ground here as they are in Hanoi, and a bowl of pho, the northern Vietnamese dish of slithery rice noodles, fragrant beef broth and leafy herbs, is as easy to find as a Big Mac. Orange......
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O Brodard, Where Art Thou?

Jonathan Gold
San Gabriel may be the center of Shanghainese cooking in the Los Angeles area, and Monterey Park the location of grand Cantonese restaurants. Alhambra is home to Noodleville, that section of Valley Boulevard crowded with multi-ethnic Asian noodle shops with names like Noodle City, Noodle Planet and Noodle World, loud,......

A Neighborhood Just West of Downtown

Jonathan Gold
May 7, 1992 -- 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 doorjamb a couple of months ago, swelling the wood and leaving......
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Changing Lanes

Jonathan Gold
Photo by Anne Fishbein The first time I visited Mr. T’s Bowl was probably sometime back in the earliest ’90s, on a warm Saturday morning in late spring. Mr. T’s, you understand, was less a bowling alley than an enormous Highland Park cocktail lounge that happened to encompass a couple......

The 17th Level

Jonathan Gold
If you grew up in Los Angeles, at least part of your life probably revolved around Farmers Market, the intimate expanse of fruit stalls between Du-par’s and the Magee‘s wooden mule that kicks when the attendant grinds the horseradish, the post cards of snowy mountains and orange groves, the souvenir......
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Highway 6 Revisited

Jonathan Gold
A 10-minute taxi ride from downtown Phnom Penh, out past the colonial mansions of the international district and over the squat Japanese Friendship Bridge on the national Highway 6, the biggest concentration of restaurants in Cambodia lies along the narrow strip of land running between the Mekong and the Tonle......