Jonathan Gold

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Next Stop, Green Village

Jonathan Gold
Braised meats are doing better box office than even Russell Crowe at the moment, from the tripe at Osteria Angelini to the veal cheeks at Spago, the carnitas at Border Grill to the pork-belly appetizer at Jar. Braising is a gentle way to cook the most ungentle cuts, breaking down......
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Hey, Babita

Jonathan Gold
A decade or so ago, when culture- page editors were still trying to come to that part of Los Angeles that didn’t happen to be contiguous with Beverly Hills, a little before television commentators learned to curl their lips into a sneer when pronouncing the word multiculturalism, La Moderna was......
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Eat, Memory

Jonathan Gold
A couple of Januarys ago, my wife brought a bag of blobby, yellow fruit home to the Manhattan apartment where we were then living, cradling the fragrant parcel as if it were a rare gift from a distant land. I would have recognized this fruit even hidden among a thousand......

5 Good Streets

Jonathan Gold
1. Pico Boulevard starts near a giant Coca-Cola bottle and ends up at a surfing beach, is a main thoroughfare of Central Americans, Koreans, Africans and Iranian Jews, and yet there’s almost always a place to park. You know how at some parties the living room is empty because almost......
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Five Places To Eat Shrimp and Drink Heavily on a Sunday Afternoon

Jonathan Gold
1. San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant. Steamed live Dungeness crabs served with mallets. Deep-fried carp. Beer sold from an ice-filled bin. And shrimp “fajitas” fried hard with garlic, peppers and onions, which you eat while you watch big freighters ease their way into the harbor. What more could you......

10 Insects To Look for In 2002

Jonathan Gold
1. Africanized honeybees. Now swarming in a location near you. 2. Tomato worms. Big, green and scary as hell, able to smell fear in an Early Girl from a distance of 2,000 yards and reduce a Big Boy to scarlet ooze in a matter of seconds. There is no recourse......

5 Web Sites To Read, Hands Trembling, At 3 A.M.

Jonathan Gold
1. debka.com. “We start where the media stop.” Only half of the ultraspooky stuff on this Israel-based intelligence e-zine, beloved by end-of-days fundamentalists, among others, will turn out to be true. The problem is figuring out which half. 2. guardian.co.uk. But only because the Brits are so much better at......
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And Then There Was Beef

Jonathan Gold
Golden Deli, you may not need to be told, is one of the best Vietnamese noodle shops in Southern California, a well-worn citadel of banh hoi and pho in a busy San Gabriel mini-mall, a restaurant so popular that its customers wait up to an hour for a spot at......
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Spicy With Spicy

Jonathan Gold
The aftermath of a dinner at Hua‘s Garden is like a Francis Bacon painting splashed across the tabletop in shades of red -- gory puddles of scarlet juice alive with Sichuan peppercorns, scraps of scallions, chewed bits of gristle, pounded rice flour and frog bones stripped clean of their meat......
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Will the Real Taipan Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up?

Jonathan Gold
Taipan is one of those Chinese restaurants that you could walk by a hundred times without slowing down, a nice, clean-lined cafe plopped down among the convenience stores and fast-food outlets in an Arcadia mini-mall. The restaurant‘s name, and even the typeface on the sign, is identical to that of......