Anything That Moves (4 page)

Then Gold hosted a benefit event at Union Station, the train depot downtown. There were concoctions from New Cocktailians (Manhattans made with Luxardo cherries, champagne drinks with absinthe-citrus foam), paired with morsels from some of Gold's favorite highbrow places. Gold, wearing a gray suit and a pale pink tie covered in pink velvet polka dots, stood with Ochoa at a cocktail table. “The chefs are going to freak out if you don't eat anything,” she said, and went to get him a plate.

Ochoa came back with a pig slider and a pig's ear, a deep-fried, molten triangle, uncomfortably soft. “I definitely encourage a certain kind of cooking,” Gold said, popping the ear and then the slider into his mouth. Then he went to search for bacon-wrapped matzoh balls: the ultimate transgression.

The food nerds were out in force: bloggers from the local sites that track Gold's every move. Neil Kohan—thirty-one, receding hair, camera slung over his shoulder—sipped a Manhattan and declared Gold the Thom Yorke of food writing. (His blog,
Food Marathon
, chronicles his eating itineraries, many of them heavily informed by Gold.) Another blogger urged Gold to try her drink—twelve-year-old Scotch, ginger syrup, fresh lime juice, soda water, and crushed ice, also made from Scotch. He sipped. “It's delicious,” he said. “But something about it tastes a little like pool water, too.”

Following in Gold's footsteps can be hazardous. For many years, at the
Weekly,
Gold produced an annual list called “99 Essential L.A. Restaurants.” Ken Baumann, an actor, attempted to eat at every one, but ended up having part of his colon and small intestine removed—Crohn's disease—after ticking off only twenty-eight. Gold's last list for the
Weekly
came out in the fall of 2011. Jenji Kohan, the creator of
Weeds,
and her husband, Christopher Noxon, a writer, decided to tackle it. They are committed eaters and devotees of Gold, and they felt they needed some way to structure their dining. “If you have a curator and you have a project that allows you to focus down, it gives you clarity,” Noxon says.

By June, Kohan and Noxon were on their sixtieth of the “99”: Lukshon, an upscale restaurant owned by Sang Yoon, the chef Gold credits with starting the national plague of “Changes and Modifications Politely Declined” when he added that language to the menu at his burger place, Father's Office. I met them there for dinner.

“Jonathan Gold says we have to get the squid, and we listen to Jonathan Gold over all things,” Kohan said as we sat down. She had on a red cardigan and cat's-eye glasses. Noxon, thin and fair, added tea-leaf salad, Manila clams, Chinese black mushrooms, garlic pork belly. The waiter suggested lamb belly roti; we got two. “He's got a tender tummy, which was a problem initially,” Kohan said. “I have an iron stomach. My mother cooked like a cafeteria—mediocre food and a
lot
of it.”

“At a certain point, I would have taken a pill for daily caloric intake,” Noxon said. “Now I get angry if I have something that isn't delicious. I get depressed.”

Once they both cared, choosing where to eat grew complicated. “It was hugely contentious and difficult,” Noxon said. “An unbelievable ordeal. Where are we going to eat? What continent?” Sometimes they would spin the globe to settle it. Now they have three children, who bicker in the car on Saturday mornings about whether to go to Golden Deli, a Vietnamese spot in San Gabriel that is perennially on the “99,” or to La Cabañita, in the far-flung town of Montrose, for Mexican. Charlie, the eldest, is thirteen. “He is the most adventurous, and the most limited,” Kohan said—allergic to dairy, sesame, and cashews. A few years ago, he decided to keep kosher, though his parents aren't observant, and now he avoids pork and shellfish, except on Purim. “He found a loophole in the literature that says on Purim you are ‘not yourself,' so for one day a year it's blue crab hand rolls and pork soup dumplings, the things he misses.”

At the end of dinner, Noxon said, “Those mushrooms are amazing and I will crave them.” They were meaty and deep, with a touch of smoke, like the dregs of a pot of Lapsang souchong. They agreed that the food was tasty, but that it was the kind of place that years of reading Jonathan Gold had taught them to deplore: inauthentic, impersonal, what he calls an “AmEx restaurant.” “It's really good, but it's bullshit,” Noxon said. “Third generation.”

•   •   •

I
n a fancy restaurant, Gold will wear a rumpled suit and a soft bluish button-down and pay with a credit card issued in the name of his high-school algebra teacher. He has special cell phone numbers that he uses just for reservations. “It's like
The Bourne Identity
in slow motion,” he says.

The first piece he wrote for a “slick”—the now defunct
California
magazine
,
edited by the late Harold Hayes—was a review of Chasen's, which had been an entertainment-industry staple for fifty years. To Gold, it reeked of Reaganomics and other things that he despised. He wrote that it was “a swell place to celebrate a seventy-fifth birthday or a contra incursion,” and that the famous chili was “distinguishable from a bowl of Dennison's only by a couple of chunks of sirloin, a 1,600 percent price differential and three guys”—the servers—“who look like they stepped out of a 1935 gangster B-movie.” He has his regrets. “Although I didn't do Chasen's in”—it was around for another decade—“I certainly put a lance in its side,” he says. “But, looking back, I really miss Chasen's. And kiwi vinaigrette and magical caviar snakes and braised cantaloupe with black corn fungus and all the things I thought were the future back then—a lot of that food was just silly.”

Accessible food has always been of greater interest to Gold—but it depends on what you mean by accessible. “The democracy of really fine dining is something I've always liked about L.A.,” he says. “In New York, the most expensive restaurant is always the best. That's not necessarily the case here.” In 1990, he started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown, next to a working dairy farm. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in. They ordered what he had ordered: slimy bamboo salads, fermented fish, and intensely spicy dishes—authentic regional Thai food that the owners, Bill and Saipin Chutima, were worried the customers would send back. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for
Vogue,
made a pilgrimage (the Chutimas said that his postprandial cigar was disrupted by the stench of cows), and so did Mark Bittman, of
The
New York Times
. When the Chutimas moved to Las Vegas and opened a new place, Lotus of Siam, Gold called it the best Thai restaurant in North America; in 2011, Saipin, who does the cooking, won a James Beard award. Gold, who has a competitive streak, put it this way once: “As the Italians say of Christopher Columbus, when he discovered America, it stayed discovered.”

As a kid, Gold guzzled hot sauce. Several years ago, on a tip from a diner who had discovered a secret, untranslated menu of southern Thai specialties at an ordinary strip-mall Thai place called Jitlada, Gold paid a visit. After eating there a few times, he brought his friend Carl Stone, the composer, who carries a card in his wallet that says, more or less, in Thai, “Yes, I know I'm not Thai, but please give me the food as spicy as I request.” They ordered
kua kling
, a dry-beef curry, and asked for it “Bangkok hot.”

The
kua kling
was the spiciest Gold had ever had. “It was glowing, practically incandescent,” he told me. “You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. It's an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It's not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don't understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time—its flavor—as you taste details of fruit and turmeric and spices that you didn't taste when it was merely extremely hot. It's like a hallucination. You're floating in some high, tasting the most magnificent things you've ever tasted in your life. I've never been able to get them to make it that hot again.” Stone said it hurt to pee for three days afterward. He said, “I thought, How in the world could I have gotten the clap?”

That day, the owner, a voluble woman named Jazz, came over to their table and started chatting. She mentioned that she had been praying every day in her Buddha room for Jonathan Gold to come in and review her restaurant. Did they know him or know what he looked like? she asked. Stone says, “I was going to throw out a red herring—‘He's tall and thin with a full head of hair'—but Jonathan started laughing and introduced himself.” Gold, in his review, praised the “delicious, foul-smelling yellow curries” and the “strange, mephitic fragrances” of wild tea leaves and stinky beans, and said that Jitlada was “the most exciting new Thai restaurant of the year.”

•   •   •

M
ark Gold, the youngest of the Gold sons, runs the marine conservation organization Heal the Bay; he finds Jonathan's eating habits atrocious and enumerates his brother's gustatory offenses on his blog,
Spouting Off.
“I have gone to dim sum in San Gabriel when he tried to order shark fin soup,” Mark wrote. “I said OMDB! I went to a restaurant with him in Chicago when he was the lead grub guy at
Gourmet
magazine. There, he nearly ordered wild-caught sturgeon until I complained vociferously.”

Right before I met him, Jonathan made his first trip to Seoul. When he got back, he wrote about eating live octopus, or
sam nak ji,
which he described as “one of the most alarming dishes in the world.” After the piece came out, Mark told me, “Needless to say, I did not participate in that sadistic torture of a wonderful marine animal. I'm not going to eat live shrimp. I'm not going to eat octopus. I haven't had shark or swordfish in twenty-five years. I said to him, ‘What do you think an octopus is? You need an ecology class.' He's all, ‘It doesn't have a backbone.'”

Of course, Gold didn't need to go to Korea to eat live octopus. One night he took me to a divey strip-mall restaurant with a picture of a smiling mermaid and a halibut on the sign, and a Korean golf show playing on the television set. He had guessed based on the halibut that they'd have live shrimp and
sam nak ji
. “If you're going to have live halibut you'll have
sam nak ji
,” he said. “It's like ham and eggs.” It turned out they were out of shrimp—the next shipment was coming at eleven o'clock that night, flown in fresh from Korea—but they had the octopus. “How do I put this delicately?” he said as we sat down. “It's a very male food. We're going to get a lot of winks and nods.”

Gold said he thought that the space had once been occupied by Alex Donut, one of three places in town to get Thai food in the late seventies. “I probably wouldn't think it was good now, but that was a thousand Thai meals ago,” he said. “I thought it was amusing to eat all the little green nachos in a jar of vinegar, too.”

Korean sashimi came to the table—big hunks of white tuna, with the taste and texture of chilled butter; fresh-killed halibut—along with pickled mackerel eggs and sea squirts. The squirts glistened orange and tasted of brine. “These things are essentially taking over the fricking sea,” Gold said. “The taste is strong, iodine-y, but not unpleasant—but some people are totally grossed out by them.” The bluefin on the table went untouched. “It's the equivalent of going on the Serengeti and eating the lion,” Gold said. “My brother hates this argument, but I don't like it because it's boring. Things that are at the top of the food chain are boring. They all taste the same.”

Then the proprietor, suppressing a smile, produced the main event, a plate of slippery gray tentacles, squirming anxiously. “It'll try to climb up the chopstick,” Gold said, dousing a tentacle in sesame oil to loosen the grip of its suckers. “I don't actually know that much about octopus physiology. Most people say that the octopus is dead, and just twitching, but I don't know. It looks pretty alive to me.”

Gold bit into the octopus. “I thought I was completely full from lunch, but this is invigorating food,” he said. More courses came—broiled eel and broths and a greasy red kimchi pancake and, finally, crab claws covered in a sticky glaze, lustrous as a ceramic sculpture by Jeff Koons.

He was a tad disappointed about missing the unsettling experience of eating live shrimp. “It freaks me out,” he told me. “You're picking up an animal whose carapace has been stripped off by the chef. Its eyeballs are going back and forth on its eyesticks and it's madly trying to swim away. Prawns don't have a great deal of intelligence but they know when they're going to die. You're killing something with your teeth, and whatever the pleasure of that—and the flavor, I've got to admit, is incredibly, hedonistically sweet—it feels wrong. You're not supposed to kill things with your teeth.”

T
he roots of extreme foodie-ism extend back to the beginning of the American gourmet industry, when squishy and swank were often one and the same. The business, which, in 2012, represented 10 percent of retail food sales and was worth nearly $86 billion, was built by a handful of largely forgotten European refugees on the backs of a menagerie of creatures most people in this country would gag to see on a plate of food.

At first, the specialty-food trade was based on comforting people with the familiar. During World War II, as thousands of Jews fled Europe for the United States, Jewish importers, most of them working from offices on Hudson and Varick Streets in lower Manhattan, supplied other émigrés with items from home. Only when the salesmen began to penetrate the uptown carriage-trade shops and department stores newly devoting floor space to imported food in spiffy packaging, did the stuff become known as “specialty.” Mario Foah, who arrived from Naples in 1939, at the age of eighteen, got his start peddling panettone, a product from the north of Italy that was exotic to the southern Italians he was trying to sell to. Later, he diversified to cookies and candy. “It was strictly a Christmas business,” Foah, who is ninety-three, told me. “The rest of the year we managed by starving and eating samples from our suppliers.” Business was conducted in cash; according to one old story I heard, dealers kept their money in secret compartments in their shoes.

Storytelling and salesmanship were inseparable, and an aura of personal sophistication proved useful. Ted Koryn was the quintessential New York food pitchman: small and suave, hilariously funny, fluent in four languages and conversant in a handful of others. He was born in Amsterdam to a wealthy family; only French was spoken in his grandmother's dining room, and when his mother went out at night a maid had to stay up till she returned to help her undress. Left alone there during the war—his mother and stepfather had gone “on holiday” to the United States just before the Nazis invaded—he hid out on a boat with two friends, and slept in the boathouse at night. In 1942, his stepfather's uncle was able to trade his art collection for exit visas, and Koryn rejoined his family in New York. There he signed on to a Dutch attachment to the Air Force and was trained in aerial photography at Yale.

After the war, Koryn started a food business, selling mainly French products no one had ever heard of before, like Pommery mustard, Lu Biscuits, and Evian water (which never took off for him). His first wife, Miriam Metzger, was the daughter of Joe Metzger, who co-founded Dannon yogurt in the Bronx. (The company, which began as Danone in Spain and got its original yogurt cultures from the Pasteur Institute, struggled to connect with U.S. consumers until Miriam's brother, Juan, suggested putting fruit in the bottom of the cup.) Koryn rode around Manhattan in a chauffeured limousine, and socialized constantly with an eclectic group of friends, from the cartoonist Will Eisner to the truffle-selling Urbanis and Xaviera Hollander, a former call girl who wrote
The Happy Hooker
. If he wanted someone to play poker with, he sent the car.

Koryn traveled extensively throughout Europe, always shopping for products to import. It was a good time to get deals: European manufacturers, their domestic economies destroyed, were willing to front product for the chance to enter a potentially vast American market. Purveyors played the edges. “If it was illegal or not one hundred percent, even the better,” Tim Metzger, Koryn's nephew, told me. “They loved to press the rules.” Bob Lape, a food journalist who started “The Eyewitness Gourmet” segment on WABC-TV in 1970, met Koryn in the middle of a blizzard, when he persuaded him to come visit his factory. Koryn was one of two men Lape called “the hungry ones.” The other was Murray Klein, the legendary manager and part owner of the New York specialty store Zabar's, where Koryn sold white truffles and beluga caviar.

In the 1950s, opening a can of mushroom soup and pouring it over a casserole was a culinary event. “They were putting crap in Jell-O and calling it an aspic,” John Roberts, a veteran of the food business, says. “Change was not valued. Food was not an adventure.” Mario Foah told me, “If you said to the man on the street, ‘I'd like to introduce you to gourmet foods,' he'd say, ‘Spell it!'” In 1952, Foah, Koryn, and several others decided to form a monthly lunch club that could function as a trade association, lobbying in Washington against tariffs on European products and other issues affecting them. They called themselves the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, or NASFT.

In 1955, the association put on its first event, the National Fancy Food and Confection Show, at the Sheraton-Astor Hotel in Manhattan. The war had sent a generation of Americans abroad, and the idea was to re-create foreign eating experiences: French mustard, Swiss chocolates, German sausages. The association's president put a note in the brochure, celebrating the inauguration of a marketplace for novel foodstuffs. “This being our first effort, there may be much to criticize and we beg your indulgence for any shortcomings or omissions,” he wrote.

One of the omitted would not indulge the oversight. Max Ries, a savvy Chicago-based purveyor, who had been barred from exhibiting—he posed a threat, most likely—ran a limousine from the Sheraton-Astor to another hotel nearby, where he had set up a show of only his products. After a few years, the New Yorkers relented and gave him a booth, which became a major attraction. To his first show, Ries brought an aerosol can filled with liquid cheese spread and a gift basket that cost $300, about $2,500 today. It included a barrel-based table, four chairs, and sixty imported delicacies. Ries came away with sixty-five orders. The next year, he displayed a brightly painted Sicilian cart with an umbrella, loaded with treats. Beautiful models passed out samples. “A lot of people didn't like him,” Foah told me. “But I admired him. He made people talk about the industry.”

A few months after Ries's show debut,
Fortune
named his company the country's largest importer, estimating its business at $6,500,000 a year, and overall specialty-food sales as high as $200 million, double what they had been in the show's first year. Commercial jetliners were making international travel, and therefore international eating, increasingly accessible. Suburbanites had money, time, and space to entertain; they needed something provocative and delicious to impress their guests at cocktail parties. Curiosity and snobbism, the piece concluded, were leading the way to “a greater sophistication of American taste.” The
Los Angeles Times
reported on a “gourmet cult which reaches now from lavish Park Avenue apartments to the grass-roots split-level homes of the Middle West.” The country was in the midst of a “great delicacy boom.”

•   •   •

R
ies, an outsider and a self-reinventor, helped create a taste for the freaky in a society devoted to beefsteak, glamorizing the seemingly repulsive and making it into a symbol of elegance. After a lucrative career as a textile manufacturer in Germany, he arrived in Chicago in 1939 and started selling imported European cheeses out of the back of a station wagon on Route 41, store by store. Soon he employed a brigade of German-Jewish refugees to go on the road for him. They drove all day and for dinner ate canned peaches and ice cream. Within a few years, Ries had diversified: an early price list shows Norwegian goat cheese, Bahamian mustard, chow mein noodles, Cuban rock lobster, and Hawaiian Punch.

Ries was dashing; slim and refined, he wore handmade suits and twirled—never chewed—his cigars. In order to make his company sound more “American,” he called it Reese Finer Foods. He developed new foods—baby corn, blue-cheese salad dressing, shelf-stable croutons—and sold them alongside other then-exotic fare like water chestnuts. When a shipment of artichokes arrived in rusty, dented cans, Ries packed them in glass with vinaigrette, and called them marinated artichokes. He couldn't boil water, according to his son, but he had a flair for presentation. Reese Finer Foods helped introduce teriyaki sauce to the United States by attaching a Japanese yen coin to every bottle sold (“Gives you a yen for Oriental food”); their barbecue sauce came with a whisk attached. In 1958, the
Los Angeles Evening Herald Express
announced, “Something wonderful has happened and no longer do you need ever again to get garlic on your finger tips!” Reese had invented roll-on garlic oil.

While other importers looked mainly to Europe, Ries sought unfamiliar snacks in Asia and Latin America. He brought tinned sparrows and French-fried grasshoppers from Japan, and ants from Bogotá. The Illinois candy-maker he hired to cover the ants with chocolate is said to have called Ries in a panic when the 500-pound shipment arrived; workers were threatening to quit the line. Once a year, Ries and his employees went to Asia to look for products and ideas. Reese sold tinned lion, tiger, elephant, and whale; pickled rooster combs, espresso, Lindt chocolate; Canadian muskrat, reindeer steaks from Lapland, and diamondbacks from Ross Allen, a snake-wrestling celebrity herpetologist with a ranch in Florida.

Ancient Romans sold the meat of exotic, imported panthers, hippos, lions, and giraffes killed in death matches at the circus; Reese did the modern equivalent, tinning creatures culled from zoos. “The zoos would furnish lists of animals they had to dispose of,” an employee later told a newspaper reporter. “Reese would buy a carcass at a high price and give it, frozen, to a cannery for processing.” When Ries went to a stock show in Chicago and noticed that no one was bidding on the bison—not then considered food—he bought the whole lot for forty cents a pound, and canned the meat with wine. “He took great food that nobody knew they wanted and got them to buy it,” Stewart Reich, Ries's great-nephew, told me. “Max—I don't want to say he churned it out, but he had a supply line and discovered the soft part of the market and exploited it.” At a “Fashion Show of Foods” Ries put on in Milwaukee in the mid-fifties, he said, “Eating habits are in the mind.”

As early as 1965, Ries predicted the foodie movement, and its turn toward the more inclusive, inventive cuisines of Latin America and Asia. “More people today can afford more of the so-called ‘exotic' foods which previously were available only to persons of great wealth,” he said. “With this increased affluence has also come a new spirit of adventure about eating.” His evidence that the babyish palate of America was maturing was that people had begun to take their baked potatoes with sour cream instead of sweet butter.

“They were Marco Polo type of guys,” Reich says. “They were definitely in the entertainment business.” One year Reese had overstock of its Spooky Foods gift set—chocolate-covered ants, bees, grasshoppers, and caterpillars—so it hired Bela Lugosi to appear in his Dracula costume with the product, which promptly sold out. Alienation was part of the appeal. Reich, who still works in the food business, considered Ries a mentor and an example; the month that
Jaws
opened in theaters Reich hawked shark-meat pâté wearing a scuba suit and took out an advertisement that read, “This is your chance to bite back.”

One of Ries's most valued employees was Morris Kushner, a former writer on Groucho Marx's
This Is Your Life
, who started as a West Coast representative and rose to company president. He lived in the guest quarters of a sprawling mansion in Encino and was married to Naudjia de Morozova, a thin, flamboyant woman who dressed in fur, claimed to be a Russian countess, and ate little besides chocolate. Kushner, who wore checked suits, a tweed trilby, and a moustache, was from Nebraska. His pedigree in food was long: his uncle was a grocer in Lincoln, and Kushner apprenticed with him in his youth. After the war, he worked for a wholesaler in Los Angeles that supplied Hollywood with chutney, caviar, and foie gras. In a book on the industry, he boasted of having been one of the first to bring smoked oysters from Japan to the United States, as part of General MacArthur's plan to revive the Japanese economy by appealing to American hostesses.

“I set out to design our private label and felt that I needed something other than merely the words ‘Smoked Oysters,'” Kushner wrote. The one other similar product available at the time was a crabapple smoked oyster from the Pacific Northwest. “I searched through Japanese literature and history books. . . . From
Madame Butterfly
and the Cherry Blossom Festival, I assumed that Japan had an abundance of cherry trees, so I labeled our product ‘Cherrywood Smoked Oysters.'” When he later met with the president of the Smoked Oyster Association in Hiroshima, he learned that the Japanese had been flummoxed by his first order, and had gone out in search of precious cherrywood to authenticate the label's claim. “Needless to say, that was the only time cherrywood was ever used in that manner, and subsequent orders were smoked with the cheaper kindling scrap wood.” But, he concluded proudly, “cherrywood smoked” became the industry standard. “I relate this little tale to illustrate how a product can be upgraded in the eyes of the beholder with a little label imagery.”

The successful food seller was part carnival barker, part con man. If an item wasn't moving, Kushner's advice was to mark it up: a $75 jar of truffles is more intriguing than the same jar for $45. Another rule of thumb: “The food broker must never lie to a buyer, or better yet, never get caught lying.” In the mid-forties, when most specialty-foods dealers were trying to keep their products
out
of supermarkets for fear that mass marketing and availability would destroy their mystique (and their profit margins), he persuaded a Southern California grocery store to designate a gourmet section. They called the improvised area—a plywood shelf resting on large, foil-wrapped juice cans—“the importation center,” because most of the items came from abroad. By 1970, the Safeway in Washington, D.C., stocked nearly five thousand gourmet items, among them staples of the Reese line like rattlesnake, kangaroo, and Bengal tiger meat. They may not have been a large part of the business, but they served a purpose: “shelf-warmers” tended to start selling faster when placed near such attention-grabbing exotics.