Author:

The newly minted Pulitzer-winning LA Weekly food critic talks process with On the Media's Brooke Gladstone, saying he doesn't take notes and shies away from fancy food vocabulary and Latinate synonyms. "It must be said that there is only one word that means 'salty,' and if you try to get beyond something being salty -- you know, briny or oceanic -- you're overwriting, and the prose suffers," Gold says. Noting Gold's "intense" devotion to meat, Gladstone asks the critic if he receives letters from vegans demanding equal time. "Yeah, I get letters from vegans, usually more in sorrow than in anger," he says, adding that he also gets a lot of letters from Jewish people complaining that he writes "an awful lot about pork." Over a meal of huaraches with a succulent beef brain and more, Gold tells the Washington Post's William Booth he's eaten at somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 restaurants in LA, and that he finds new haunts by scouring ethnic newspapers. "I don't understand a word of it, but they list an address and I go," he says.