Following a litany of sui generis dishes at Alinea in Chicago that included “a dish of minuscule cremini and maitake mushrooms whose plate is perched on an inflatable pillow filled with pine smoke,” Mr. Gold broke into the interrogative voice:

“Is it quibbling to suggest that the delicate fragrance of maitake, a mushroom prized for its aroma of pine, was obliterated by the seepage from the pillow, and that nearly every dish was oversalted to the same, undoubtedly intentional degree? Is it merely clever to scent an all-white dish of halibut, parsnip curls and almond with the jet-black aromas of pepper, licorice and coffee? Is trotting out a version of a classic Escoffier dish, in this case slightly overcooked lamb with seared potatoes and a sauce Choron, the equivalent of Picasso executing the occasional formal portrait to prove that he knows that human eyes do not stack like those of a turbot?”

The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts.

In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”

His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Mr. Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Mr. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”

Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than six feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being taken by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later after Mr. Gold’s review had been published.

Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Mr. Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed The Los Angeles Times to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.

Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Mr. Chang.