Jonathan Gold eats as if his manhood depended on it—he fears only scrambled eggs. Illustration by Lara Tomlin

For nearly twenty-five years, Jonathan Gold, the high-low priest of the Los Angeles food scene, has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He tells his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers (“The mellow, pecanlike flavor isn’t bad”). On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals, before the Census Bureau does, which new populations have come to town, and where they are, and what they’re cooking up. In April, he announced a recent migration from Mexico’s Distrito Federal. How did he know? You could now get D.F.-style carnitas in Highland Park, “loose and juicy, spilling out of the huge $1.99 tacos like Beyoncé out of a tight jumpsuit.” It was the same month that the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first two U.S. cases of swine flu, both in California. Gold recommended the tacos de nana—pig uterus—“chewy yet forgiving, pink and yet not, whorled in swoops and paisley shapes that defy Euclidean geometry.”

Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the free, alternative L.A. Weekly. He abides by George Orwell’s rule of thumb: the fancier the restaurant, the more people who have dripped sweat into your food. Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. “I have my thing,” he says. “Traditional—I hate the word ‘ethnic’—restaurants that serve some actual hunger people have, rather than something they tell themselves they must have.” He sees Los Angeles as “the anti-melting pot”—the home of true, undiluted regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas. Gold is read by chefs (Nancy Silverton, Michael Cimarusti, Wolfgang Puck), and by food nerds in their thirties who live in Silver Lake and Echo Park and spend their weekends retracing his steps. There are people who consider “Counter Intelligence,” a collection of Gold’s columns that was published in 2000, one of the great contemporary books about Los Angeles. Several years ago, after giving a lecture at Pitzer College, Gold was approached by a CalTech geneticist, whose food hobby had once extended to cooking up specimens over the Bunsen burner in his lab, and who could recite long passages from reviews that Gold had written a decade before. They became great friends.

Javier Cabral, who writes the blog Teenage Glutster (subtitle: “Food, Adolescence, Angst, Hormones and a Really, Really Fast Metabolism”), is one of Gold’s most devoted fans. He lives with his parents, first-generation immigrants from Mexico, in East Los Angeles. Under Gold’s influence, the Glutster, who used to eat at fast-food chains daily, began to seek out the traditional specialties of his neighborhood, like birria (goat stew), which he had never tried before. He started the blog in 2005, when he was sixteen and a junior in high school. “I learned from Jonathan Gold that food writing doesn’t need to be so hosh-posh, snobby, and froufrou,” the Glutster told me. “It can be ghetto.”

Last year, the Glutster’s mother took him to a healing mass at La Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, his local parish, in the hope that it would cure him of his fascination with food, which she finds worrisome. He left before the service ended, and, taking a walk around the neighborhood, came upon the day’s true “revelation,” as he put it on his blog: a Oaxacan spot, Moles la Tia, that served twenty varieties of mole. Later, Gold reviewed the restaurant, in the style that has come to be his signature, a postmodern scrapbook of divergent references that run with the internal logic of a dream. The mole negro, he wrote, is “so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it, spicy as a novela and bitter as tears.” Further, it “appears so glossy and rich that I am always tempted to test its consistency by stabbing an index finger into it, and the resulting stain lingers as long as the empurpled digits of patriotic Iraqi voters.” And, finally, “The last time I was as inspired by glossy black, it was part of Charles Ray’s infamous sculpture Ink Box, and it was enshrined in a major museum of art.” In the column, Gold also mentioned the Teenage Glutster, thereby putting him on the food-blogging map.

Gold’s jackets, snug and black and leather, encase him like the skin around a boudin noir, which, being pig-derived, is among his favorite foods. Lately, he has been wearing a small close-cropped mustache, and his hair, a graying red cascade, curls over his shoulders. His skin is fair and freckled; his eyes—twitchy, restless—are blue. When, starting in 1999, he went to New York for a few years to be a restaurant critic at Gourmet, maître d’s around the city hastened to get a bead on his appearance. The word went out: “Biker.” Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman—“Another hairy Californian,” he says—and for Mario Batali, though, according to him, “I’m much better-looking than Mario.” His hip-hop name, given to him by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, is Nervous Cuz. (Gold was a music journalist in the eighties and nineties.) He is sly and erudite, withdrawn in person and in print exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone, who has titled many of his pieces after restaurants that Gold has introduced him to, considers him the S. J. Perelman of food.

Gold is forty-nine, and grew up in South Central. His mother, Judith, was the librarian at a rough public school, a witty, lively woman who had been a magician’s assistant and a minor theatre actress; his father, Irwin, an aspiring academic, studied under Richard Ellmann but got polio before he could finish his dissertation. He became a probation officer; Roman Polanski was one of his cases. (The filmmakers behind the recent documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” used Irwin’s copious, finely written probation report in their research.) He was passionate about classical music, literature, and comfort food (Chicago-style hot dogs, all-you-can-eat buffets, lunch-counter burgers); aiming to please him, Jonathan, the oldest of three sons, took up cello, reading, and eating. He failed to win his father’s approval: Irwin claimed never to have read Jonathan’s columns. After his father died, Jonathan cleaned out Irwin’s car and found a complete file of his work in the trunk and Verdi’s “Requiem” in the tape deck.

At sixteen, Gold left the house. It was the late seventies; he stayed with friends and, he says, in the months before the Iranian Revolution, squatted in Beverly Hills houses that had been bought but not yet occupied by families from Tehran. On the strength of his cello playing, he went to U.C.L.A., where, for a time, he lived in his practice room. The music professors at U.C.L.A. didn’t like him much: his compositions tended to involve homeless people swearing into microphones. He plugged in his cello and started playing it in a punk band.