When you're less familiar with a style, what is the baseline for judging a place against itself or where it's coming from? Will you bring people who might be more fit to judge what the L.A. place is doing?

Before I started doing this, there were a couple different approaches to writing about food culture. There was, like, where you'd go with somebody from the neighborhood, almost like a Chamber of Commerce thing, going with dignitaries, and everything would be through their eyes. You eat well that way, but it's a mediated experience. I'm much more interested in unmediated experience. I mean, I'll bring my Korean friends to Italian restaurants, and I'll bring my Chinese friends to taquerias. But I just think part of it is coming to the knowledge yourself, of earning the knowledge, how a community works and what its context is and how you might eat there, as opposed to heading in with a list of six dishes someone has provided you with. And the advantage of writing for the Times is that if you're writing about a Khmer restaurant in Long Beach, it's being read by Khmers in Long Beach. It's not necessarily being read by tourists who would never go down there.

Do you ever hear from the proprietors that "This is great! But…" Is it ever, "We're so overrun by devout Jonathan Gold readers who make this place not what it used to be?"

I used to think I would spoil the restaurants by writing them up. But eventually the old regulars will come back. Unless it becomes the kind of thing where it does become a tourist destination and the real regulars stay away—but that happens much less than you might think.

Gold reacts strongly to a big base hit in a mid-season ballgame between the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks that's playing on the television. It's probably not a bad way to follow your teams—restaurant-hopping late at night in the Pacific Standard zone, where you reach an hour each night practically all year long when establishments don't really have much else to show besides the Dodgers or the Lakers.

How much of your intel for less obvious restaurants comes through your own network versus readers making recommendations?

Tips, almost never. The one thing they do do, though, is get you into a neighborhood where there might be something interesting going on. There's a couple of blocks here in K-Town that have sprung up in the last three or four years, probably ten new places really worth knowing about.

This is something that's even broken through to national media. Though it's hard to tell from New York what is real and what is, you know, something that sounded good to editors at The New York Times or whatever.

Man, are they covering L.A. restaurants. Kind of randomly, but…

That's what I mean. Do you have a sense of what it is that breaks through to the national consciousness? Is it celebrity chefs, like Roy Choi? Is it appearing on Top Chef or a Bourdain show? I'm curious why the rest of the country knows about certain L.A. restaurants and not others.

There's that sort of restaurant-lounge thing that gets covered in the New York Times Style section. You know, any restaurant where you might have bottle service or you might sit on a couch. But a lot of the time the food is not that interesting.

And then there are certain things that are popular here that aren't really popular in New York, right? Like, you can probably open a restaurant here without too much capital, and if you're opening in Manhattan, you're looking at, like, six, seven, eight million dollars at which point, you know, it's not your restaurant. Your name could be above the door, but it's not your restaurant. And then there's the thing that happens here, the idea of growing up as an immigrant in one culture, going to cooking school, working at some of the best restaurants in the world, and deciding to come back and that you want to, you know, make the decision to not make French dishes when you come back, but the things you grew up with…that's the most exciting stuff here.