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eating Korean beef-liver sashimi at a restaurant recommended by Gold. “I feel that because he’s willing to eat this stuff, it’s almost like a dare,” he said. “I have to try it, even if it’s horrifying.”
    Alice Waters, the chef at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, and the mother figure of organic, farm-to-table dining, says that Gold is a harbinger of where American eating needs to go: toward diversity, away from monoculture. Gold reveals, before the U.S. Census Bureau does, which new populations have come to town, where they are, and what they’re cooking up. In 2009, he announced a migration from Mexico’s Distrito Federal. How did he know? Because you could now get DF-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, which had most people looking askance at pork. Gold looked at it sidelong, and bit. He recommended the
tacos de nana
—pig uterus— “chewy yet forgiving, pink and yet not, whorled in swoops and paisley shapes that defy Euclidean geometry.”
    Early in my apprenticeship, Gold took me through Historic Filipinotown. Filipino is one of the few kinds of cooking that Gold can’t stand. “It’s as if you took the worst of the U.S., Spanish, Asian, and Pacific Island cuisine and mixed them into one thoroughly unwholesome . . . I try, I really try,” he told me once. Our destination was the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, which was started in 1953 by immigrants from New York and is, he says, the single source of every good bagel in Los Angeles.
    Looking back, I could have been hurt. Bagels? I got the sense that Gold, who is a gentleman, didn’t want to scare me, at least not right away. We got four water bagels and three salt. In the car, tearing hunks from the one he had designated a roadie, he said, “You probably don’t eat bagels. Too pure.” It was a damning view of my potential and a barely veiled challenge. In any case, Brooklyn Bagel was only a pit stop. We had just had a so-so Guatemalan meal (
chiles relleños,
tamales, pounded-pumpkin-seed stew, and
kakik de gallina,
a chicken dish that he’d never seen on a menu before), and were on the way to Mama’s Hot Tamales Café, off MacArthur Park, near Langer’s Deli (the source of the city’s best pastrami). “This is one of the gnarlier, gnarlier drug zones in L.A.,” he said, circling Mama’s block. “I was here with my mother, on our way to Langer’s, and people were trying to sell her crack.” An apartment where he lived for ten years, until the 1992 riots trashed the neighborhood and he moved to Pasadena, was just a couple of miles away.
    At Mama’s, we had a chicken tamale with red sauce and a pork tamale with green. Gold took a pound of coffee beans to go, and then we swung back west, to hit a Peruvian restaurant owned by Koreans that sits in a median, next to a car wash, and specializes in spit-roasted chicken and grilled beef heart. “It’s not the
best
grilled beef heart you’ve ever had,” he said. He was picking up a chicken for supper and, since he was there, ordered a fermented-corn drink and half a chicken to stay. I smiled weakly and said nothing. At that point, I hadn’t had any grilled beef heart, ever, as I’m sure he had deduced.
    Gold eats at three hundred to five hundred restaurants every year. “Food rewards obsessiveness,” he says. His friend Robert Sietsema told me that, during three years starting in the late nineties, when Gold was working in New York as the restaurant critic at
Gourmet,
Sietsema, who was the restaurant critic for the
Village Voice
and presumably accustomed to eating a lot, gained twenty-five pounds. “We really put on the feed bag,” he