Jonathan Gold is a Los Angeles Times food critic, and the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Before talking with Adam Gopnik about foodie culture, he dished about traffic, haircuts, and Korean fermentation in the green room-and made a persuasive argument for Ringo’s importance to the Beatles.
Q. What do you do when you’re stuck in traffic?
A. I listen to chamber music. Also, minimalist classical music is absolutely brilliant for traffic jams. You go through Philip Glass’s music in changing parts, and it doesn’t matter that you haven’t moved because the atmosphere around you has.
Q. How do you take notes while you’re reviewing?
A. I tend not to take notes. I have that peculiar brain damage that makes me forget the name of the person I talked to last night at the party but remember the soup I had 20 years ago, and whether it was garnished with parsley or chervil.
Q. What’s your current obsession?
A. Korean food-specifically the 200 different kinds of fermentation that go into making the pickles and the flavors and the condiments for a typical Korean meal.
Q. What’s the last live event you saw?
A. I saw my daughter in a Chekhov one-act play at her school last week. She was wonderful.
Q. What’s your biggest pet peeve?
A. I have to narrow it down to one … I’m such a sunny individual-it doesn’t come up that much. Possibly people failing to signal when they’re making left turns. That’s always annoying. [Laughs.]
Q. If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?
A. A tapir. I love tapirs. I’m trying to think of the possibilities of that long, long tongue.
Q. How much is too much to pay for a haircut?
A. Depending on the aesthetic value, it’s possible there’s no price too great to pay for a perfect haircut. That being said, it’s quite obvious that whatever that price is, what I’m paying doesn’t begin to approach it.
Q. What’s your go-to karaoke song?
A. I haven’t done karaoke in a while, but when I used to sing at piano bars, “Wagon Wheel.”
Q. Who’s your favorite Beatle and why?
A. The only proper response to that is John, isn’t it? If I were going to push it I might say Ringo, because I think he’s one of the things about the Beatles that made them quite unlike any other group. Ringo pushed the beat-made them a little edgier or on edge. He pushed them in a direction that became more what rock was to become than a strict descendant of the blues. It’s probably a little far-fetched, but if you wanted to look at it that way, groups like Metallica-where a lot of the energy and drive is coming from the percussion-you’d have to say that that started with Ringo.
Q. Are you good at keeping secrets?
A. It wouldn’t really be fair if I told you, would it?
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.