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bowl of Dennison’s only by a couple of chunks of sirloin, a 1,600 percent price differential and three guys”—the servers—“who look like they stepped out of a 1935 gangster B-movie.” He has his regrets. “Although I didn’t do Chasen’s in”—it was around for another decade—“I certainly put a lance in its side,” he says. “But, looking back, I really miss Chasen’s. And kiwi vinaigrette and magical caviar snakes and braised cantaloupe with black corn fungus and all the things I thought were the future back then—a lot of that food was just silly.”
    Accessible food has always been of greater interest to Gold—but it depends on what you mean by accessible. “The democracy of really fine dining is something I’ve always liked about L.A.,” he says. “In New York, the most expensive restaurant is always the best. That’s not necessarily the case here.” In 1990, he started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown, next to a working dairy farm. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in. They ordered what he had ordered: slimy bamboo salads, fermented fish, and intensely spicy dishes—authentic regional Thai food that the owners, Bill and Saipin Chutima, were worried the customers would send back. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for
Vogue,
made a pilgrimage (the Chutimas said that his postprandial cigar was disrupted by the stench of cows), and so did Mark Bittman, of
The
New York Times
. When the Chutimas moved to Las Vegas and opened a new place, Lotus of Siam, Gold called it the best Thai restaurant in North America; in 2011, Saipin, who does the cooking, won a James Beard award. Gold, who has a competitive streak, put it this way once: “As the Italians say of Christopher Columbus, when he discovered America, it stayed discovered.”
    As a kid, Gold guzzled hot sauce. Several years ago, on a tip from a diner who had discovered a secret, untranslated menu of southern Thai specialties at an ordinary strip-mall Thai place called Jitlada, Gold paid a visit. After eating there a few times, he brought his friend Carl Stone, the composer, who carries a card in his wallet that says, more or less, in Thai, “Yes, I know I’m not Thai, but please give me the food as spicy as I request.” They ordered
kua kling
, a dry-beef curry, and asked for it “Bangkok hot.”
    The
kua kling
was the spiciest Gold had ever had. “It was glowing, practically incandescent,” he told me. “You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. It’s an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It’s not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don’t understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time—its flavor—as you taste details of fruit and turmeric and spices that you didn’t taste when it was merely extremely hot. It’s like a hallucination. You’re floating in some high, tasting the most magnificent things you’ve ever tasted in your life. I’ve never been able to get them to make it that hot again.” Stone said it hurt to pee for three days afterward. He said, “I thought, How in the world could I have gotten the clap?”
    That day, the owner, a voluble woman named Jazz, came over to their table and started chatting. She mentioned that she had been praying every day in her Buddha room for Jonathan Gold to come in and review her restaurant. Did they know him or know what he looked like? she asked. Stone says, “I was going to throw out a red herring—‘He’s tall and thin with a full head of hair’—but Jonathan started laughing and introduced himself.” Gold, in his review, praised the “delicious, foul-smelling yellow curries” and the