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“strange, mephitic fragrances” of wild tea leaves and stinky beans, and said that Jitlada was “the most exciting new Thai restaurant of the year.”
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    M ark Gold, the youngest of the Gold sons, runs the marine conservation organization Heal the Bay; he finds Jonathan’s eating habits atrocious and enumerates his brother’s gustatory offenses on his blog,
Spouting Off.
“I have gone to dim sum in San Gabriel when he tried to order shark fin soup,” Mark wrote. “I said OMDB! I went to a restaurant with him in Chicago when he was the lead grub guy at
Gourmet
magazine. There, he nearly ordered wild-caught sturgeon until I complained vociferously.”
    Right before I met him, Jonathan made his first trip to Seoul. When he got back, he wrote about eating live octopus, or
sam nak ji,
which he described as “one of the most alarming dishes in the world.” After the piece came out, Mark told me, “Needless to say, I did not participate in that sadistic torture of a wonderful marine animal. I’m not going to eat live shrimp. I’m not going to eat octopus. I haven’t had shark or swordfish in twenty-five years. I said to him, ‘What do you think an octopus is? You need an ecology class.’ He’s all, ‘It doesn’t have a backbone.’”
    Of course, Gold didn’t need to go to Korea to eat live octopus. One night he took me to a divey strip-mall restaurant with a picture of a smiling mermaid and a halibut on the sign, and a Korean golf show playing on the television set. He had guessed based on the halibut that they’d have live shrimp and
sam nak ji
. “If you’re going to have live halibut you’ll have
sam nak ji
,” he said. “It’s like ham and eggs.” It turned out they were out of shrimp—the next shipment was coming at eleven o’clock that night, flown in fresh from Korea—but they had the octopus. “How do I put this delicately?” he said as we sat down. “It’s a very male food. We’re going to get a lot of winks and nods.”
    Gold said he thought that the space had once been occupied by Alex Donut, one of three places in town to get Thai food in the late seventies. “I probably wouldn’t think it was good now, but that was a thousand Thai meals ago,” he said. “I thought it was amusing to eat all the little green nachos in a jar of vinegar, too.”
    Korean sashimi came to the table—big hunks of white tuna, with the taste and texture of chilled butter; fresh-killed halibut—along with pickled mackerel eggs and sea squirts. The squirts glistened orange and tasted of brine. “These things are essentially taking over the fricking sea,” Gold said. “The taste is strong, iodine-y, but not unpleasant—but some people are totally grossed out by them.” The bluefin on the table went untouched. “It’s the equivalent of going on the Serengeti and eating the lion,” Gold said. “My brother hates this argument, but I don’t like it because it’s boring. Things that are at the top of the food chain are boring. They all taste the same.”
    Then the proprietor, suppressing a smile, produced the main event, a plate of slippery gray tentacles, squirming anxiously. “It’ll try to climb up the chopstick,” Gold said, dousing a tentacle in sesame oil to loosen the grip of its suckers. “I don’t actually know that much about octopus physiology. Most people say that the octopus is dead, and just twitching, but I don’t know. It looks pretty alive to me.”
    Gold bit into the octopus. “I thought I was completely full from lunch, but this is invigorating food,” he said. More courses came—broiled eel and broths and a greasy red kimchi pancake and, finally, crab claws covered in a sticky glaze, lustrous as a ceramic sculpture by Jeff