Jonathan Gold

Jonathan Gold, before he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, wrote about two other topics that people have a hard time describing in English: classical music and legal affairs. He agreed to start writing about food, he said, because “a freelancer is supposed to be a little flexible. It turned out to be a congenial fit.” To preserve the anonymity required in his food writing gig, he asked us not to post a photo, although, he admitted, I know the cat’s pretty much out of the bag. Learn more about Gold below.

Q. What do you wake up to?
A. A shrieking six-year-old.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I listened to a CD, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band, a great Los Angeles R&B group from the ’60s.

Q. What’s your favorite word?
A. I’m not sure I have one but other people seem to think that it’s ‘funky’.

Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. My children’s smiles.

Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Curmudgeonly enthusiast.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. A cellist.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A really good Ramos Gin Fizz.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. Italian wine.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Umbria.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I think I’m already doing the one that everybody wants to do. But if I had to pick, how about operatic tenor, or a fire-balling lefty.

Q. What would be your death row meal?
A. Roast chicken and bread salad. That’s the dullest answer I’ve ever given to that question.

Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. Thanksgiving is the food person’s holiday. It’s when all the attention is on the cook and it’s not actually considered bizarre to spend several hours with your arms in the cavities of giant birds.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. My pick-up truck.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. I will not surf the Internet today.

Q. What should you throw away but haven’t been able to part with?
A. Fifteen thousand back issues of magazines. It’s a fire hazard.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d most love to have a beer with?
A. At the moment, probably Barack Obama at a basketball game.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.