From Goat Stew to Corncakes: A Paean to an Undiscovered L.A.

The only physical requirement to be a critic is sitzfleisch--the ability to sit through the reading of a 900-page first novel, for example, or the performance of a four-hour grand opera. But a restaurant critic must be made of stronger stuff. As Jonathan Gold demonstrates in “Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles” (LA Weekly Books / St. Martin’s Press, $16.95, 320 pages), it takes an iron stomach and a certain measure of courage to swallow the stuff that he’s writing about.

“For a while in my early 20s, my only clearly articulated ambition was to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard,” Gold declares, “starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near where the street began in downtown Los Angeles and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s #5 near the beach.”

Nowadays, Gold is the restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine, but his lively and exceptionally well-informed food and restaurant coverage has appeared in various local publications for more than two decades--currently L.A. Weekly, co-publisher of “Counter Intelligence,” and formerly The Times. Clearly, he is a man who knows whereof he eats, and “Counter Intelligence” is his crowning achievement as both a food critic and an urban adventurer.

Indeed, Gold possesses a truly astounding breadth of knowledge and experience in the ethnic cookery that is the real glory of California cuisine. Judging from the restaurants that he visits and describes in “Counter Intelligence,” he is not much interested in the trendy stuff they’re serving at the latest celebrity hangout on Sunset Boulevard, and he’d much rather chow down on Salvadoran corncakes, Jalisco-style goat stew, or Vietnamese noodles--cholesterol and calories be damned.

“Counter Intelligence” is intended for use as a restaurant guide, of course. Each of the 200 or so restaurants that Gold describes is distinguished by “at least one dish that is the best of its kind in the city.” The first entry, for example, singles out “the smoky dendeng belado, slices of beef fried until they attain the size, shape and crunchiness of Pringles,” at an Indonesian restaurant called Agung. And the very last entry praises the Armenian garlic sauce served at Zankou Chicken: “Go ahead, Ultra Brite; go ahead, Lavoris; go ahead, CarFreshener: My money’s on the sauce.”

But Gold has produced something far more ambitious and far more illuminating than an underground version of Zagat. He opens our eyes to the vast urban landscape of Los Angeles in all its rich ethnic and cultural diversity. He escorts us into neighborhoods where we might not otherwise go. His comments about what we eat reflect something profound about who we are. And, all the while, he brings to his book an authentic joy of discovery that is only rarely found in most critical writing.

In fact, Gold is one of the great stylists in any field of criticism, and his prose is always lively, funny, entertaining, and enlightening, sparkling with wit and yet packed solid with authority. I am a much pickier eater than Gold, and it’s unlikely that I will actually visit a great many of the places that he finds so compelling. Indeed, given the kind of restaurants he writes about, their quality and even their very presence is subject to change. Still, the experience of reading “Counter Intelligence” is a savory delight.

For me, the book’s single most revealing moment comes when Gold observes, “there may be as many as 500 Salvadoran restaurants in central Los Angeles, and at least half of them are pretty good.” The subtext, of course, is that Gold must have choked down a couple hundred or more really bad meals in order to assess how many good ones are available--and that’s just in the category of Salvadoran cuisine. What other critic has done more to acquire his expertise or to demonstrate his commitment to the loftiest standards of criticism?

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Quite another take on Los Angeles can be found in “Fodor’s Cityguide Los Angeles” (Fodor’s, $19, 376 pages), a handbook that goes beyond the standard tourist data and offers advice on how and where to find a dentist, take a hike, buy a rare coin, see a ballgame, take a yoga lesson, or dance the night away at a “goth” club. No single entry is more than a paragraph long, but the various contributors, most (but not all) of them based right here in L.A., offer a good deal of savvy and even a few surprises.

Not until I thumbed through “Fodor’s Cityguide,” for example, did I know that a Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine called the Scorpion is on display near the Queen Mary in Long Beach, or that the bathroom graffiti is one of the key attractions at a rock ‘n’ roll venue called Al’s Bar in downtown Los Angeles, or that gold was first discovered in California not at Sutter’s Mill but at the Oak of the Golden Knoll at Placerita Canyon in Newhall.

With its portfolio of maps and its glove-compartment-sized format, “Fodor’s Cityguide Los Angeles” is a resource that may turn out to be as useful to locals as to travelers.

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By contrast, “The National Geographic Traveler Los Angeles” by Marael Johnson (National Geographic Society, $22.95, 272 pages) is a more conventional travel guide that concentrates on sightseeing, but the book is considerably enlivened by its collection of color photographs and stylized maps. Indeed, it’s exactly the kind of book that I like to pick up in advance of a trip to a new city and then take home and keep on my bookshelf as a souvenir. A vintage photograph of the Beach Boys when they were still boys, a building-sized mural of a B-17 looming over Tower Records on Sunset, and a scenic shot that makes Pasadena’s city hall look like a castle in Spain all caught my eye and my fancy.