How Jonathan Gold Inspired a Travel Writer

I must have read half the book on my flight from New York to Los Angeles. I had gotten a copy of “Counter Intelligence,” a 2000 collection of restaurant reviews by the food critic Jonathan Gold, who died this week at 57, as a gift before my trip. I had been to Los Angeles before, but it was my first time as a burgeoning seeker of good food.

I had already begun exploring New York’s food scene; living in Queens (I moved there in 1998) had accelerated that process, as I tried Thai, Korean, regional Mexican and other cuisines for the first time. But the food of Los Angeles was more or less unknown to me, outside sushi and In-and-Out burgers. Like many New Yorkers, I had a Los Angeles-shaped chip on my shoulder: How could this sprawling city claim to compete with my own in personality and style?

As I read through “Counter Intelligence,” a straightforward collection of Mr. Gold’s reviews for LA Weekly and a handful of other publications that sparkled with wit and curiosity, I could feel my culinary consciousness expanding. Persian, Uzbek, Pakistani — these were cuisines I had never before had a desire to explore, let alone had access to. Though I had traveled to many places around the world, I never saw food as a gateway to understanding cultures. “Counter Intelligence” started that process for me.

Cookbook writers had enticed me to explore cuisines in my own kitchen — Paula Wolfert on Moroccan food, Diana Kennedy on Mexican, Julia Child on French. But Mr. Gold was the first food critic to open up a city to me, to push me, along with thousands of others, to go outside our usual understanding of a place and take some chances.

Mr. Gold, who would take a top spot in any ranking of food critics, was also wildly prolific. There are more than 200 entries in “Counter Intelligence” — a fraction of the reviews he would eventually generate, but enough to dizzy the mind.

On that first post-“Counter Intelligence” trip to Los Angeles, I had a few meals at restaurants he recommended: Korean hot pots in Koreatown, Persian sandwiches on Westwood, Oaxacan mole in Mid-City. Exploring the food meant exploring the city, going to neighborhoods that, frankly, I had never even heard of.

One Gold-imprinted place I remember well: the Apple Pan in Rancho Park. It wasn’t a Spam burger at Mago's, or a Bombay-style “frankie” at All India Café, but the burger at Apple Pan was an L.A. classic — one that, to my shame, I didn’t know.

It wasn’t just the food that Mr. Gold made so appealing, it was the experience. “No matter how many waiting people may be crowded in behind you, no matter how hungrily they stare at your pie,” he wrote about the Apple Pan, “the countermen will always draw you another cup of coffee from the gasfired urn and furnish you another dram of fresh, heavy cream.”

The experience lived up to his hype, and for the first time I felt like maybe I could love this city.

Dan Saltzstein is an editor of the Travel section of The Times.