I’m not brilliant at this - which is why it’s both challenging and rewarding. But I am always on the look out for people who do this description business well. And sooner or later, I always turn to Counter Intelligence, the only book from Jonathan Gold, the late, great restaurant critic from Los Angeles and the only person to ever win a Pulitzer from writing about food. Even before reading any of his work, Gold struck me as an enormously appealing man. At first glance, with his Sipowicz build and frazzled hair, his fondness for old leather jackets, he could be mistaken for a roadie, perhaps for some legacy US band like Santana. On second look there is something almost aristocratic in that face, something of George the Fourth, or perhaps even General Washington. Gold travelled around LA in his pick-up truck finding the best in what he called “ethnic food”. He reviewed the big places when he had to, but he was happiest, it seems, in a mini-mall, eating great Ethiopian dishes, say, and telling the rest of the world about what he had discovered.
