[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap] first emailed Jonathan Gold when I was 16. It went something like this: “Hi, Mr. Gold. So, like, I’m in 11th grade and can’t find 'Food Writing' as a major anywhere. How do I become a food critic and what’s the dark side of it?”
He responded: “Well, I kind of fell backwards into it and for every one good meal, you will have at least 10 bad ones.” That brutally honest response would change the course of the rest of my life.
It was a pivotal point in where the naive allure of living a life of punk rock-induced inner-city nihilism with the homies had almost done me in. But somehow, someway, through accidentally reading his stories laden with punk rock references in the LA Weekly during my long bus rides back home to East L.A. from the San Gabriel Valley, he carefully led me to discover my obsession with food and more importantly, embrace it.
Hell, what’s more punk rock than getting paid to eat? I’m down, I thought.
My family had just lost our house through a bankruptcy, and we were living in my father's office behind my dad’s furniture store in East L.A., which had also recently burned down. I didn’t have the slightest bit of money to go out and eat at the places he wrote about, but that didn’t stop me from walking into those places week after week, grabbing a bunch of take-out menus, and reading them over and over like a book on my long way home. So, when the rare time came of me having $10 to my name again, I already knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to order.