The Five Best Lines From Jonathan Gold's GQ Interview

Jonathan Gold is normally one for long, romanticized explorations of food, but in this new GQ interview he seems, well, pretty easygoing and fun to hang around with.

Sure, he and the author pal around Koreatown for a while and eat too many dinners at once and do all the usual Gold-y things that writers like to come in and do with the Man himself, but for the most part GQ’s interview is a lighthearted portrait into a man who takes his job seriously, without being serious himself. That’s a pretty nice combination.

Here are the five best lines:

On giving restaurants time to find their groove: "I always like to give places a little time before I go, because it's like…I'm Casper the Friendly Ghost, you know? I go in and say "Hi!" and everyone goes Aggh!"

On Brooklyn maybe being over: "I think it's funny that at this point the most "Brooklyn" thing you can do right now is move to Los Angeles."

Why traveling locally might be just as good: "The communities in Los Angeles are big enough and varied enough and sort of committed enough that you know when you finally do go to Seoul, or you finally do go to Bangkok, it's not that surprising."

A word about Ray Garcia’s personal cooking at Broken Spanish: "Garcia would do these competitions, where every year he'd do food that would reference his childhood, do crazy shit with this really, really specific connotation—a really specific jolt of nostalgia for, like, a huge group in this city. He's just able to mine that stuff. And so now he's doing his own thing."

The bad news on options for eating at L.A. Live: "There's a million restaurants in the Staples L.A. Live compound, and they're all bad. There's not a single good one. Los Angeles is a metro area with, like, 12 million Mexicans, and the Mexican restaurant in the L.A. Live compound is Rosa Mexicano."