In the early 1980s, well before his doggedly exploratory restaurant criticism in the Los Angeles Times and the Weekly made him famous, Jonathan Gold gave himself a mission: “to eat at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard and create a map of the senses that would get me from one end to the other.” This rigorous mandate demanded that he has at least a few bites of food in every one of Pico’s eateries, of every kind, in order. “As often happens with these restaurants, they close down,” he explains on a 1998 “This American Life” broadcast, “so if I’d gone two miles and a restaurant I’d gone to had closed down and opened up again, I would have to go and eat at that restaurant before the next one.” He soon “became obsessed with the idea of Pico Boulevard. Almost every ethnic group that exists in Los Angeles, you can find on Pico,” from “specific blocks that are Guatemalan, Nicaraguan blocks, Salvadoran blocks” to “parts you can drive a mile without seeing a sign that isn’t in Korean” to “a huge concentration of Persian Jews that came over around the time the Ayatollah took power. I don’t think there’s another street in Los Angeles quite like it.”
The young Gold’s mission strikes me as an appealingly and almost quintessentially Los Angeles journey to undertake: ambitious, hedonistic, self-assigned, and totally Sisyphean. He never finished it, but no one could have. He mentions the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of the businesses on Pico, which goes a fair way toward explaining the difficulty of completist eating. When you multiply that by the boulevard’s sheer length, difficulty becomes impossibility. In most other American cities, having eaten everywhere on a particular street would sound mundane, almost dull, less an accomplishment than an admission that you don’t get very far afield. But Los Angeles’ streets present another experience entirely, something the Dutch novelist and traveler Cees Nooteboom discovered when he came to Los Angeles for a stay in Beverly Hills in 1973. “On the third day, I ventured outside,” he writes. “I walked, which was crazy — not because it is dangerous but because it does not make sense. In a city with streets longer than fifty kilometers, the measure of one foot is absurd, and so is the use of one’s feet as a means of transportation.”
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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