Funkhaus Loves Jonathan Gold: An Unauthorized Interview

[caption image="13483"]Lead image via.

We may have stolen an interview with Jonathan Gold.

When we were pulling together our inaugural issue of Scoundrel last year, we had one strongly desired “get”: an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic for the Los Angeles Times Jonathan Gold, the man behind such prolific statements like, "when it's done properly, taco should be a verb."

For us, Scoundrel is a place to feature individuals who approach their craft with originality, so the maestro Jonathan Gold was the perfect choice. He’s the egalitarian beacon of food criticism, talking about mom and pop shops in your local strip mall with as much integrity and gusto as that five star, $200 steak you’d dream of feasting on.

Gold is a busy man and we didn’t hear back from him after two requests for interview which is neither surprising nor deterring, so we pressed on. If the professor himself was too busy or otherwise entangled to come to us, we figured we'd come to him. Perhaps a little known fact among Angelenos: every Wednesday Jonathan holds an AMA of sorts of the LA Times site, answering any and all (moderated) questions between noon and 12:30. The perfect breeding ground for an interview, defined by the own ethos Scoundrel espouses: creating by any means possible.

So, we took to the AMA. Roughly between June 2015 and June 2016, we bombarded the J Gold Q&A with 8-10 questions under a series of real and fake names. While we speculated that if anyone on the LA Times side had an IP detect, they’d be curious as to all of the questions arising from 1855 Industrial Street, we continued month after month. Take a look at this Q&A from December, for instance. We are users Dylan, Amy, Marm, and Ashley, and account for over half of the questions asked. Why bother, you ask? For the love of the Gold, and the love of good food. Special shout-out goes to Dylan, our Project Manager, who became the MVP of askers.

Stay tuned for the second issue of Scoundrel (release date TBA), where we’ll have months and months of compiled questions and answers. An unofficial interview, led by an office-wide covert operation.