Hooray for Jonathan Gold! The incredible food critic who started out covering taco stands and smoke-choked Korean BBQ joints and pupuserias and tiny Thai kitchens and many more in Los Angeles has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Here’s a taste from his classic guidebook Counter Intelligence:
Meet lonja. Lonja is a slab of pigskin the size and heft of a Snickers bar, fried with a good half-inch of meat still adhering to it, and padded with enough insulating fat to power a team of sled dogs halfway across Saskatchewan. Lonja is fairly alarming as foodstuffs go — salty, chewy, breathtakingly high in cholesterol, and possessed of an extreme, tooth-cracking crunchiness that is probably responsible for half the bridegwork of Sonoroa. What we’re talking about is essentailly a chunk of deep-fried lard sandwiched between leathery flesh and steel-hard skin, a chaw primitive enough to make a Slim Jim seem like a shining example of modern meat-processing technology. Lonja, the most radical form of Mexian chicharrones, may be the monster-truck pull of the salty snack planet.
I have personally seen a man go through two pounds of lonja so quickly that it looked like bits of pig were leaping into his mouth by themselves…
That’s about Antojitos Denise’s, in East LA. I was looking for a piece he wrote about a certain shrimp dish, but I couldn’t page past the As in his book without getting hungry.
Props to Pulitzer’s literature winner, too: Cormac McCarthy. Who I can almost imagine being the one devouring that lonja.
