Dave and I were sad to learn of the passing of Jonathan Gold, an icon in LA, known for his considerate, empathetic reviews of restaurants in the city. Inspired by his attempt to eat at every restaurant on the road he once lived on, Pico Blvd. (audio story at https://www.thisamericanlife.org/110/mapping/act-five), we decided to do something similar in our own neighborhood. Dave came up with this plan.
Instead of traveling down one road to eat we decided to use our house as a starting point and identified nine routes radiating out from there. Planning for thirty meals as our tribute time frame, we applied a random number generator to those nine routes. For each meal we would travel down the route that the number generator told us to follow. We also applied another random number generator for each meal, to tell us at which restaurant on that route we would eat.
From our house we would start driving, counting along the way. When we got to the restaurant that was the number given to us by the generator, that’s where we’d eat. Like Jonathan Gold on Pico Blvd., if we’d eaten there already, we’d go down one restaurant further. On Day 1, for example, the generator told us to take route 8, which is “from home, around the marina, down Pacific Ave.” The generator told us to go 23 restaurants away from our house, along that route, which was a place we’d driven by for 13 years and never gone to, the Canal Club.
This tribute experience has been a delight, taking us to places we’ve seen before and not gone into, places that are new, places we’ve never noticed. We’re at the half-way point of the tribute. Follow along on twitter at the hashtag #JGoldTribute, and take a look at where we’ve been at https://twitter.com/i/moments/1036678849541492736.
