Job Title: Restaurant critic Employers: Newspapers; some TV stations Openings: Check with H.R. departments Salary Cap: About $110,000 Number of Jobs: A few dozen

Jonathan Gold is enjoying the jamon iberico. The rest of the dishes at this sleek Santa Monica tapas bar are uneven at best, he's decided, but the iberico, thick salty slabs of a cured Spanish ham that costs upwards of $90 a pound, is the highlight.

"The pigs forage in the cork forests of Spain, eating acorns their entire lives," explains Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic for the alternative L.A. Weekly, as he savors another slice of the buttery meat. "It's the pig equivalent of raising a child in a candy store."

It's not often that one gets to chew the fat—literally—with a food critic, and a lunch with Gold, who has been reviewing restaurants in L.A. for more than two decades, proves to be a far-flung exchange. He's as likely to expound upon the local ethnic press and 80s hair-metal bands as he is the merits of a sommelier's wine list. Yet as Southern California foodies can attest, it's precisely his catholic sensibilities that elevate Gold's reviews, whether he's praising the savory Guadalajara-style goat stew at an out-of-the-way Mexican joint or debating which Korean restaurant serves the crispiest mung-bean pancakes.

His writings, most notably in his "Counter Intelligence" column that has been running since 1986, have covered every type of cuisine, but he's best known for championing smaller, ethnic eateries, often found in the lesser-traveled neighborhoods of the city. Last April, when Gold became the first food writer to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the judges praised his "zestful, wide-ranging…reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater."

"The joke used to be there were vast parts of L.A. that would only get written about if there was a gang killing or I was writing about a restaurant," says Gold, who routinely scours the city's foreign-language papers in search of hidden culinary gems.

Gold began his journalistic career as a proofreader for the L.A. Weekly in 1982. After he wrote a story on health insurance that caught the eye of the paper's owner, he was asked to edit the paper's restaurant issue. "It was a congenial fit," he recalls. "Food writing played to my strengths, which are physical description and setting scenes."

Gold estimates that over his career he's eaten in close to 5,000 restaurants. Early on, he'd consume up to seven dinners in a night, but these days he's slowed his pace—he typically dines out ten times a week, seven lunches and three dinners. "A lot of people, even very passionate ones, become food bloggers for a few months then stop," Gold notes. "[That's] because it's a 60-hour-a-week job. It's harder than it looks and it's not particularly sustainable as a hobby."

And there are other pitfalls. "I go to the gym five times a week and I'm still as big as a barrel," laments the stout-figured Gold. And when a list of of 500 L.A. restaurants that had failed health inspections was released a few years back, Gold realized he had eaten at about a third of them. "I had low-level food poisoning pretty constantly for seven or eight years," he says.

Still, he recognizes his profession's appeal in today's culture of celebrity chefs and food cultists. "There aren't that many jobs and a trillion people seem to want to do it," says Gold. "At a basic level you have to be really literate and need a deep knowledge of the field. You have to be obsessed with the topic."

But to his mind the most vital prerequisite is a strong, singular perspective. "A good critic can explain and entice somebody into a particular world," says Gold. "If you read Edmund Wilson writing about Don Quixote, you understand the book in a way you didn't before. The critic has the ability to make it something new. That's what the best food writers will do."

As well as introduce you to some damn good ham.