Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold meditates on the issue of anonymity in the current LA Weekly, and offers his take on Vietnamese restaurant Red Medicine‘s decision to refuse service to and publish a photo online of S. Irene Virbila, a longtime restaurant critic for the LA Times.

I can even understand, almost, why they felt obligated to do what they did: They had kept Virbila waiting, they were slammed, she had been pretty brutal to chef Jordan Kahn’s desserts when he was the pastry chef at Michael Mina’s XIV, and they sensed disaster. It was a panicked move, and I suspect they knew it was dumb even as they were doing it. They did no real harm to Virbila — if anything, they lent her pluckiness — but they made themselves look second-rate.

Gold himself was “outed” by a picture posted on the LA Weekly website of him celebrating his Pulitzer win with staff.

* Photo by Anne Fishbein