Acclaimed Los Angeles restaurant critic Jonathan Gold dies at 57
LOS ANGELES - Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who richly chronicled the city’s vast culinary landscape and made its food understandable and approachable to legions of fans, has died. He was 57.
Gold died of pancreatic cancer at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles Saturday evening, according to his wife, Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa. He was diagnosed with the disease in early July.
One of the most widely admired voices of Los Angeles, Gold wrote about restaurants for four decades and became indelibly linked with the city in which he was born and raised.
“He, more than any chef, changed the dining scene in Los Angeles,” said longtime friend, chef and Mozza co-owner Nancy Silverton. “He really was the ambassador for our city.”
Food criticism before him - and even during his time - focused on the austere, the high-end, the Michelin stars. Gold redefined the genre, drawn more to hole-in-the-wall joints, street food, mom-and-pop shops and ethnic restaurants than he was to haute cuisine. Although he appreciated and wrote beautifully about fine dining, he revered the taco truck more than the tasting menu.
“While most people might not go to places I write about, they know all the kinds of food that are available,” he said in a 2012 interview. “They get that this one place has really good soup dumplings, one has Shandong-style beef rolls and another has fantastic beef noodle soup. Even if most people don’t go eat it, I think there is a greater awareness.”
Gold’s death is a crushing loss for the food community - and a shock because his decline was so rapid that many of his friends and colleagues didn’t even know he was ill.
“I can’t imagine the city without him. It just feels wrong. I feel like we won’t have our guide, we won’t have the soul,” said filmmaker Laura Gabbert, who directed “City of Gold,” a 2015 documentary that followed the legendary critic as he ate his way through and reflected on Los Angeles. “It’s such a loss. I can’t wrap my head around it still.”
Peter Meehan, a family friend and former editor of the now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, said he had shared more restaurant meals with Gold than anyone else outside his immediate family since meeting him six years ago.
“He’s not just a writer - he was a conduit for the stories of Los Angeles,” Meehan said. “I just see the city through his eyes and across the table from him. Thinking of him not being here is just hard. It’s just hard to process.”
Gold pioneered a different approach to food criticism: His reviews - which appeared first in L.A. Weekly and later in the Los Angeles Times and Gourmet - were predominantly positive and focused on off-the-beaten-path ethnic restaurants, which he preferred to call traditional restaurants (he particularly disliked the phrase “exotic food”). He dismissed the notion of starred reviews and cheered the stuffy Michelin Guide’s departure from Los Angeles in 2010.
“Jonathan understood that food could be a power for bringing a community together, for understanding other people,” said Ruth Reichl, who edited Gold at The Times and at Gourmet. “In the early ‘80s, no one else was there. He was a trailblazer and he really did change the way that we all write about food.”
Gold’s column, Counter Intelligence, was an indispensable dining guide to Angelenos, giving them a way of discovering their own city.
“He ended up becoming like L.A.’s translator,” said longtime friend Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s “Good Food,” which Gold appeared on weekly.
“Do you know how many people have told me that when they moved here they had no idea how to deal with Los Angeles?” she said. “And they used him as a template to learn the city. It made them flip from being afraid and kind of not happy to be here to embracing it.”
With his suspenders, slightly rumpled button-down shirt, moustache and mop of curly strawberry blond hair, Gold was an easy-to-spot silhouette around town, peering through the order window of his favorite food trucks and sending chefs into near-panic when he would show up at restaurants unannounced.
Affectionately known as J. Gold, he explored L.A.’s endless culinary offerings in his beat-up green Dodge Ram 1500, racking up 20,000 miles a year as he traversed the sprawling city in search of his next great meal. It was typically found in places “jammed into a strip mall, sharing a parking lot with a doughnut parlor, a kebab house and a check-cashing emporium,” as he described Culver City’s Mayura.
“I loved that when I went out with him - and I think this was true for a lot of people - he picked me up in his ridiculously oversized and always on-the-ropes truck and he dropped me off, even if it meant he was driving across the entirety of Los Angeles four times in a night,” Meehan said. “The pre- and post-meal conversation in the truck was part of the Jonathan Gold experience, and it was not optional.”
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