Jonathan Gold
He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.
If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good that he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.
“L.A. always seemed better when he wrote about it,” the film critic John Powers, a friend of Mr. Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”
In 1986, Mr. Gold started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants.
Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.
“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”
http://www.latimes.com/food/jonathan-gold/la-fo-ruth-reichl-jonathan-gold-20180721-story.html
Food writer Ruth Reichl on Jonathan Gold: He gave us the keys to a hidden city
BY Ruth Reichl, July 21, 2018 6:50 PM PT
Jonathan Gold was the most maddening person I’ve ever met.
Ask anyone.
His friends all knew that when he called you, 20 minutes after he’d promised to join you for dinner — at a restaurant or your house — to say he’d hit terrible traffic, it probably meant he hadn’t even gotten into his car. He was always late.
If you were his editor you gave him fake deadlines, hoping that if you could convince him that you needed it before you actually did, you might get the copy on time. Good luck. To Jonathan, deadlines were merely a suggestion.
Jonathan reveled in flouting the rules. In the ’80s, when I first met him, he cheerfully drove around without a driver’s license. He wore what he wanted — in the early years his constant costume was a slightly too small black motorcycle jacket — lived where he wanted, and spent his time indulging in the pursuits that interested him. Those included music of all kinds, a voracious appetite for books, and a deep interest in art of the weirdest sort. (If you haven’t heard the chicken story, ask me sometime.)
For someone like me, who’s always been a very good girl, the fact that he spent his life doing exactly what he wanted — instead of what was expected — could be extremely irritating. But just when you were ready to explode he’d write something so wonderful, or do something so endearing, that you’d forgive him.
I met Jonathan right after I arrived in Los Angeles in 1984. On our first meeting, he annoyed me by saying he’d eaten in every taco stand in the city, which struck me as an absurd bit of hyperbole. It turned out to be true. At the time he was employed as a music critic, and he’d casually drop names like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, saying they were important musicians. How annoying when he turned out to be right about that.
But what we bonded over was food; I’d never met anybody with such deep knowledge of Korean and Thai cuisine, and he slowly initiated me into the mysteries of pupusas, arepas, and tortas. He was a veritable encyclopedia of Los Angeles food, and when Laurie Ochoa (who became his wife) and I took over the Food section of this paper, the first thing we did was ask Jonathan to write for us. His copy, of course, was always late.
“I know it drives you crazy,” he said during one memorable argument, “but I’m worth it.” And of course, he was. In fact, the first thing I said when Conde Nast asked me to become the editor of Gourmet Magazine was, “Can I bring Laurie and Jonathan with me?” Because although I knew Jonathan was going to be impossible, I couldn’t imagine trying to make the best epicurean publication in the country without their help.
Now, looking back, it seems to me that as much as I respected Jonathan, I never really appreciated how much he gave us — or how much he changed food journalism. Long before anyone had used the words “social gastronomy,” long before Tony Bourdain stepped out of the kitchen and onto the television screen, at a time when nobody in America — and few people in the world — understood the power of food, Jonathan got it.
From the very beginning, he used restaurant criticism as a way to talk about more than where you should eat. He understood, in his bones, the many ways that food is a powerful way to create community.
When I first arrived in L.A. a Thai chef told me that he could live his whole life in this city without learning English simply by staying inside the boundaries of the Thai community. He presented this as a sad thing, but what Jonathan understood is that it is precisely this insular quality that makes Los Angeles food so compelling. This is the one place in America where chefs from all over the world are cooking for a discerning audience of their own people.
But Jonathan didn’t want us to go out to Monterey Park simply to eat Sichuan pickles. He didn’t lure us out to El Monte or the world’s best birria burritos for their mere deliciousness. He wrote enticing prose designed to take us out of our safe little territories to mingle with other people because he knew that restaurants aren’t really about food. They’re about people.
He gave us the keys to a hidden city, and introduced us to folks we’d never have known. And the city changed. It is nothing like the city I found when I first came here in 1984.
But he did it his way. Other food critics hire babysitters and leave their children at home. Not Jonathan. When he had a family, he wanted them with him wherever he went, and as a result, Izzy and Leon have eaten more arcane food in more unusual places than any other kids on earth. I don’t think I’ve ever met better parents than Jonathan and Laurie — that family has been such a tight unit. It’s been awe-inspiring and pure pleasure to watch.
Selfishly I lament Jonathan’s loss because I want to read all those stories he’ll never write. And I’m sorry for the city because L.A. without Jonathan just won’t be the same. But it’s when I think of the Ochoa-Gold family as three instead of four that my heart really breaks.
Ruth Reichl was a food critic and food editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1984 to 1993.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-arellano-jonathan-gold-20180721-story.html
Must Reads: We all live in Jonathan Gold’s Southern California
BY Gustavo Arellano, July 21, 2018 7:50 PM PT
Much will be written about Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold in the coming days — about his talent at finding the best food in Southern California, even if it was hiding in a nondescript strip mall or a truck; about how a Jewish kid became the unlikely chronicler of immigrant L.A. by reporting on their cuisines; about the loyal readers who flooded restaurants after Gold praised them; about a prose style so vivid that he remains the only food columnist ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
But Southern California didn’t just lose its best food writer. When the man I and so many others called Mr. Gold passed away this weekend from pancreatic cancer, we lost one of our greatest and most important literary voices. He was a scribe of a sort we had never seen before, and probably won’t again: a champion of Southern California who wasn’t a saccharine booster like Charles Fletcher Lummis or the Instagram influencers of today; a chronicler of L.A.’s streets who never bought into the noir nightmares of Raymond Chandler or Mike Davis; a superstar who was never a self-aggrandizer; a nerd who could work in a Beyoncé reference for a review about a dim sum palace in Monterey Park without coming off as pretentious or over eager.
He deserves a spot in the pantheon of Los Angeles writers, alongside Charles Bukowski, Walter Mosley, and Luis J. Rodriguez. His columns have the same defining importance about our time and place as Joan Didion’s dispatches, as “The Day of the Locust.” It was through his work at The Times and LA Weekly that the rest of the country arguably discovered the Southern California that gets buzz today — a dynamic, young, multicultural hub that keeps a tenuous hold on unity through the foods we share and create. Our food in his hands became the prism through which outsiders could finally see the real SoCal.
Others sang of this Southern California long before Gold, of course. But none had his position or his mainstream appeal.
His strength lay in the fact that he wrote as someone thankful that the Los Angeles of today was not the Los Angeles of his youth: a white, Protestant town where our most significant contributions to America’s dining scene were fast food empires and cafeteria dining. But he also came to food as a perpetual newbie — a cellist by trade, and someone whose Falstaffian figure immediately marked him as an outsider who needed to prove his bona fides by getting it right.
He always did.
Gold originally became famous by becoming one of the first food writers in the country to largely eschew high-end restaurants and jump into so-called holes in the wall. He challenged well-heeled readers to drop their skittishness and snack on Oaxacan fried grasshoppers, on Thai pig-uterus soup, or fermented Peruvian drinks in restaurants where they might be the only white folks.
But Gold did more than just obsess about grub. He was an amateur anthropologist of Southern California like few others, documenting rising ethnic neighborhoods and new immigrants long before his colleagues took note. While our presidential administration believes immigrants negatively affect American culture, Gold celebrated not just the new waves of people who came to the region, but also explained how their food served as a bridge for all of us to learn about one another.
Drop the privilege, Gold constantly preached: These “foreigners” are Southern Californians just like you. So eat.
Once he became a national voice, Gold made sure to pay forward any attention thrown at him. In the many profiles about him, he always made sure to name-drop young writers, new chefs, and rising trends in the hope that his approval would bring them success.
Gold could’ve gone on to bigger and better things. But his choice to remain a food critic for a daily newspaper allowed Gold to be the change he wanted to see. And so we live in the Southern California that Gold predicted and documented in his reviews.
It’s the place where my Mexican mother goes to a Lebanese market in Garden Grove because they have better prices than the Latino store down the street. Where we have pho for breakfast, hot chicken for lunch, pupusas for dinner, and a late-night burrito from a taco truck just for the hell of it.
And it’s the place where I and other writers of color got inspired to get into food journalism. We were inspired because we grew up with Gold, and carried copies of his 2000 collection of reviews, “Counter Intelligence,” like a Thomas Guide across neighborhoods, putting a check mark on each spot we hit.
People used to visit Southern California for the weather, the beach, Disneyland. But a big draw now is the food. And that’s all gracias to Gold. Don’t mourn his passing too long. The best way we can honor his legacy is by living in the Southern California he wanted all of America to know: a big ol’, multihued, ever-delicious bowl of stew. Or plate of fessenjoon. Or giant taco. So eat.
http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/07/jonathan-gold-timeless-tireless-writing.html
