Jonathan
Gold, the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who became the first (and only)
journalist to win the Pulitzer Prize for food criticism, died Saturday evening
of pancreatic cancer, the LAT reported. He was 57.
Gold is
credited with being one of the first restaurant critics to laser-focus on what
he called “traditional” cuisine — “I hate the word ‘ethnic,’” he said in 2009.
With his forays into off-the-beaten path neighborhoods, Gold made the act of
discovery part of the thrill; he would seek out the cuisines of communities on
the fringe, and argue for their placement in the fabric of not only a city’s
dining scene, but its culture at large. In the beginning, the perch was
entirely his.
“When I
first started writing about, let’s say the San Gabriel Valley, I was the only
person writing about the San Gabriel Valley,” Gold told Eater in 2014. “I could
write about a place that was this famous place in the community, that everybody
from Hong Kong would go to, blah blah blah. It would be mine.”
Gold’s long
career in criticism dated to the mid-’80s, when he launched his “Counter
Intelligence” column at LA Weekly (a 2000 Counter Intelligence book, which
featured more than 200 columns that had run to date, was pointedly subtitled
“where to eat in the real Los Angeles”). He also had two stints at LA Times,
was the NYC critic at Gourmet for two years, and contributed to countless
publications.
And Gold
was generous with his views on the finer points of food criticism and his role
as critic. Here now, some of those thoughts — a window into what made Gold, as
Eater LA says, a “singular voice in LA’s multicultural restaurant scene”:
On how he’d
conduct research, as told to The New Yorker in 1999: “I go into a fugue state,
like the Aboriginal dreamtime, when you go on long, aimless walks in the
outback. That’s how I feel driving on the endless streets of Los Angeles County
Everybody
has their own style of writing, but it’s something about the sort of physical
description I do that seems to work well with food. I could also be a
pornographer, but that’s kinda not my kick. But they both describe bodily
functions — it’s that sort of really, really intimate physical detail.”
On how he
viewed his role, to Munchies in 2015: “Well, I am trying to democratize food
and trying to get people to live in the entire city of Los Angeles. I’m trying
to get people to be less afraid of their neighbors.”
More on the
above, to NPR in 2016: “As much as you would from a novel or a painting or an
opera or movie, you can go to a restaurant, and eat a meal, and look at the
people around you and smell the smells, and taste the flavors and learn
something about the world that has a lot to do with what’s on your plate.”
On his
relationship with his readers, to Eater in 2014: “There are really good
intelligent readers who read me every week, that won’t necessarily know the
difference between tonkatsu and tonkotsu. I think the worst thing you can do is
write down to your readers. Especially doing what I do, right? Everybody eats
three meals a day, everybody is an expert on something in food, even if it’s
just the way that they like their scrambled eggs done.”
On the
importance of the service-journalism aspects of criticism, to The Believer in
2012: “As a writer of criticism, the consumer thing is the least interesting
thing, but as a critic, the single worst thing you can do is send a reader to
waste time and money on something—even if it’s something you personally love.
You have to indicate the reasons why you love it and they’ll hate it.”
On the
importance of context in criticism, to Eater: “The greatest tool in the toolbox
is — as a critic of anything — your job is to basically, at least on a world historical
scale, know more about the restaurants you’re going to than even the people
doing it. You know why they’re doing things.”
On his
methods, in the 2016 documentary City of Gold: “I very rarely take notes in a
restaurant; I’m more involved in observing the music of the meal. I mean, you
can take notes when you’re having sex too, but you’d be sort of missing out of
something.”
On dropping
the pretense of anonymity in 2015: “The game of peekaboo is harmful both to
critics and to the restaurants they write about. If chefs truly can cook better
when they know a critic is in the house, then restaurants without an early
warning system are at a permanent disadvantage. A critic who imagines himself
invisible may find it easy to be cruel. At a moment when serious criticism has
all but drowned in a tide of Yelpers, Instagram accounts, tweets, Facebook
sneers and bloggers who feel compelled to review a restaurant before it even
opens, the kabuki of the pose is a distraction.”
On why he
mostly wrote positive reviews during his second LAT stint, as told to The
Believer: “I’ve been doing this long enough, and I’ve closed enough
restaurants. It’s very strange that 40 people can be put out of work because I
make an aesthetic judgment. It doesn’t happen in film, because Warner Bros. can
survive to fight another day. If the sports section says something mean about
Kobe
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