Jonathan Gold

Jonathan Gold, food / restaurant critic of the LA Times and formerly a prominent music critic, died yesterday at 57, just a couple of weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

I'm so sad about this. I became acquainted with Gold last year through the wonderful documentary City of Gold, about his writing and his relationship with food and the city of Los Angeles. He was a marvelous writer and utterly omnivorous in his culinary taste. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2007, the first (and still only) restaurant reviewer to win the prize.

Here are various obituaries and other writing about Gold:

• NY Times obit, by Pete Wells, who does right by Gold
• LA Times obit
• LA Times lifts the paywall for coverage of Jonathan Gold
• New Yorker profile of Gold, by Dana Goodyear (2009)
• Dana Goodyear's follow-up article in TNY (2018)
• Molly Lambert on how Gold showed that local journalism matters (TNY, 2018)
• Web site for City of Gold

From Dana Goodyear's postscript:

Gold was the kind of father who woke at dawn to make his daughter snacks from a recipe by Apicius, in Latin, to take on a field trip to an exhibit about Pompeii, and was always home well before sundown during the week of Hanukkah to assuage his son.

From Pete Wells's obit:

In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Mr. Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.

Updated 7/24, with links to Lambert and second Goodyear article and quotations from Goodyear and Wells.