2007 Criticism winner Jonathan Gold died of pancreatic cancer on July 21. He was 57.
Born to a middle-class family in South Los Angeles (his father served as parole officer to Charles Manson and Roman Polanski before and after their paths intersected in the Tate-LaBianca murders), Gold's identity and career were fundamentally interwoven with his hometown.
When the UCLA art student began working at L.A. Weekly as a proofreader and music writer in the early 1980s, Los Angeles was at a crossroads. Long deprecated as a gilded simulacrum for America's entertainment industries — "everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept," two-time Fiction winner William Faulkner once said — its image was evolving.
In her picaresque fictive memoirs, Eve Babitz bridged high and low culture. Sculptor and performance artist Chris Burden (who briefly employed Gold as his assistant) brought a punk edge to UCLA's art department, while Philip K. Dick brokered alliances between the L.A. punk cognoscenti and local science fiction writers at his Santa Ana apartment.
Consequently, the members of the Los Angeles musical underground chronicled by Gold at L.A. Weekly and Spin (including The Germs and N.W.A.) slowly subverted the mainstream as avatars of word-of-mouth cultural capital over the following decade — one mixtape at a time.
But Gold soon realized that the most important cultural story of his time had little to do with the musical innovators; rather, it was the immigrants who were repopulating neighborhoods marginalized by the suburban exodus — and the bountiful meals ripe for discovery therein.
Beginning in 1986, Gold's "Counter Intelligence" column offered an L.A. through the prism of food completely apart from the martini-laden dealmaking of Dan Tana's. In Hawthorne, a working class, airport-adjacent city best remembered as the birthplace of The Beach Boys, he found Al-Watan, a nondescript Pakistani restaurant that "ostensibly specialize[d] in the complicated offal dishes that make up the heart of Muslim Pakistani soul food" but actually offered the "best tandoor-cooked meats in the United States."
While many food critics at the time shied from the sociocultural inquiry that had become de rigeur in arts criticism, Gold reveled in descriptions of "businessmen in blue dress shirts, Sansabelt slacks, and shiny patent-leather shoes" who "seem almost to live at Al-Watan, dropping in a couple of times an afternoon, ordering big plates of lamb and rice, negotiating in Urdu on flip phones while they wait for the biryani to arrive."
"[Y]ou have to be able to put it into context," Gold reflected in 2015. "Somebody reading [a review] may never have been and may never go to it. But by putting it in a certain place in the culture, they’re able to understand it. They may get to the end of the essay and they’ve learned something, maybe. It’s like those essays in the New York Review of Books that will seem to only tangentially touch on the book it’s ostensibly reviewing. Then you get to the end and you realize, 'Oh wait, this actually has talked about the book the entire time and I know more than I did when I started.'"
A collection of Gold's columns was published as "Counter Intelligence" in 2000 to acclaim. Although he recently had moved to New York with longtime wife/editor Laurie Ochoa to cover its dining scene for Gourmet, he returned to Los Angeles a year later, remaining there for the rest of his life. His profile was enhanced by "City of Gold," a 2015 documentary that cast him as the eccentric paterfamilias of "a Los Angeles where ethnic cooking is a kaleidoscopic portal to the mysteries of an unwieldy city and the soul of America."
As the rarefied strains of underground music gave way to the omnipresence of Spotify, more than one article was published on the phenomenon of "food is the new rock," with exotic cuisine now enjoying the cultural cachet that punk and hip-hop carried in Gold's youth.
"There’s always been that sort of glamorization of the working class," Gold told The Washington Post's Chris Richards in 2013, two years after he was a Pulitzer finalist once again. "The rock guys tried to ride that for a really long time. . . . But no matter how glamorous it is, no matter how much you pay for dinner, chefs are still doing things with their hands. . . . In a time when guitar solos are incredibly uncool, somebody has to be doing something that has a physical manifestation to it, right?"
By the mid-2010s, Los Angeles was ensconced as a world-class destination for art and cuisine, in no small part due to Gold's decades of advocacy. Regularly publishing until a month before his death as chief food critic of the Los Angeles Times (where he moved following his second stint at L.A. Weekly in 2012), he remained attuned to new trends, including natural wines and the holes in the wall of the polyglot San Gabriel Valley.
Despite the perquisites of fame, he continued to situate himself at the bleeding edge of his city. In his "five rules for dining in L.A." (handwritten by his daughter and published on his Instagram account in 2017), he advised readers that "the best choice is always the restaurant 15 minutes further than you are willing to go."
For Gold, food was not just a sensory experience. It was a portal to the differences and commonalities of the disparate populations that comprise urban life, an enduring thorn in the side of self-segregation. "It’s easy to hole up in whatever enclaves you happen to be in," he said in 2015. "And I’m not even going to say the rich people with their beautiful houses in the Hills. There are also people holed up in the Chinese enclaves or the Central Americans south of Midtown or the Cambodians in North Long Beach. There are so many ways to be insular in Los Angeles. There’s so many ways to live your life without being more than dimly aware of other people’s cultures. In my writing, [...] the idea is to pluck people out of their comfort zones and make them live in the entire city. We have it; we might as well."
Related
Read Jonathan Gold's Prize-winning portfolio here.