Jonathan Gold didn't just elevate the art of restaurant criticism, he helped a fractured region understand itself
LOS ANGELES_Few things truly connect our sprawling metropolis: the freeways, the Los Angeles Times and without a doubt, Jonathan Gold, who transcended the role of restaurant critic to become a modern-day ethnographer. His gift was his ability to explain the tribes of this place to each other by celebrating the things they cook and eat.
"Real life occurs, of course, in the parts of town where guys at the gas station speak Korean and where the streets intersect at 90-degree angles to one another, and where the possibilities are as infinite as the extended coastal plain," he wrote in The Times' Sunday magazine in 1990.
Bite by bite, Jonathan, who died Saturday at 57, tasted the infinite possibilities of this extended coastal plain. His love for exploring the region behind the wheel of his truck was almost as intense as his love for eating.
"I am fond of driving long distances on surface streets," he wrote in that 1990 essay, "coursing down the 40-mile
