Remembering the Inimitable Jonathan Gold
The beloved critic, dead at 57, was the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize—and a vital champion of L.A.’s culinary riches.
Every so often, I would send the food critic Jonathan Gold a fan note when one of his pieces seemed even better written than usual. He would always reply with something gracious like “Too kind, as always,” or with a reciprocal compliment for a piece of mine he’d happened to see. What I never said and always meant was, “Reading your latest piece made me think, as I always do the minute I start anything with your byline, Why do I even bother to write?” There seemed little point in trying to be funny, or original, or stylish, or to distill years of experience and acres of reading into 2,000 compressed words as long as Jonathan Gold had access to a keyboard.
