There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
—George Bernard Shaw
On this day in 1960, Jonathan Gold was born to Jewish parents Judith Gold, a high school teacher and librarian, and Irwin Gold, a probation officer. The first of three children, Jonathan began working as an editor at L.A. Weekly magazine while attending classes at UCLA. In 1986, he started his first food column, which later moved to the L.A. Times. He also contributed regularly to KCRW’s Good Food program. In 1999, he moved from Los Angeles to New York City to become a restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine. In 2007, when he was once again writing for L.A. Weekly, Gold became the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Gold died in 2018 from pancreatic cancer.
Unlike his contemporaries, who typically visited only high-end, Michelin rated restaurants, Gold plumbed the depths of the Los Angeles eating scene to reveal the gems hidden throughout the city at everyday restaurants frequented by everyday Angelinos. As a result, Gold’s reviews often featured positivity rather than rebuke, and illustrated a firm command of the origins of ethnic cuisine.
Affectionately known as J. Gold, Jonathan explored L.A.’s endless culinary offerings in his beat-up green Dodge Ram 1500, racking up more than 20,000 miles a year as he traversed the city in search of his next great meal. Gold introduced readers to favorite dishes such as toothpick lamb, doro wot, soup dumplings and boat noodles, and single-handedly put many of L.A.’s signature restaurants on the map. He sought out places that felt emblematic of the city, and the resulting reviews bore a distinctly Los Angeles feel.
Gold claimed that he hoped his visits to the city’s many immigrant enclaves would ultimately break down barriers among Angelenos, by making L.A.’s diversity feel accessible. “I am trying to democratize food and trying to get people to live in the entire city of Los Angeles,” he said in a 2015 interview with Vice. “I’m trying to get people to be less afraid of their neighbors.”
Through his work, Gold not only democratized the Los Angeles food scene, but illustrated how the food scene could be a force for democracy, bringing people together across ethnic, class, and racial boundaries. It’s a lesson well learned, and one uniquely suited to a Jewish author, whose tradition includes not only countless festive meals (from the Passover and Rosh Hashanah seders to traditional foods for Hanukkah, Purim, Shavuot, and more), but also a prescriptive zeal for inviting others to share in the experience, not to mention an army of Jewish bubbes and mamman-joons just waiting to push their matzo ball soup or ash-e reshteh on an unsuspecting visitor. But don’t give them a hard time. They’re simply following our ages-old tradition of bringing people together.
— Rabbi Josh Knobel