Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic known for his way with words, multifaceted mind, and dogged dedication to Los Angeles — the city he loved and lived in — died on Saturday at 57. He was a husband, father, and critic at the Los Angeles Times; many, especially fellow writers and those in the food world, are still bereaving.
His longtime colleague and friend, the writer and former critic Ruth Reichl, wrote to Eater that she “can’t sleep” and is “devastated” by the loss. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food,” she told the New York Times critic Pete Wells.
Writers and editors from across the country were touched by Gold’s empathetic, excitable reviews, all of which contained references that reached far beyond food: British punk, Beyoncé, immigration, the Dodgers, jazz standards, Kobe Bryant, the sculpture artist Charles Ray, and “your late Uncle Morris” all had a shot of popping up in one of his pieces. Here now, writers share their favorite passages from Gold’s oeuvre.
Francis Lam, writer, editor, host of The Splendid Table
When I think of Jonathan purely as a writer, as someone who sees something about the human experience and articulates it in the most perfect way, I always think of this passage about eating live shrimp:
I have consumed thousands of animals in my lifetime: seen lambs butchered, snipped the faces off innumerable soft-shell crabs, killed and gutted my share of fish. I had, I thought, come to terms with the element of predation inherent in eating meat — and I am thankful to the beasts that have nourished me. But this was the first time I had ever come up against one of the most basic of nature’s postulates: You live; your prey dies. In order to eat, you must first rip into living flesh . . . not by proxy, not from a distance, not with a gun or knife, but intimately, with your teeth.
I thought about the Hindu cabby who had driven me back into town from a Singapore seafood restaurant years ago, lecturing me the entire way on the spirituality inherent in a single prawn, and I thought about my vegan friends who refuse to eat anything that once had a face.
I bit into the animal, devouring all of its sweetness in one mouthful, and I felt the rush of life pass from its body into mine, the sudden relaxation of its feelers, the blankness I swear I could see overtaking its eyes. It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don’t want to do it again.
A great writer sees things and makes us see ourselves differently because of them. This was one moment, of thousands, where Jonathan made us understand ourselves more clearly.
So I was always in awe of him for that, and that was even before I understood what his real project was: not just to make us understand ourselves more clearly, but to make us understand each other more clearly, to bring humanity closer together. God, I’ll miss him.
Gustavo Arellano, writer, columnist, author
My favorite Mr. Gold review of all time was, of all things, a Tex-Mex spot: Arturo’s Puffy Tacos in Whittier:
My friend Julie is one of those kitchen samurai you sometimes hear about, a woman who spends her year flitting from hotel room to hotel room, imposing her will on corporate-owned restaurants in every corner of the world. The nature of the job can be brutal — she is required to instruct experienced Chinese chefs on the finer points of dumpling construction, French chefs on pâté, and sushi masters on the proper way to make a spicy tuna roll. She can go weeks without leaving the megahotel at which she is currently employed, existing on staff meals and postmidnight bar snacks. When she daydreams, as she did over a platter of spicy bo ssam at Kobawoo the other day, it is often about the local Mexican food she grew up eating on the rough west side of San Antonio, Texas...
Los Angeles, oddly enough, shares in the history of the signature San Antonio delicacy. Its own puffy-taco emporium, Arturo’s Puffy Taco out in Whittier, was founded by the brother of the famous Henry not long after the San Antonio restaurant first opened its doors. (The proprietor of Ray’s Drive Inn, where the puffy taco may well have been born, was father to both Arturo and Henry.) The customers seem to be mostly expatriate Texans, packed into the tiny adjunct dining room under the signed photographs of Tejanomusicians and basketball referees, putting away mounds of food that tower over the red-sauce-encrusted tables.
Gold becomes a convert, compares picadillo to terrine, and the review ends with him wondering why he had never heard of Arturo’s in his many years of criticism. Then comes the reveal: His wife, LA Times arts editor Laurie Ochoa, tells him she used to get them all the time growing up, and wondered why she had never told him about it.
”Twenty-five wasted years,” was Gold’s concluding line. History, food, love, and Gold undercutting his own status as LA’s food god. God, I miss him already.
Jeff Gordinier, food & drinks editor, Esquire
From 1993’s “Pie’s the Limit” in the LA Times: As with all good hamburgers, a Pie ‘n Burger burger is about texture, the crunchy sheaf of lettuce, the charred surface of the meat, the outer rim of the bun crisped to almost the consistency of toast. When compressed by the act of eating, the hamburger leaks thick, pink dressing that is somewhat more tart than it may look. Soft, grilled onions, available upon request — please do — add both a certain squishiness and a caramelly sweetness. The slice of American cheese, if you have ordered a cheeseburger, does not melt into the patty, but stands glossily aloof from it, as if it were mocking the richness of the sandwich rather than adding to the general effect. The burgers here come jacketed in white paper and are compact enough to generally remain intact through three-quarters of their life — it’s kind of a genteel thing, a Pie ‘n Burger burger, a Pasadena thing.
Isn’t that perfect? I grew up on the border of San Marino and Pasadena, a few blocks away from Pie ‘n Burger, and used to ride my bike there as a kid. What was always interesting — and moving — about Jonathan Gold’s reviews for people who lived in Southern California was that jolt of recognition. Hey, whoa, the gentle sage of LA food came to eat at our local place — and he expressed love for what we love! He got it! It gave you a sense of community pride.
A crucial thing to remember about Gold is that when his writing began to appear in Los Angeles, there was no internet. For years, a lot of hungry folks in Southern California heard about great Oaxacan and Thai and Sichuan spots the same way you might hear about great new bands: via word of mouth. Then J. Gold showed up on the scene and, as Ruth Reichl has pointed out, it felt as though all these vibrant neighborhoods started being introduced to each other through his work. Oh, there’s excellent Armenian food right up the hill? Oh, there’s a world of deliciousness a few minutes away, in Monterey Park? His writing probably helped foster millions of meetings and conversations that otherwise might never have happened. Now you can use Google to chart your culinary path around a city like Los Angeles, but in the 1980s (and afterwards) J. Gold was our Google — only a lot more persuasive and a lot more poetic.
Julia Kramer, deputy editor, Bon Appetit
When I was a student at Pomona College, I read Gold religiously. I still remember the night my boyfriend and I drove to Glendora for doughnuts at Donut Man after reading this piece:
Have you ever seen a strawberry doughnut from the Donut Man? It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates cushion, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness, oozing from the sides, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home. The tawny pastry itself is only lightly sweetened, dense and slightly crunchy at the outside, like most good doughnuts, with a vaguely oily nuttiness and an almost substantial chew. It is the only doughnut I have ever seen that is routinely served with a plastic knife and fork. It is worth every penny of the $2.50 it costs.
John Birdsall, writer, author
I used to have a printout of this 2004 column pinned to the wall above my desk. I styled at least two early pieces I wrote on this.
A single passage is hard, since it’s a piece where the thoughts wrap so tightly around each other it’s like pulling a single twig from a nest, but here, after Robert Sietsema, drunk on the Basque brain shredder Amer Picon, makes a shameful comment to a bartender in East Bakersfield who reads the both of them:
She sneered at the lameness of Sietsema’s come-on, a world-class sneer, a sneer that would have served her well behind any bar in Silver Lake or on the Lower East Side, and the two of us were as smitten as any two drunk, married guys could ever be at 3 in the afternoon.
“You two are from out of town,” she said delicately. “Tourists.” She flicked the hair out of her eyes.
“You brought a wrapped loaf in with you, so I know you’ve already been to the Pyrenees Bakery. You probably stopped in at Luigi’s — for what? A plate of beans? Spaghetti with sauce? — but you had your main lunch at one of the Basque restaurants. My guess is Wool Grower’s, because you two are too pathetic to have gotten up in time for noon lunch at one of the better places. You have a bagful of Dewar’s peanut chews in the car. After this, you’re going over to the Alley Cat, because the place is for losers, because you think the neon and the Hirschfeld mural are ‘cool.’ Tonight for dinner, you’re going to . . . not here, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here now . . . to the Noriega. Definitely the Noriega. And I don’t blame you for going there: Tuesday is prime-rib night.”
On her way back to the regulars, she turned in our direction, pulled up her blouse, and flashed us. It was a friendly gesture, and we appreciated it. Even if she’d had us mostly dead to rights.
What was astonishing then, as now, is that this was Gold’s restaurant review column. He breaks every convention of the form still manages to pack a mention of, what, 12 dishes in here? He drops them like wasabi peas along the surface of a bar: distracted by the spectacle of his drunken picaresque, you eat each one up without noticing, and when they’re gone you wish you had just a few more to nibble on. Gold puts himself at the center of a low-life binge where even the simplest food — peanut candy, for fuck’s sake! — suggests that rapture exists everywhere and is possible anywhere.
Pete Wells, restaurant critic, the New York Times
Like everybody who’s written about Jonathan Gold over the past few days, I’ve struggled to convey the sheer breadth of his work. Yes, he was unmatched at finding cuisines that were brand new to Los Angeles. In the 1980s, before the Census Bureau had registered the influx of Salvadorans, he already knew who made the best pupusas. But he also wrote about cheffed-up creations. His take on the Peruvian-Japanese fusions cuisine of Nobu Matsuhisa is still the definitive one.
And some of my favorite writing of his doesn’t have much to do with cuisine at all. His tastes in low-end dining were no more snobbish than they were in rarefied dining rooms where everybody pays with a Platinum card. He was drawn to places that were sui generis, where you could spend a few hours in a world that didn’t exist anywhere else, and sometimes that meant late nights in weird spots where the food was beside the point.
For example, this passage on a Polynesian extravaganza in Rosemead called Bahooka, which outlasted many classic paper-umbrella venues from the Trader Vic’s era but closed in the early years of the genre’s revival. You can find Bahooka in Gold’s classic 2000 guidebook, Counter Intelligence, assuming you can locate a copy of the book, which is out of print. Bahooka is listed in the index under “Tiki-American”:
Bahooka’s is the kind of place you’d expect to find near a scruffy tropical seaport—all rusted nautical gear, stolen street signs, and scarred dark wood. Lit like a navy-base bar and with more bobbing tropical fish than you’d find in a Jacques Cousteau special. Lifeboats hang out back — after the bar closes on a weekend night, you’ll always find a giggling kid or two waving from inside of one. There are fish in the foyer, fish tanks surrounding three sides of each booth, and fish swimming inside the glass-topped bar, but not much fish on the menu, unless you count some cod that seems to have sum all the way from Iceland through a sea of old oil. Fish puffs go with a Monsoon or a Jet Pilot or a Flaming Honey Bowl better than you might think, though the leaden deep-fried balls of food aren’t anything you’d want to look at by the light of day. There is no rumaki. Sorry.
When the steel-guitar lowings on the P.A. start to sound good, it’s time for a Shark’s Tooth or a Cobra’s Strike. Halfway into one of those, a sticky order of Exotic Ribs may seem like just the thing, because the ribs are moist, soak up a lot of alcohol, and come with fries, sweet baked hams, or cobbettes. The cobbettes, definitely the cobbettes. You can also get teriyaki chicken breast, ham with sweet-and-sour sauce, roast beef, or fried golf balls or shrimp, but you won’t. What will happen is that your date will suck up the last of his or her Jolly Roger Bowl and carve your initials in the booth. Don’t worry, it’s happened before.
Helen Rosner, food corespondent, the New Yorker
From 2006’s “Bring the Funk,” published in LA Weekly: There is a rhythm to an izakaya meal that is unlike any other. Glasses of cold sake and big bottles of beer appear at regular intervals, then bits of raw fish and grilled meat and savory custard are served individually or all at once. It’s a waltz-time snack-sip-chat, snack-sip-chat dynamic that can go on for the length of a Mahler symphony... animal-vegetable-mineral, warm-hot-cold, sweet-salt-funk... until, before you know it, the restaurant is empty, the lights have been turned high, and the waitress is suggesting that you might want to start finding your way home. It is cruel, the end of the evening at an izakaya.
Gold was never cynical, always precise, but a precision that had a wildness in it. I love this passage — from one of the LA Weekly reviews the Pulitzer committee cited for his 2007 award — because of how beautifully he ties together food and feeling. It’s never just what’s on the plate: it’s the patterns, the ebb and flow, learning and teaching, the wide emotional arc of being a person at a table in the fortunate position of being fed.
Gabriella Gershenson, writer, recipe editor for the forthcoming The 100 Most Jewish Foods
The first time I read Jonathan Gold’s work, it was an epiphany. At the time, I wasn’t a writer, I was a reader. As a reader, I never really paid attention to who was doing the writing, just to what was on the page. It was information to be consumed and I took for granted that it was just there. All of that changed one day when I was reading a restaurant review in Gourmet magazine, and the prose was so vivid, I wanted to know who had written it. It was Jonathan Gold. He introduced a paradigm shift that changed everything for me. I suddenly cared as much about who was telling the story, and how they were telling it, as I did about the story itself.
I wish I could remember what the review was on, or what the quote was… something about a chef’s artistry on the plate. Gold’s passing last weekend led me to a fruitless search in the hobbled Gourmet magazine online archive to find that passage. While I was not successful, I did fall down a rabbit hole of other stories Jonathan Gold had written for the magazine. He was poetic: “Hotel rooms are empty spaces yearning to be filled — with work, with sighing, with sex; cool, perfect voids screaming for completion,” he wrote in an appreciation of Hilton hotels. He was funny: ”I waved toward the canapé, telling him that I had always considered truffle oil to be the Heinz ketchup of the overbred,” he wrote about an encounter with Gordon Ramsay. He was deep: In a story on Hawaiian cooking, he wrote that ”a proper luau, like a proper bouillabaisse or a proper paella, is an ultimate expression of community through food.” It seems fitting that the sentence that struck me so many years ago has become apocryphal. What’s most important in the end aren’t the words themselves, but the fact that they, and the person who wrote them, changed the way I see the world.
Brett Martin, correspondent, GQ
From 2009’s “Snook Attack: La Chente,” published in LA Weekly: Have you ever encountered pescado Zarandeado? Because it is as intimidating as an entrée can get, a vast, smoking creature split open at the backbone and flopped open into a sort of skeleton-punctuated mirror image of itself, wisps of steam rising around the onions and lemon slices with which it is strewn, served on the kind of plastic tray you may remember from your high school cafeteria, which is probably the only vessel broad enough to handle the fish. As served at Mariscos La Chente, a Westside restaurant specializing in the seafood dishes of Sinaloa and Nayarit, it is so menacing that you scarcely know whether to eat it or beat it to death with a stick.
A Gold review was the ultimate MacGuffin — a pretense for heading out in a direction you would never have gone on your own, except that the prize at the end wasn’t an illusion. It was a fish.
This, the lede of an LA Weekly review of Mariscos La Chente, a Mexican seafood restaurant on Centinela Avenue, was “Snook Attack” and was one of several pieces Gold wrote over the years tracing LA’s cultish obsession with pescado zarandeado.
There are two lessons here: One is about the maintenance of enthusiasm, a harder thing than you might imagine, but something with which Gold never seemed to struggle, at least not on the page. The other is about truth: Gold’s writing may have been pyrotechnic, but it wasn’t Gonzo. You got to the restaurant and, by god, you wondered whether you should beat that fish with a stick. He needed neither hyperbole nor fabulism because, he proved again and again, as long as you were willing to go out that front door with open eyes and hungry belly, the world was more than enough.
Kat Kinsman, senior food & drinks editor, Extra Crispy, author Hi, Anxiety
From “Alone at Last,” published in Gourmet in 2000: One small confession: I think the New York Hilton may be my favorite hotel. Because the New York Hilton understands me and people like me: I am a man who enjoys creature comforts in moderation, but most of all, I like to be left alone. In the Hilton — and in the many hotels like it throughout the world — I feel like a citizen. The Hilton fits like a good blue suit off the rack. And in the Hilton I always feel as if I am somebody else, somebody whose company thinks my time is important enough to put me up in a $225 hotel room in midtown Manhattan, somebody who owns a good-quality raincoat from Brooks Brothers or another fine American firm, somebody whose boss probably won’t object too much to the $125 ($125!) steak dinner for one at Maloney & Porcelli, which one of those airline magazines called “One of the Great Steak Houses of the World”... somebody who just might need a bacon cheeseburger at a quarter to three in the morning. … At the Hilton, I am neither seen nor judged and there are no clipboards. But my room is equipped with Telephone with Dataport, Thermostat (adjustable), Clock Radio, Hair Dryer, Iron, Ironing Board, and Work Desk with Lamp. The Scald-Proof Shower/Tub has water pressure enough to knock me back a step when I turn it on, and it never, never runs cold. There is J&B in the minibar and ice just down the hall and a piano bar downstairs if I am in the mood for mild entertainment. Everything is perfectly, impeccably clean, as if I were the first man in the world. And it is enough.
It’s not often than Jonathan Gold graced the East Coast with his presence or his prose, so I sop it up greedily. He also tended to truck in the extraordinary — the dish worth driving hours from your home and comfort zone to experience. It’s jarring and glorious to see him, in this piece from the May 2000 issue of Gourmet, embrace the deliberate anonymity and smooth-edged blandness of a corporate hotel because it seems almost taboo for a man of his drive and appetites to celebrate such a thing. Gold reveled in shared humanity, evidenced often by the “you” present throughout his writing, and it’s somehow tremendously freeing to know that even he needed a break from it all on occasion.
Paolo Lucchesi, food and wine editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Oddly sad about Nate Dogg. His smooth yet vicious crooning was as vital to the early '90s as Biggie's lisp or Cobain's howl.
— jonathan gold (@thejgold) March 16, 2011
Gold tweeted this on March 15, 2011, on the occasion of Nate Dogg’s death. For a reason that I never quite thought too much about, I have never forgotten that tweet — the images and sounds of those three musicians in perfect juxtaposition. There’s a Hemingway-esque clarity and ease in each of those 23 words, but now that we’re reflecting on the countless things that made Gold so special, I think these 23 words say an awful lot about his greatness as a critic.
First, there’s the choice of inclusion: In expressing the essence of early ’90s music, alongside the two titans (Biggie and Cobain), he rightly celebrates Nate Dogg, the lesser known guy who sank in the background, singing hooks, a guy who was ubiquitous but not traditionally A-list. Yet Gold elevates him, taking a critical long view and declaring him every bit as essential as better-known headliners. And there’s the descriptors themselves: Vicious crooning, a lisp, a howl. Those utterly simple, evocative and unexpected details, in their absolute specificity, are haunting. Vicious crooning. Most of us writers would settle for the easier cliches — Biggie’s lyricism or flow, Cobain’s pain, his moans — and never know the power of going deeper to find the detail that captures something so precisely — and easily.
Alison Roman, contributing writer and editor, author of Dining In
From “Mr. Baguette Takes on Mr. Lee,” published in 2004 in LA Weekly: Henry Ford applied the concept of the assembly line to automobile manufacture; August Escoffier to the vast hotel banquet kitchen. The McDonald brothers broke American diner cooking down into a set of simple, easily replicated procedures and transformed the world’s restaurant in dustry in the process. Starbucks formalized espresso drinks. La Brea Bakery proved that it was possible to devote a vast industrial assembly line to the making of slow-rise artisanal bread.
But there has never been a testament to the virtues of standardization quite like the assembly line for Vietnamese banh mi at Lee’s Sandwiches, a small chain of restaurants centered around bright kitchens, clean as an operating chamber, that seem to stretch into infinity. A study in balletic grace, teams of sandwich makers, all in white, slice hot baguettes in half, chop off the pointy ends, then neatly layer meat and condiments that are sized to the skinny bread. Bakers march across the kitchen bearing trays of freshly baked French bread for the sandwich makers. A sign in the front window, perhaps inspired by the display at Krispy Kreme, flashes Hot Baguettes in burning red neon.
This whole review of dueling banh mi spots he wrote in 2004 is the first thing I remember reading and thinking, I’m going to go find these places and I’m going to go eat these things, for no other reason other than I wanted to hang out with the person who had written the article. I figured if I, too, ate these sandwiches, then somehow we’d be considered members of the same imaginary club, and I really, really wanted to be a member of that club. I didn’t even really like sandwiches! That’s how good he was.
He was the best and I trusted him implicitly (still is, still do). I’ve said repeatedly that the only bad thing about New York is that we didn’t have a Jonathan Gold, because how the hell are we supposed to know where to eat?
Brett Anderson, restaurant critic, the Times-Picayune, New Orleans
Soundgarden’s first EP, Screaming Life, may have seemed like just another obscure indie record when it came out in ’87, but in retrospect the first bow-shot of the modern rock era was fired on the first ten seconds of that limited-edition, blue-vinyl Sub Pop masterpiece (in the opening measures of the song “Hunted Down”). Thayil’s riff consisted of bottom-string guitar notes that didn’t bend, exactly, as much as they refused to commit to a single pitch; Matt Cameron’s drumming was spare and sort of thuddy, but also laid-back in a style common to metal drummers of the time but not to underground art bands. The bass lurked subliminally deep, and most of the space above was occupied by the powerful, piercing cry of singer Chris Cornell, who sounded like a goddamn trumpet. It was a record capable of making you forget everything but the overwhelming need to shake your long hair in front of your eyes.
When I began my first weekly restaurant column for the Washington City Paper, in D.C., in January of 1996, one of the many obstacles I struggled to overcome — I had never tried sushi, despised raw tomatoes and couldn’t operate chopsticks — was an ignorance of working food journalists who churned out prose in the knowing, culture-striding, slightly off-the-rails style of the music writers who inspired me to get into newspapers in the first place. Among them was Jonathan Gold, who at the time regularly wrote long features for Rolling Stone and Spin magazine, the premiere U.S. pop music magazines of the day. I’d heard Gold wrote some about restaurants in LA, but it seemed so impossible to me that his food writing could be as thrilling as, say, the Soundgarden profile he wrote for Spin in 1994. (Follow the link and note that the opening paragraph, set in Australia, name-drops curry stands and Malibu.)
There were no punk brainiacs writing about food back then — or so I assumed before I ultimately found my way to Gold’s Counter Intelligence columns on the LA Weekly’s website. As it turns out, Gold’s food writing was — well, anyone familiar only with it will recognize his voice in the passage above, forever emblazoned in my memory thanks to the whip-snap of the “goddamn trumpet.” Gold’s food columns regularly coiled around some set of observations, many of which sent me running (in those pre-Google days) to my reference library, only to offer up grin-inducing release, often in the form of an easily relatable revelation, like “the overwhelming need to shake your long hair in front of your eyes.” Jonathan left us way too young, but I’ll forever marvel at how long he sustained such brilliance.
Charlotte Druckman, writer, author
Here are two passages of his music writing, where you can see the brilliance of his prose, but you also get to see his range, how he started, his early driving force — and passion — and that he could NAIL a profile.
The first, an except from his feature on N.W.A. for Spin in 1989, shows you how much he knew about a specific genre of music, and the second, his profile of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails from Rolling Stone in 1994, shows him writing about a very different genre and how he zeroes in on a single performer:
Public Enemy is hard. Too Short is hard. Eric B. and Rakim are hard: raw, noisy, uncommercial. Hard beats are what you hear pounding from Oldsmobiles, boomboxes, skateparks and hardly ever from the radio; spare, percussive backing tracks composed with cheap-sounding drum machines and short snatches bitten from old soul singles.
L.L. Cool J used to be hard until he recorded a love song, which no self-respecting rapper will ever let him forget. Run-DMC were hard until they jammed with Aerosmith. KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, whose first album included an ode to his 9mm repeater pistol, wanted to stay hard so bad that he posed with an Uzi on the cover of his last album — an album whose hit single was “Stop the Violence.” The brutal calculus of hardness forgives lapses in taste, but never in form. “There’s a principle involved,” Ice Cube says. “The Weekly wouldn’t run a picture of a baby getting its head cut off; N.W.A wouldn’t do a pop song.”
Hardness arose as a rap aesthetic at about the same time much of the music became essentially suburban. While artists from Harlem and the Bronx were still producing good-time party jams, middle-class kids from Queens and Long Island began to form the contemporary image of the rapper as an articulate gangster with a chip on his shoulder, a young black man hard by choice. (Every rapper suburban middle-class Def Jam mogul Rick Rubin ever had a hand in producing is hard: Run, L.L., PE, Slick Rick, even the Beastie Boys.) Hard rap, like punk, brought together a self-selected community of kids by becoming an image of what their parents feared most.
-
To paraphrase the late poet Philip Larkin, hatred is to Nine Inch Nails what daffodils were to Wordsworth.
Reznor is a master of control and a perfectionist to the extent that when the stage lighting did not work out to his satisfaction at the beginning of The Downward Spiral tour, he spent two days reprogramming the system’s computer software. “It was looking like a Genesis concert,” he says. “Somebody had to get the job done.”
In the light of day, maybe yelling at a soundman or discussing marketing strategy with his manager John Malm, Reznor looks pretty robust for a rock & roll guy. He has ruddy Midwestern cheeks and an athletic ease you might associate with the quarterback of a small-college football team. Perhaps surprised by his rude health, strangers meeting Reznor for the first time often describe him as normal. (He is more likely to describe himself as a “computer dweeb.”)
Onstage though, splayed like a St. Sebastian without the torturing arrows, Reznor resembles nothing so much as the Bronze Age man they dug from that glacier in Austria a couple of years ago, give or take a pair of fish-net stockings: rough-edged bowl cut, leather cod-piece thing, garters, tunic and pre-industrial boots. Though the subject of control is as central to Reznor’s collected works as the subject of marijuana is to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s — an early press release for Pretty Hate Machinetook pains to point out “Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails” — Reznor appears powerless onstage, buffeted by harsh, glowing fog, martyred to the noise and to the crowd, enraged by a world he does not understand.”
You and me, we could be there, in that audience, right now, 24 years later.
Matt Rodbard, editor Taste, co-author Koreatown: A Cookbook
You find your way into a dark parking lot off Berendo, walk up a wheelchair ramp that seems to lead to a dance studio, and walk through a deserted courtyard, down a hall past a dishwashing station and up a small flight of stairs into DGM (short for Dwight Gol Mok), a movie director’s fantasy of a smoke-filled Korean student tavern.
This is the start of Gold’s blurb for Best Kimchi Pancake from what many (me, possibly Matt Kang) consider Jonathan’s LA Weekly mangnum opus — a benign-titled Jonathan Gold’s 60 Korean Dishes Every Angeleno Should Know listicle that was actually the deepest dive into one of LA’s most-interesting food culture/sub culture. I used this article (it ran several thousand words) as a roadmap when reporting Koreatown, and was lucky enough to dine with the guy on a couple occasions, his flowing red hair ending up in our plate of sticky pork ribs at Ham Ji Park. I suspect Koreatown was Gold’s favorite food destination. It’s so alive and always changing and just the best in a city of bests. He’d never admit this of course. Rest In Peas!
Tom Sietsema, restaurant critic for the Washington Post
Jonathan was so clearly in love with the city he covered, both old and current Los Angeles. His 2011 shout out to Musso & Frank Grill in the LA Weekly manages the neat trick of telling his audience everything they need to know about the place — why it matters, what to order, its place in history — in just a few lovely sentences. To read them is to be there, with Jonathan sitting across the table from you:
If you walk into Musso expecting to have the same kind of steak you had last week at Morton’s, you probably have the wrong idea. Because before the restaurant became a martini-fueled Hollywood clubhouse, the place where Faulkner blew out his liver and generations of character actors learned to show up on Wednesday for the chicken potpie, the restaurant was practically a showcase for what was then considered California cuisine, a genteel marriage of the local produce, abundant local fisheries and masculinized lunchroom cooking: avocado cocktails smeared with sweet, pink dressing and frigid bowls of chilled consommé; fried smelts and dainty plates of crab Louie; kidneys Turbigo. This is what the cosmopolitan life was like, before Cosmopolitans. Or if you happen to be of a certain bent, you could always try a long, drowsy lunch of Vicodin, jellied consommé and Welsh rarebit, followed by a desert-dry Gibson and a long nap — an experiment in what one friend of mine calls gout-stool cuisine.
Andrew Zimmern, television host, author
Jonathan Gold defined our food world in many ways. He was an explorer, an advocate, a mentor for individuals communities and cultures. He turned phrases and put forth ideas that changed the way the rest of us considered the cultural value of eating. His impact on dining in America is beyond measure. Personally I lost a lighthouse. Gold’s earliest work, before he won the Pulitzer and went on everyone’s radar helped me sharpen my own viewpoints and inspired me to trust my gut, eventually affecting all the work I do today. We swim in food, food is life, and it’s a cultural barometer without peer. One of my favorite quotes is one that parallels my thinking and experience.
I think the point of obsession with food means we’re healthy as a species. When we’re hungry, everything tastes good, hunger is the best spice. When you’re in a area that has few resources, you work incredibly hard to have something. And then you make the something taste good. The greatest food in the world comes from the inventiveness of great privation. What emerges is all the miraculous fermentations and all the strong flavors. You put it together in the right way, it’s delicious. That defines survival, and our human species.
Willy Blackmore, editor at Popula
From 2009’s “Moles La Tia: Beyond the Magnificent Seven,” in LA Weekly: Still, I always end up with the quail in the traditional black mole, so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it, spicy as a novela and bitter as tears, a mole whose aftertaste can go on for hours. La Tía’s mole negro appears so glossy and rich that I am always tempted to test its consistency by stabbing an index finger into it, and the resulting stain lingers as long as the empurpled digits of patriotic Iraqi voters. The last time I was as inspired by glossy black, it was part of Charles Ray’s infamous sculpture Ink Box, and it was enshrined in a major museum of art.
I remember reading his review of Moles La Tia for the first time and having a kind of run, don’t walk feeling. There’s a sense of immediacy and almost urgency to the writing — like you (and it’s always you with Gold) simply have to eat this right now. That kind of earnest enthusiasm that came through in his raves always had me making dinner plans.
Jordana Rothman, food editor, Food & Wine
The first of the few times I met Jonathan Gold was in the backyard of Ivan Orkin’s ramen-ya on New York’s Lower East Side. Over the past few days I have been comforted to hear from friends and colleagues with similar stories: Encountering Jonathan Gold could be a stupefying experience, not only because he was a legend but also because, after all of our awkward bumbling, he’d always turn out to be so… gentle. Later, for the Los Angeles Times, he’d write about the evening at Ivan Ramen:
The taste, the crunch, and the purpose of the dish was very much that of a splendidly greasy okonomiyaki, and in fact it was called Lancaster Okonomiyaki on the menu, honoring both the Pennsylvania Amish birthplace of scrapple and the name of the Japanese snack it was meant to evoke. (I admire his restraint in not naming his creation Scraffles, Scrokonomiyaki, or Wapples, although admittedly all of those sound more like exotic skin ailments than they do like food.) It was a good dish.
This of course is many paces from the gorgeous prose and seeker sensibility that earned Gold a Pulitzer, that made him every food writer’s hero (and also, frankly, made the rest of us feel featherweight in comparison.) In his work, Jonathan Gold could rally cry, could daydream, could lob, could pierce. You might tap along while reading, as though it wasn’t a restaurant review but the lyrics to a song, sometimes Cab Calloway sometimes N.W.A.
But I love this one for its simple admiration, the way it shakes the hauteur out of food writing. Only Jonathan Gold could call something a “good dish” and have that be exactly right. Perfectly enough.
Corby Kummer, senior editor, the Atlantic
From 2006’s “Home of the Porno Burrito,” in LA Weekly: I was tipped off to El Atacor #11 by an unsigned e-mail a couple of months ago, a message instructing me to Google the phrase “porno burrito.” I did. A healthy percentage of the results pointed toward the restaurant. The potato taco may be El Atacor’s enduring glory, but its fame in the online world comes mostly from its Super Burrito, a foil-wrapped construction the size and girth of your forearm, which drapes over a paper plate like a giant, oozing sea cucumber or, perhaps more to the point, like an appendage of John Holmes. It is impossible to look at a Super Burrito without marveling at the flaccid, masculine mass of the thing. It is probably even harder to bite into it without laughing.
Jonathan Gold’s voice was like no other food writer: witty, rhythmic, erudite, slightly formal because he liked it that way and it let him make fun of himself. It’s worth subscribing to the Los Angeles Times to get access to more than ten. The Pulitzer Prize page devoted to his award gives a heaping helping of the pieces that won him the first Pulitzer awarded to a food writer, with the bonus of loading ten pieces with one click. A full and wonderful trove of his Counter Intelligence columns for LA Weekly were collected in a book I’m ordering another copy of before they sell out.
Joshua Gee, editor of Snack Cart
It’s cliched to say that a writer changed my life. But Gold wrote a specific essay that changed the actual course of my life. In early 2012, I had just gotten out of a bad relationship, and left an apartment we shared in Boston. Friends in both New York and Los Angeles were lobbying me to move to their respective cities. A member of the LA contingent sent me Gold’s essay on the anniversary of the LA riots. It blew my mind:
It’s one thing to decide whether you feel like burgers or pizza for dinner; another to choose between bangus, empek-empek, or brains masala. It was hard to tell whether the most exotic of the restaurants was the place that advertised “Fil-Italian cuisine — stranger than fiction!” or the hot-dog stand specializing in a kind of red-hot previously unobtainable outside of Rochester, N.Y.
Before the riots, Los Angeles had been notorious in some circles as a kind of multicultural nightmare, a fever-swamp of global capitalism on a path to becoming the city portrayed in “Blade Runner.” An entire school of urbanism, sometimes called the “L.A. School,” had emerged to study our sunny dystopia.
But change in Los Angeles is often easier to track by looking at its restaurants rather than its boardrooms, and from the business end of a pair of chopsticks, extreme diversity didn’t look so bad. Sometimes equality, democracy and tolerance are virtues you fight for on distant battlefields, and sometimes they are as close as the frozen-food aisle at Vons.
I didn’t know who Gold was, but the essay made me ache to be the kind of person he was writing for. It hinted at the vast culinary and cultural landscape of Los Angeles. It showed me all I still had to learn about food. That essay brought me to Los Angeles. When it was time to leave, I started Snack Cart partly to force myself to keep up with Gold’s weekly reviews. Reading restaurant reviews from around the country, I came to realize how different Gold was from the rest. Most critics tell us where to eat. Jonathan Gold told us who we are.
Bill Addison, Eater’s national critic
On Wednesdays in 2006 I would fire up my desktop computer at the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked as a food critic under Michael Bauer, and start my morning with a ritual: reading the latest Jonathan Gold review that had gone live on LA Weekly’s site. The review that ran the first week in December that year was called “Flesh and Bone”; it was a review of Wolfgang Puck’s new Beverly Hills steakhouse called Cut. The lede left me short of breath:
A whole fillet of Japanese beef, as wrapped in ninja-black cloth and carried around by the beef sommelier at Wolfgang Puck’s steak house Cut, is as ghostly white as an alabaster slab, like steak as seen in a photographic negative, like something Francis Bacon might have carved out of soft stone. Cooked, a single mouthful of Japanese rib eye from Kyushu pumps out flavor after flavor after flavor, every possible sensation of smoke and char and tang and animal you can imagine until your teeth have extracted all the juices. If you happen to be at Cut, and you happen to have in front of you what would ordinarily be a perfectly splendid corn-fed Nebraska strip steak, aged 35 days, seared at 1,200 degrees, then finished over oak to a ruddy, juicy medium rare — or even an example of American wagyu rib eye — you would take one bite of your neighbor’s Japanese Kobe steak, cooked the same way, and look around for rocks to throw at your own hunk of meat.
I wasn’t at all surprised when he won the Pulitzer the following year, and that the Cut review was among the submissions for the prize. But on first reading, on that mild San Francisco morning back in December 2006, I just remember the excellence he inspired coursing through me like benign lightning: “Do better, Bill. Every week, do better.”
Gold became America’s defining food critic by reminding us each week to broaden our own definitions of community. He built his reputation by lovingly detailing the cuisines of the world, often served at mom-and-pops housed in strip malls scattered around the Los Angeles metro area. But the review of Cut reminded me that his poetic mind, saturated in all the artistic disciplines, could yield wonder describing restaurants of any genre.