Jonathan Gold

Restaurant critic who was relentless in his search for the novel

Jonathan Gold, the American restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself, died on Saturday in an LA hospital. He was 57. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.

In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, sootcaked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlours, Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered Frenchleaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and woodpanelled Hollywood grills with chicken pot pie and martinis on every other table.

Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical magnifying glass. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.

“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “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.”

Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them.

He became the subject of a documentary called City of Gold, a feature imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of 99 Essential LA Restaurants was declaimed over the beat of Jay-z’s 99 Problems, and a verb.

He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pick-up truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.

If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.

“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”

Jonathan Gold was born on 28 July 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he grew up. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. His father, Irwin, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. He spent much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of New Wave pop music, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.

With cello proficiency in his favour, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold.

Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, while he was still in college and was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. In 1986, Gold started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighbourhoods of immigrants.

At LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again. She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon. PETE WELLS