Fanfare for the 213 man
Jonathan Gold died last week.
I never met him, but I knew a few of his L.A. Weekly colleagues in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He was a music critic back then, one who specialized in classical music, heavy metal and later hip-hop. And he was one of the reasons that for a few years L.A.
Weekly was a publication I read cover to cover.
I didn’t become aware of his food and restaurant writing until after he won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 2007. After that, he moved on to the Los Angeles Times, where he became part of one of the greatest arrays of cultural critics ever to work for a newspaper outside New York City. In addition to Gold, the Times had Dan Neil, who won the Pulitzer in 2004, writing about automotive culture; book critic David Ulin, film critics Kenneth Turan and Carina Chocano, music critics Ann Powers and Robert Hilburn, and a few others I feel bad about leaving out.
Gold was the first restaurant critic to win a Pulitzer.
A marvelous little documentary about him called City of Gold was released in 2015. I reviewed that movie, and Dan Lybarger, a freelance critic who often contributes to our Friday Style section, interviewed Gold for us. When he heard about Gold’s death Dan sent me the raw audio of that conversation, and I posted it on my blood, dirt & angels blog. (You can hear it at tinyurl.com/yd9u79no.)
To be honest, I didn’t regularly seek out Gold’s restaurant writing; like most people, I’m not all that interested in reading reviews of restaurants I probably won’t have occasion to visit. But I read enough of them to understand that food wasn’t really his subject, that like any good critic his criticism was much broader and deeper. A review is an excuse to comment on the human condition. Good critics write about their subject in the context of a wider world.
Gold’s real subject was his city and his people.
Early on in his conversation with Lybarger, Gold apologizes for conducting the interview from a San Francisco hotel room—referring to one of Los Angeles’ area codes, he says he’s “definitely a ‘213’ man.” And 213 isn’t just a Los Angeles area code. it’s a deep Los Angeles area code. It doesn’t encompass Santa Monica or Beverly Hills or West Hollywood. It’s a grittier territory. East Los Angeles is in 213. So is downtown, Chinatown and Koreatown. So is Hollywood, which isn’t as glizy as its publicists would have you believe. Area code 213 is mostly composed of places where real people live.
It would not have been lost on Gold that when Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and Nate Dogg teamed up to form a hip-hop supergroup, they called it
213, which was the area code for their hometown of Long Beach until 1991. (Ironically 213, which once covered the southern third of the state from the central coast to the Mexican border, has become one of the smallest in the country in terms of geographical terms.) The Los Angeles Clippers mascot, Chuck the Condor, wears 213 as his jersey number.
While he wrote well about fine dining, Gold’s Los Angeles was a city of taco trucks, pho stands, cheap joints, and mom-and-pop holes in the wall. Gold honed in on the everyday pleasures available in living, working the rich veins of food and culture by seeking out authentic culinary experiences in the places that never make tourist guidebooks. And through these experiences, he got at larger socioeconomic issues—race and class tensions impinging on the immigrant dream.
Like any good critic, he looked for fresh avenues of delight. He had a gift of making himself susceptible to the unlikely connection, of finding the sublime in what presented as mundane. And he also lost friends over harsh reviews—holding people who knew better to high standards.
If you are in my business, people like Gold ought to inspire you. He was one of those rare critics who wrote best when he was expressing enthusiasm. A rave is difficult to write on a number of counts, one of which is that it requires the critic to reveal a certain vulnerability, a capacity for surprise. It’s easier to assume a position of reflexive condescension than to admit wonder.
Every city could use a writer like Gold, though perhaps not every city deserves one. My own feelings about Los Angeles are mixed—I have spent a lot of time there yet never genuinely felt comfortable. To me, it feels like our most provisional great city, a temporary and artificially sustained colony in the desert. Coyotes still patrol its interior streets; if the Pacific Ocean doesn’t eventually claim the place, they probably will.
But Gold loved the guts and offal of L.A., he found something like a soul down in its interior. He was a masterful writer, discursive and smart and forever ready to subvert the expectations of his readers. He wasn’t about the food, the glutamate kick of umami, he was more interested in having “people be less afraid of their neighbors.” He was more interested in engaging empathy than educating palates, but he understood one way to understand neighbors is to eat what they eat, in their company.
Frequently he wrote in the second person, sitting his readers at the tables he described. He dropped references, from classical literature to heavy metal music to Jean-Antoine Watteau, and he didn’t think he had to explain them to you because you are after all a smart person.
He played the cello, but his aesthetic was punk. Spirit trumps technique; experience trumps scholarship. Life is to be lived.
I never met Jonathan Gold. I wish I had.