San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
APPRECIATION
THE GREATNESS OF JONATHAN GOLD.
My story is typical. When I moved to Los Angeles, Jonathan Gold taught me about the city — certainly more than “The Day of the Locust” or “If He Hollers Let Him Go” or Raymond Chandler or Mike Davis or Joan Didion — or any of the wonderful and awful movies I’d seen. From San Gabriel Valley Chinese to tacos in Bell Gardens to Compton barbecue, I mapped Los Angeles through eating.
Los Angeles wasn’t like San Francisco, which felt like a little fenced-off jewel box with much less left to discover. Frontier-less, Los Angeles was segmented by ethnic enclaves with semiporous borders. Whether Armenian or Thai, entire communities could subsist on themselves. Koreatown restaurants specializing in one dish survived on the essential and special nature of that import. Arriving in Los Angeles, I had never eaten duck breast barbecue with fatbathed purple rice. Or cumin-blasted lamb skewers at a Korean-owned restaurant dedicated to Beijing-style Xinxiang fare. Or hagfish. Those are all foods I ate because Jonathan Gold, who died July 21 at 57, told me to. They, not sunshine, are what, on occasion, still pull me back to Southern California. I ate them because Gold had provided his beautifully written stamp of approval, but also because he had provided the passport. He’d found them. It was less about his good review than the review’s existence. Gold, who passed away over the weekend, had far too generous an authorial persona to uncover a tiny stand in South L.A. and grouse about the service like a Yelp troll.
When I interviewed Jonathan Gold at a Korean restaurant six years ago, he let loose a long, melancholy sigh about 20 minutes into the meal:
“You know, I eat a lot of bad food.”
Championing the unfussy and unknown required eating over a dozen meals out a week. Gold was a bit of a guinea pig, taking more than one for the team, eating five lifeless tacos for every transcendent specimen.
In his 1939 novel “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West characterized Los Angeles as a “dream dump,” a junkyard where people, once seduced by mythologies, lay their fantasies and hopes to restless slumber. The product of a vision, every restaurant is a small dream that offers substance, unlike the ephemeral Los Angeles of myth. Gold’s writing made seeing the real Los Angeles an imperative. And there is nothing more real, really, than a strip mall storefront that serves goat stew for 24 hours a day to people who want nothing more than goat stew. And unlike the settings of dreams, a great little restaurant in the middle of anywhere is often, sometimes miraculously, still standing when one returns to the hazy scene. This was especially true after Gold wrote about one.
He made dreams come true. Along with bringing diners (especially new arrivals like me) to magical eating experiences they’d otherwise only imagine, he made sleepy restaurants popular overnight, giving families a shot at success, identifying and trumpeting unknown culinary voices, cementing through his attention the value and specialness of food, and therefore people.
In our interview, he mentioned having closed more than a few high-end restaurants — not with any delight, but with no regret either, particularly when a place was, in his mind, simply “stupid”: pretentious, experimental though not innovative (or, most importantly, even tasty). In our talk, he explained the challenge of telling readers that, essentially, they should like something they probably wouldn’t. This was his work, too: over decades, bending tastes to accommodate culturally unfamiliar flavors as opposed to just highlighting those that immediately translated. He was less a critic in these moments than a teacher — amplifying, connecting, explaining, shaping.
His voice was authoritative, not authoritarian, although the second-person perspective of many reviews bears the whiff of a strongman who’s earned his reputation: You will want. You will have. He did that in person too, ordering for us both, explaining at length, for instance, how the Korean restaurant’s interpretation of yukhoe was particularly refined. In writing, and in person, he came across like a wise uncle, not a know-it-all jerk.
I contributed to L.A. Weekly while he was its critic, but we weren't friends. After our dinner together, I very occasionally got in touch with a question. He always messaged back, whether I wanted a quote or a recommendation. After the interview in the Believer magazine came out, my mother, a former newspaper editor, mentioned that he seemed like “a little bit of an —hole.”
If so, the best kind, I thought. He was, after all, brusque at first, barreling into the restaurant and grunting at me. An hour later though, he was colorfully comparing sea worms to uncircumcised penises, recalling the absurdity of wrangling an interview with Axl Rose in the early ’90s, and laughing — a lot.
The best part of the interview (which I left out of the final piece) was when he told me to trash him.
“It’s fair, it’s fair,” he groaned, his forehead in his hands, the iconic red hair slipping out from between his fingers like liquid.
The host had obviously recognized him and, for the duration of our meal, food he had not ordered kept appearing. Gold wasn’t writing about the place yet, but he knew that his celebrity status and distinct appearance did not suit a necessarily anonymous reviewer. And here was the evidence: plates shingling the table, servers beaming as they tiptoed past. I was trying to explain that it was fine, that I wasn’t writing that kind of piece, when the owner came out bearing copies of a newly translated cookbook dedicated to Korean royal cuisine.
Gold was warm and decent. After refusing the gift politely, he finally insisted on paying for one. His new cookbook tucked under an arm, he glanced at me from across the table and pointed emphatically at its spine. He looked up at the owner and then back at me, a resigned smile starting to stretch across his face.
“You want one, too,” he said instead of asking.