Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Jonathan Gold, Restaurant Critic Who Showcased L.A. Neighborhoods, Dies At 57

(JTA) — Jonathan Gold, a restaurant critic who said his goal in reviewing both taco stands and fancy French restaurants was to make people less afraid of their neighbors and to visit the entire city, has died.

Gold, who was the first restaurant critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, died Saturday at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Los Angeles, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier in the month. He was 57.

Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2007 while writing for L.A. Weekly.  The judges praised his “zestful, wide-ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater.” He was a finalist for the prize again in 2011.

He also won several James Beard Foundation journalism awards during his career, including the M.F.K. Fisher prize for distinguished writing in 2011 and the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award, which he received in May.

Gold was known for reviewing small, ethnic restaurants and even food trucks located throughout the city with as much zest as expensive haute cuisine restaurants. He published more than 1,000 reviews from the 1980s until his death.

“He wasn’t looking down his nose at the world, he was looking out from the table and trying to put restaurants, meals, and cuisines in context. Empathy, understanding, commensality: That’s what he brought to the game. Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews, he wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too,” Peter Meehan, a family friend and former editor of the now-defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, told the New York Times.

Gold’s work and his view of his beloved Los Angeles are featured in the 2015 documentary “City of Gold,” directed by Laura Gabbert.

Following his Pulitzer win, he stopped going incognito to restaurants, since his image was wide-spread and became well-known.

Most of Gold’s reviews appeared in two newspapers – L.A. Weekly and The Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012.  He started at L.A. Weekly in 1982 as a proofreader while working on a degree in art and music at UCLA, and soon after became its music editor. In 1986 he began a column in which he explored Los Angeles’ ethnic neighborhoods, moving the column to the Los Angeles Times from 1990 to 1996. He moved to New York in 1999 to become the New York City restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine, but returned to L.A. in 2001. He returned to the L.A. Weekly for a decade and then returned to the Times.

Gold was born and raised in South Los Angeles.  His mother, Judith, was a teacher and school librarian who converted to Judaism and his father, Irwin, was a Jewish Los Angeles probation officer.  He played the cello from childhood, and pursued a degree in music history at UCLA. He briefly led a new wave rock band called Overman.

He is survived by his wife, Los Angeles Times Arts and Entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa, and two children.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.