Well-acclaimed and beloved food critic Jonathan Gold passed away at 57 due to pancreatic cancer. Gold was just diagnosed in early July.
Gold was born and raised in Los Angeles and famously worked for the LA times. He is the first food writer to ever win the prestigious Pulitzer prize. He died at St. Vincent Medical Center.
About The Esteemed Writer
Aside from winning a Pulitzer, he also brought home numerous James Beard Foundation journalism awards including the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award, and the M.F.K. Fisher prize for distinguished writing.
LA Times honored the award-winning writer and said in a tweet that the company will miss him very much. His writing career spanned an amazing 40 years in which he published over 1,000 reviews. He wrote about the food scene in the area. Additionally, his love for hidden gems set him apart from other critics.
People in Los Angeles also immensely loved the clever writer's articles because he continuously referenced his reviews to literature, pop culture, and music. This does not come as a surprise since he studied music at UCLA.
Gold survived his wife, Laurie Ochoa, who also worked for LA Times as an arts & entertainment editor, and his two children, a 15-year-old son, and a 23-year-old daughter.
Gold was also well-known for his wisdom. Here are a few quotes by the popular food critic.
Quotes By Jonathan Gold
"Every culture is passionate about food; some are just passionate about food and the food is shitty."
"It is probably fun to write reviews on Yelp. I found a writer for the Times who does stuff for us that I like a lot because she was the good writer on Yelp in Los Angeles."
"I never want to talk to a New Englander about a Lobster roll ever again in my life. And I'd prefer not to talk to a New Yorker about pizza either."
"I have been saying no to reality TV for years. Some people even approached me about being a pitchman, which I thought was the funniest thing in the world. Can you imagine me being Guy Fieri?"
"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."
"It's complicated, but I can remember the key details of a dish that make it memorable without writing notes. There's just something about writing notes. Eating is an essential activity. You could take notes while you're fucking, too, but you'd lose the flow."
"I've cooked maybe three Indian meals in my life, but I have maybe one hundred Indian cookbooks. When I came across a restaurant in New York that had dishes from Azerbaijan, I didn't have just one Azerbaijani cookbook; I had three."
"I try to go to restaurants without people from the group I'm writing about. In other words, I have tons of Korean friends and tons of Chinese friends, but I tend to take the Chinese friends to Korean places and the Korean friends to Chinese restaurants. I think blundering through the menu is a lot of the fun."
"As a journalist, you're observing things. You're not the person who's observed. Sometimes I want to gently guide the interviewers in the direction they should be going. But I don't."
"Criticism is criticism. An aria is in some way equivalent to a well-cooked potato."
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