ZCZC
BFF-35
US-MEDIA-FOOD-CRITIC-GOLD,OBIT
Prize-winning Los Angeles food critic Gold dead at 57
LOS ANGELES, July 22, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Jonathan Gold, the Los Angeles
restaurant critic whose reviews of the city’s neighborhood eateries became a
window into its soul, died Saturday aged 57, his newspaper reported.
The only food critic to win journalism’s most prestigious prize, the
Pulitzer, Gold succumbed in hospital to pancreatic cancer which had been
diagnosed in early July, the Los Angeles Times quoted his wife Laurie Ochoa
as saying.
“He was the soul of this city and all of its amazing flavors,” Los Angeles
Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote on Twitter.
“There will never be another like him,” the mayor said.
The long-haired, mustachioed and somewhat heavy-set Gold toured his native
city in an old pickup truck sampling everything from tacos to Thai food.
He was “drawn more to hole-in-the-wall joints, street food, mom-and-pop
shops and ethnic restaurants than he was to haute cuisine,” and his reviews
were predominantly positive, the Times wrote in its obituary. “Gold pioneered
a different approach to food criticism.”
In 2007, Pulitzer judges said his reviews for the LA Weekly expressed “the
delight of an erudite eater,” and awarded him the prize for criticism.
Gold was the subject of the 2015 documentary “City of Gold.”
“The thing that people find hard to understand is the huge number of
cultures that live in the city and come together in this beautiful, haphazard
fashion,” he said in the film.
BSS/AFP/SSS/1606 hrs