![]() Like Anthony Bourdain, he turned the world's attention away from the Michelin-starred, white-table-clothed, high-end gastronomy that otherwise occupies the gaze of the critic. His writing may have revolutionised the dining world of Los Angeles, but his legacy was much larger and more generous. Not for nothing was Gold dubbed "the bard of the taco truck". "Or is it the lashings of cumin in the meat's marinade, the careful grilling and the elegant green salsa that has a family resemblance to a hotly spiced Punjabi chutney?" "Does the stand's precariousness, the fact that its lights are powered through cables attached to the battery of a constantly running old car, and the surreptitious nature of the transaction flavour the experience? "Does it matter that my favourite stand, set up most evenings in front of an auto body shop, has no name, no license, and may not be there tomorrow or next week? "Pico is home to Valentino, which specializes in preparing customized Italian food for millionaires, and to Oaxacan restaurants so redolent of the developing world that you half expect to see starved chickens scratching around on the floor."įrom Mexican food trucks to the city's best dim sum, strip-mall Szechuan noodles to family-run cevicherias, Gold uncovered the communities, economies, and food traditions that beat at the heart of the city.īen Birchall, one half of the podcast, Ingredipedia, speaking about Gold's legacy for ABC RN's Blueprint for Living, said:Ī Yelp review might point you in the direction of a city's best food trucks, but what it can't do is describe the experience, the feeling of a place, the cumulative effect of the smallest details, with the attention and eloquence Jonathan Gold brought to the task. Gold's culinary curiosity turned him into a kind of social geographer, and produced thrilling accounts of the ways in which communities, traditions and immigrants pushed and pulled against the city: "Precisely because Pico is so unremarked, because it is left alone like old lawn furniture mouldering away in the side yard of a suburban house, it is at the centre of entry-level capitalism in central Los Angeles, and one of the most vital food streets in the world." Reflecting on his ambitious and now famous quest to eat at every restaurant on LA's Pico Boulevard, Gold wrote: ( Supplied: Los Angeles Times/Getty Images) Jonathan Gold (left) resolved to eat at least once in his lifetime at every joint on Los Angeles' Pico Boulevard. ![]() Gold told the story of Los Angeles through its food and, like Bourdain, he showed his audience the intricate ways in which the food locals cooked and ate was deeply woven into the fabric of urban life. Writing about food was about more than simply finding the hippest restaurant, the hottest chef, the perfect quenelle or the finest julienned carrot.įor Gold, the role of a writer was to show the audience a different world, and the role of a food writer was to say something about the world in which food was produced. ![]() If, as Gold wrote, Bourdain "elevated the rough humanity of the kitchen", Gold revealed to us the richness it could produce.įor close to four decades Jonathan Gold chronicled the life of a city. The death on July 21 of Jonathan Gold has left those "fringes" a little more bereft. When Anthony Bourdain died in June, the Los Angeles Times food critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Gold wrote a moving obituary: the food world, he said, was now left with a "gaping Bourdain-shaped hole - not at its centre but on its fringes".
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