{"id":44103,"date":"2018-07-23T21:18:54","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T03:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=44103"},"modified":"2018-07-23T21:19:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T03:19:56","slug":"op-ed-food-critic-jonathan-gold-had-the-chutzpah-to-take-immigrant-food-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/op-ed-food-critic-jonathan-gold-had-the-chutzpah-to-take-immigrant-food-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"OP-ED: Food critic Jonathan Gold had the chutzpah to take immigrant food seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"
By ROB ESHMAN<\/div>\n
\n

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Jonathan Gold was more than a food writer. Every obituary will tell you that, and so would he.<\/p>\n

\u201cFood is a way to look at the world,\u201d he told me once. \u201cI mean, everybody eats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gold, who died July 21 at the age of 57 from pancreatic cancer<\/a>, leveraged that truism into a career that not only established him as one of the great American food writers of any generation, but transformed the city whose food he ate, examined and extolled.<\/p>\n

There was Los Angeles BG and Los Angeles AG, Before and After Gold. In a city divided by freeways, class, ethnicity and soul-sucking commutes, Gold encouraged Angelenos to explore beyond their neighborhoods. His descriptions of Chinese soup dumplings, Thai boat noodles, Peruvian ceviches or South Central smokehouses drew Westsiders east and Eastsiders south. His prose knit together a city that can all too easily fray.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I\u2019m doing anything that\u2019s beyond writing about food,\u201d he said to me during an onstage Q-and-A<\/a> following a screening of the 2016 documentary about him, \u201cCity of Gold<\/a>,\u201d \u201cit\u2019s to get people in Los Angeles to be a little less afraid of their neighbors. And it\u2019s easy to live in one part of town and not really interact with other parts. There are a lot of ways to do it. But you might not go some place to see an Indian movie or a Nigerian art exhibition, but if I tell you that someone is making a bowl of noodles like you\u2019ve never had in your entire life, maybe you\u2019ll make that drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

It worked. When I asked the packed audience of 300 people who had visited a restaurant because Gold wrote about it, almost every hand went up.<\/p>\n

Many of the people whose food Gold discovered were immigrants, who so many people, including our President, are quick to demonize.<\/p>\n

In the documentary, Chinese, Thai, Latino and Ethiopian restaurant owners tell how a single Jonathan Gold review brought hordes of new customers to their restaurants and transformed their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been writing about immigrant communities for 30 years,\u201d Gold said. \u201cI like immigrants. I think we should pretty much let everybody in \u2014 well, maybe they should be able to cook. Donald Trump is a guy who eats a lot of white bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gold grew up in what he called a \u201chighly Reform\u201d L.A. Jewish household, where his father was \u201cthe most overeducated probation officer in the history of Los Angeles County.\u201d The house was filled with high culture, if not great food. The links between food, tradition and family that Gold has spent a lifetime searching out didn\u2019t exist in his childhood home.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, hell, I didn\u2019t even eat broccoli when I was in high school!\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cI mean, cauliflower was like a foreign country.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was one exception.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father definitely considered deli to be a sacrament,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At the Q-and-A, I asked Gold to name his favorite LA deli.<\/p>\n

\u201cLanger\u2019s,\u201d he said, to wild applause, naming the smoked meat temple near the corner of 7th and Alvarado<\/a>. \u201cThe pastrami sandwich \u2014 there should be a marble statue of it in the Civic Center mall.\u201d<\/p>\n

I once asked Gold why it is that so many important American food writers \u2014 A.J. Liebling, Alice B. Toklas, Ruth Reichl, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman \u2014 are Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think about food a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re a hungry people.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the American Jewish food writer Calvin Trillin who inspired Gold, a UCLA liberal arts graduate, concert cellist and punk rocker, to become a food writer.<\/p>\n

During a talk he gave at my USC course on food journalism<\/a>, I asked him what drew him to food writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could talk to a general about what\u2019s going to happen in Iraq and he\u2019ll lie to you up and down,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you ask him how he had his eggs that morning, he\u2019ll tell you the truth. It\u2019s maybe a small truth, and it maybe in the large scale of things is a less important truth, but I think that makes it something worth writing about. I think it\u2019s worth learning about it. It\u2019s something that we all have in common.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2007, Gold received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first restaurant critic to be so honored.<\/p>\n

But seven years before that, in 1999, Gold announced he was leaving Los Angeles to work in New York for Gourmet magazine. He would eventually return, but those of us who already recognized what he meant to L.A. felt the loss.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout Gold,\u201d I wrote<\/a>, \u201ca little of the stitching has gone out of the LA fabric.\u201d<\/p>\n

I see now I was wrong. Gold\u2019s legacy is secure. He left behind a city that revels in its diversity, that celebrates all flavors, that feasts together at a common table.<\/p>\n

(Rob Eshman is the former publisher and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal. He writes the blog Foodaism and teaches, \u201cMedia, Food and Culture\u201d at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. You can follow him on Twitter at @foodaism.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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