The Legacy of Jonathan Gold

He left us way too early. He proved how powerful food criticism can be. It's been 7 years and his voice is still with us. A dish he would have liked - and a book he would have loved.

I spent the last week at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, a rather magical event that has, for the past thirty years, brought groups of writers together for a few halcyon days of lectures. This year’s group included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Colum McCann, Carl Hiaasen, Ocean Vuong, Safiya Sinclair, Max Boot - to name just a few. I was honored to be included, loved every minute I spent there, and urge you to go on line and watch the talks (they were all recorded).

A summer week in a beautiful landscape with stimulating people made me recall another extraordinary gathering I attended almost exactly seven years ago. I’d flown to Italy for a conference of the Basque Culinary Institute, and my friends Nancy Silverton and her partner Michael Krikorian volunteered to pick me up at the airport in Bologna. As we got in the car I noticed that they were strangely subdued. “We’re taking you to Osteria Bottega," they said, “Jonathan says its his favorite restaurant in Bologna."

It was a hot night, and inside the restaurant it felt like a thousand degrees. Or did it only seem hot because as plates of fat, floppy tortelloni in sage and butter arrived Nancy said somberly "We have to tell you something.” While I was in the air our friend Jonathan Gold had been admitted to the hospital, and things did not look good.

It was wonderful food, extraordinary food, but like everything I ate that week it tasted mostly of the past. Every bite reminded me of some dish I'd eaten somewhere with Jonathan.

August 6, 2018
We didn't sleep.  We couldn't.  We sat up, Nancy, Michael and I, drinking wine, worrying about Laurie and the kids until the sun came up.  Jonathan was gone, and it was hard to be half a world away.

And I still had the Basque Culinary World Prize ahead of me.

Michael, very kindly, offered to drive me from Panicale to Modena.  It was a long drive. Passing Florence we knew the smart thing would be stop for something to eat, but we weren’t hungry. A couple hours later hunger hit and we pulled off in the little town of  Sasso Marconi feeling rather foolish: Jonathan would have had a plan, known exactly where to go - even if it meant a three hour detour along a goat path.

The streets were empty.  Not a soul stirred, nor a breath of wind.  And so we went into the first restaurant we found.  To our astonishment the place was packed, alive with life, with noise, with music. The whole town was there, sharing food, indulging in a long leisurely Sunday lunch.

Let me just say that this was instant proof  that every restaurant in Italy does not serve great food.  Jonathan would have been amused to see me scoop everything into my (now soggy) purse and run outside to feed it to a passing dog. We drove on to Modena.

The opening party for the event was at Hombre Parmesan - which not only makes extraordinarily fine organic cheese, but also houses an astonishing collection of vintage automobiles.   This Mazzerati from the fifties is sometimes called the most beautiful car ever made. 

The food was fantastic. Huge shards of that fine parmesan splashed with Massimo Bottura's private balsamic vinegar (you can see how thick it has become with age).  Gnocco fritto cooked in great vats of lard, snatched from the cauldron and  topped with prosciutto whose lacy fat began to slowly melt. Freshly made, still-warm ricotta.  There was more - so much more - but I couldn't stop eating those crisp, salty, warm gnocco fritti.

Still couldn't sleep.  Tossed and turned all night, wishing I were in Los Angeles.  Spent the next day deliberating over the prize at the gorgeous Casa Maria Luigia, which Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore are soon to open.

The Basque Culinary World Prize is dedicated to the notion of gastronomy as a transformative force. I wanted to award the prize to every one of the impressive chefs who are dedicated to feeding immigrants, eliminating waste, inventing new ways to feed the ill, and supporting indigenous populations.  In the end the 100,000 euro prize went to Jock Zonfrillo, who is doing extraordinary work with the native foods of Australia.

Lunch and dinner were both provided by Osteria Francescana. For a few highlights read this.

The following day was dedicated to a conference called "Transforming Society Through Gastronomy," a series of fascinating talks by a group of diverse people. The artist JR, talked about the table he set up on the US/Mexico border

The next talk was by the always erudite historian Bee Wilson, then chef Andoni Luiz Aduriz took us on a stroll through history and filmmaker David Gelb talked about his series, Chef's Table.  My subject was meant to be "an edible truth" but when I stood up to speak, all I could think about was Jonathan.

I had a different speech written for today. I was going to talk about what is, in my opinion, the gravest danger facing food journalists today: the danger of telling the wrong stories. I was going to talk about how much we’ve muddied the waters by relating what seem like truths, only to find out a few years down the road that they were the wrong truths. That we’d been misled by science, by politics, by marketing. And that in the face of all the serious problems today, we have, perhaps, so confused the public that they’re no longer listening to us.

As someone who’s been writing about food for fifty years, I spend a lot of time worrying that we haven’t done a very good job. We in the food press have confused the public by printing constantly contradictory stories. One year butter is bad for you and everyone stops eating it. Then it turns out margarine’s even worse. Eggs are a culprit. No, they aren’t. Gluten is terrible! Well, maybe not so much. Salt, salt is the problem. Well, no only ten percent of the public is salt sensitive. Saturated fat will kill you. Oh no, maybe it won’t. Sugar is a killer… After a while people just stop listening.

As writers like Marion Nestle have conclusively proved, we’ve been dreadfully manipulated by Big Food, who have not only paid researchers to do spurious studies, but also targeted scientists and investigative writers in an attempt to make sure that no bad news that might compromise their business ever leaks out.

I was going to say that in these times, more than ever, people need real news, news they can use to fix our broken food system. I think we can all agree that there has never been a time in human history when we were in so much need of the facts each time we sit down to eat. We all keep asking the question _ what should we eat? Never have the answers been so confusing.

You all know the problems. They’re the ones many of the candidates for the Basque World Prize are trying to solve: food waste, food distribution, hunger, poverty, obesity, the devastation of the oceans, carbon dioxide in the air, water, climate change, overuse of antibiotics. Our food is being threatened from everywhere.

But I landed in Italy Thursday night to such terrible news that I just can’t give that speech right now. I got off the plane to learn that my longtime colleague and friend, Jonathan Gold, was dying. That I’d never see him again. And so for the past few days I haven’t been able to think about anything but Jonathan. Which is probably appropriate to this conference. Because the mission of the Basque Culinary World Prize is to use gastronomy as an engine for change – and I don’t think anyone has ever done that better than Jonathan. And, over the past few days, as I’ve watched the extraordinary outpouring of grief and love, I’ve been struck by how much has changed. Jonathan’s death was on the front page not only of the Los Angeles Times, but also of the NY Times, a paper he never wrote a single word for. And that is proof of how much food now matters to people – and what a huge opportunity it offers all of us.

Long before Tony Bourdain stepped out of the kitchen and onto the television screen, at a time when nobody in America – and few people in the world -understood the power of food, Jonathan got it. As far back as the early eighties he was using restaurant criticism as a way to talk about much more than where you should eat. He understood, long before anyone was talking about it – and certainly before anyone was writing about it – the many ways that food creates community. Jonathan was a true visionary, a person who defined in his very being, edible truth.

In his hometown, Los Angeles, Jonathan is revered as the person who literally put their food on the map. In fact the documentary about him is called City of Gold a play on words that implies that he made the city. And in some sense, he did.

Los Angeles is a confusing place, a huge sprawl divided into ethnic enclaves. A Thai chef told me, in the early 80s, that he could live his whole life in LA without learning English because he could so easily stay inside his community and do everything he needed to in his own language. It is precisely that insular quality that makes LA restaurants so remarkable; chefs were cooking for their own people, and they had no need to water it down. What Jonathan did was mix it up, lure his readers out of their safe little territories. He had a message: Try other people's foods and maybe you'll discover not only that you like what they eat – but also that you like them. He wanted to make them curious about their neighbors – and he instinctively knew that there was no better way to do that than through their food. As one young woman – not a food person, simply a person who likes to eat – wrote me this morning “Wherever he is now, I know that if I ever end up there he’ll be the first person I ask to show me around, right after I thank him for teaching me how to live in this city I call home.”

And that is the JG effect: through Jonathan people discovered a formerly hidden city. And because of that, the city changed. In the world that Jonathan made, Los Angeles was a small town. As one chef wrote to me yesterday, “He treated us and our food with respect and love. And saw us as equals. Our food trucks, our holes in the walls, Mom and Pops – that was the true identity of Los Angeles. He saw it, he loved it, and he wanted us to succeed. He believed in us when many did not.”

Jonathan didn’t start out as a food critic. Before he wrote about food, he wrote about music. This is how I have described our meeting in my upcoming book.

“In the early eighties, when I became the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times, I kept running into the same young couple when I went out to eat. Did they, I wondered, spend all their time in restaurants? You couldn’t miss them; they were extremely conspicuous in the small Asian and Mexican restaurants they seemed to favor.

He was pale and puffy with long, thinning hair, and the mushroom complexion of someone who rarely sees the sun. She was tall, with golden skin, wild black hair and a lean body that seemed to be all legs. No matter the weather he wore a scuffed black motorcycle jacket, while she favored bright prints in clashing colors.

For months we pointedly ignored each other. Then a waiter in some tiny Koreatown restaurant specializing in tofu insisted we share a table. We were the only non-Asian patrons in the place, and the man refused to take no for an answer.

Slowly, reluctantly, we began to talk. Jonathan Gold turned out to be the music critic of the city’s alternative paper, The Weekly, but there seemed to be no subject on which he lacked an opinion.

He was a classical cellist and rap music aficionado who was close to people with names like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. (They called him Nervous Cuz.) He also claimed to have eaten in every taco stand in the city. I found this hard to believe but it turned out to be true. Jonathan also knew a stunning amount about Thai and Korean food, and he could go on for hours about the distinctions between the foods of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. I found him slightly pompous, irritating, and utterly fascinating. I was pretty sure he felt the same way about me - minus the fascinating part.”

Sometime during the eighties Jonathan gave up writing about music and focused, instead on food. It wasn’t just that he loved eating out: he’d begun to understand the power of food. Yes, he could and did tell you, in excruciating detail, about the one restaurant that specialized in the food of Oaxaca, and which place in Koreatown served only Korean black goat soup. But he was different than the other people who were then writing about “ethnic” restaurants (a word that drove him crazy). And not merely because the quality of his writing was so high that someone once told me that he was “much too good to be wasted on a food critic.” And it wasn’t his enormous respect for each cuisine. What set him apart was that he never lost sight of the fact that when he was writing about food he was really writing about much more. He was writing about people.

And he passed it on. I just edited this year’s edition of Best American Food Writing. As I read through the hundreds of stories one theme kept recurring: over and over young writers began their pieces by saying, “I want to be the next Jonathan Gold.”

Reading through the entries I began to understand exactly what that meant: it meant that food writing has changed. Fifty years ago when I started my career, it was extremely polite. Not any more. The sound of modern food writing is angry, raucous and impolite. It embraces class and gender. It asks difficult questions. The new sound of food writing is muscular and passionate – and it understands its own power.

That it is intent on fomenting change is very much thanks to Jonathan. Because he not only showed us a new way of looking at food, but also proved that you don’t need television or a movie to make an impact. Every time he put pen to paper he proved the power of words.

I know there are a lot of writers in this room. And I hope you’ll all remember Jonathan’s most important legacy. What Jonathan showed us – more than anything – is what food writing can do. In the hands of a passionate, talented writer, words can become powerful weapons.

Last week I thought that what we need is more investigative writers telling us the truth. And that’s not wrong. But now I see is that sometimes the softest words make the biggest impact. Jonathan wrote about delicious dishes in far-flung neighborhoods. He did not write an overtly political word. And yet he touched millions of people and changed an entire city. Those of us who want to change the world would do well to remember that stories that seem very small can turn out to be the biggest ones of all.

Whenever I eat tacos I think of Jonathan. Here’s a recipe for a very simple but satisfying favorite.

Purslane Tacos
4 tomatillos
1 small jalapeno, sliced
1/2 small onion, coarsely chopped
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped
1 heap purslane
neutral oil
salt, pepper
queso fresco
corn tacos

Begin by making a quick green salsa. Peel the papery husk off the tomatillos, wash them, cut them into quarters and toss them into a blender with the chile, onion and garlic. Whirl them into a thin liquid.

Take a big heap of purslane, wash it well, chop it and boil it for about 10 minutes. Drain.

Slick a skillet with oil and add the salsa. Bring it to a boil, turn the heat down and add the purslane. Add salt and pepper to taste. (Diana Kennedy adds cumin as well.) Cook it down until it’s thickened.

Sprinkle some queso fresco across the top and served wrapped in warm tortillas.

When I discovered this book my first thought was how much Jonathan would have liked it.

Chinese Imperial Cuisines and Eating Secrets chronicles a cuisine that is almost unimaginably luxurious. The book not only tells you about the vast range of exotic ingredients consumed by the emperors of yore, it also tells you how to cook them.

Should you be seeking suggestions for ways to use your rhinoceros meat, this cookbook has you covered. Or perhaps you need a recipe for those camel paws you found in the supermarket the other day? This recipe calls for four.

Had a lovely dinner last night at Dell’Anima, which occupies the old Pearl Oyster Bar spot on Cornelia Street. Wonderful bone marrow and charred octopus to begin, followed by fantastic quail and really interesting variations on pasta like this orecchiette with beet puree, peas and mint.