Jonathan Gold

Who is Jonathan Gold?

Jonathan Gold is a food critic who currently writes for the Los Angeles Times and has previously written for LA Weekly and Gourmet. In 2007 he became the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. He is also a regular on KCRW's Good Food radio program.

Gold often chooses small, ethnic restaurants for his reviews, although he covers all types of cuisine. His articles have been collected in the book, Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles.

Gold started out at the LA Weekly in 1982 as a proofreader while he was studying art and music at UCLA, and by the mid-1980s became one of the paper’s most popular writers. He was music editor for the Weekly in the 1980s, and held a number of other positions with the paper. With the encouragement of Weekly founder Jay Levin, he started his Counter Intelligence column in 1986 as a way of exploring Los Angeles’ ethnic neighborhoods, places that often go underreported in other papers. He took the column to the Los Angeles Times from 1990 to 1996, while also writing reviews of high-end places for California and Los Angeles magazines, as well as music stories for Blender, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Details.