[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]s heaven a San Gabriel Valley strip mall? Jonathan Gold might’ve volunteered that it is. Jonathan logged a significant percentage of his annual mileage exploring the boulevards and avenues of the San Gabriel Valley, and some of his most wonderful writing came about as he championed the area’s enormously diverse restaurants.
It was apparent in his reviews how much respect he had for these places, a respect rare in mainstream media back when he first started writing about food and not quite as common as we’d like to see in today’s major publications. He obsessed over soup dumplings; he admired a proper pho broth. The skill required to shave a bowlful of noodles from a clump of raw dough, or to roll a proper beef roll, did not escape his attention. And maybe most importantly, Jonathan was pretty damn funny, so if there was a restaurant with a dumpling the size of softball, you could count on him to have a field day with it.
Kindly, of course: Jonathan was the sort of critic aware enough of his privilege to know that whether a joke uplifts or cuts often depends on who’s delivering the punch-line.
The number of reviews Jonathan filed restaurants over his career is staggering; if you organized them all into an anthology, you’d well have a recent history of the region. Here are a few choice quotes — or excerpts, rather, because it’s near impossible to pull a Jonathan quote without pulling in everything else around it — from a few of his jaunts to the SGV.