FishbowlLA

Jonathan Gold’s April 2011 Olive Garden review — how the April Fools joke produced an actual LA Weekly piece

By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, April 2011

In early April 2011, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold — then writing for the LA Weekly — found himself eating at the Arcadia Olive Garden after what had started as an April Fools joke on his photographer Anne Fishbein got out of hand. Gold had convinced Fishbein he was going to review the Italian chain restaurant; once she arrived expecting the assignment, he went through with it. The original FishbowlLA framing was warmly amused.

Then

Jonathan Gold had been one of LA’s most-cited food critics for decades by April 2011. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2007 — the first food critic to win the prize — and had been at the LA Weekly since the late 2000s after his earlier 2008 move from the LA Times. His weekly Counter Intelligence column had been one of the alt-weekly’s signature franchises; his broader cultural footprint had been substantially developed through his radio appearances on KCRW’s Good Food and his book Counter Intelligence.

The April Fools setup was characteristically Gold — known for his interest in independent, immigrant-owned, deeply local restaurants, he had occasionally surprised readers by reviewing more mainstream establishments. The Olive Garden joke had been intended as a setup for a “gotcha” reveal; instead, with Anne Fishbein already on-site at the Arcadia location, the practical joke turned into an actual review assignment.

The resulting Olive Garden piece in the LA Weekly was characteristically substantive. Gold’s review took the chain seriously enough to engage with its actual culinary execution — the rigorous Culinary Institute of Tuscany training the company touted, the operational consistency, the menu engineering — while also providing the kind of cultural-context framing that had defined his broader food-criticism register.

Pandora Young’s FishbowlLA framing was warmly amused. The piece treated the Olive Garden-review-by-accident as the kind of food-criticism episode that captured both Gold’s particular sensibility and the broader alt-weekly culture of writers-and-photographers improvising substantive work out of small editorial mishaps.

Now

Jonathan Gold returned to the LA Times in 2012 — his second stint at the paper, where he continued as restaurant critic until his death in July 2018 at 57 from pancreatic cancer. His broader cultural footprint expanded substantially across the post-2011 interval: the 2015 documentary City of Gold by Laura Gabbert captured his criticism-and-LA-exploration register at length; his obituary cycle in 2018 produced substantial subsequent retrospective coverage.

Anne Fishbein continued in photography work across the years. The collaboration with Gold across years of LA Weekly and LA Times restaurant coverage produced a substantial visual archive of LA-region restaurant work; many of the photographs accompanying Gold’s reviews have continued to be reprinted in retrospective work after his death.

Olive Garden has continued operating as one of the major American chain-Italian-restaurant operations. The 2011 Gold review remained one of the more-cited critical engagements with the chain by a major American food critic across the years that followed; the broader question of whether serious food critics should engage with chain restaurants has continued to be a recurring food-writing question.

LA Weekly went through the 2017 ownership transition and substantial editorial cuts (covered in batch 5’s Laurie Ochoa piece). The food-coverage register that Gold had embodied at the paper has been substantially reduced across the post-2017 ownership era.

The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of Gold-era alt-weekly food criticism — captured in his last full year at the LA Weekly before the 2012 return to the LA Times that would define the final phase of his career. The April Fools origin story has continued to be one of the more-repeated Jonathan Gold anecdotes in retrospective accounts of his career.

Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.

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