By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Marcus Vanderberg on FishbowlLA, November 2011
In early November 2011, FishbowlLA covered the release of Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential Restaurants” list for 2011 — the LA Weekly’s annual flagship dining guide from the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic. The question Gold posed that year was deceptively simple: “what is an essential Los Angeles restaurant?”
Then
The “99 Essential Restaurants” list was one of Jonathan Gold’s signature annual projects at the LA Weekly — a curatorial statement rather than a conventional ranking.
That framing was the substance of Gold’s broader food-criticism contribution: his career-defining argument was that the truest picture of LA emerged through its food, and specifically through its immigrant-owned, deeply local restaurants as much as through its destination fine-dining rooms.
Now
Jonathan Gold returned to the LA Times in 2012, the year after this particular list. He continued producing the list until his death in July 2018 at 57 from pancreatic cancer. The 2015 documentary City of Gold substantially captured his food-criticism-as-LA-exploration register.
The “essential restaurants” annual-list format has continued at the LA Times after Gold’s death, including the 101 Best Restaurants franchise.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of Gold-era LA food culture — captured in his final full year at the LA Weekly.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.