Coming March 10: New ‘Saturday’ section, and Jonathan Gold

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A memo from Times Editor Davan Maharaj announces the return of Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold, as well as Gold’s debut March 10 in The Times’ new Saturday section:

Please join me in welcoming an old friend back to our newsroom.

Jonathan Gold is joining the Los Angeles Times as a restaurant critic and columnist — in print and with special online reports.

His love of all things gastronomical has taken him from the L.A. Weekly (where he started as proofreader in 1982), to the Los Angeles Times (1990-96, where he wrote his Counter Intelligence column), to Gourmet (where he was the magazine’s New York restaurant critic) and back to the L.A. Weekly (where he worked for more than a decade). If you follow the L.A. food scene, you know about Jonathan’s ability to find and savor Uzbek, Korean, Peruvian and Islamic Chinese cuisine. He discovered the only Trinidadian restaurant in Inglewood.

You’ve probably heard about crickets, fried grasshoppers and some animal parts that Jonathan has consumed in pursuit of outstanding food journalism. Five years ago, he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism — the first win for a food writer. He was a Pulitzer finalist last year as well. He has been honored twice as a National Magazine Award finalist in criticism by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

“He sees Los Angeles as ‘the anti-melting pot’ — the home of true, undiluted regional cookery — but also has a fondness for what he calls the ‘triple carom’: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas,” Dana Goodyear wrote in a 2009 profile of Jonathan in the New Yorker. He is, Goodyear added, “sly and erudite, withdrawn in person and in print exuberant.”

Jonathan will join an award-winning staff that includes Times Food Editor Russ Parsons and restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila in our never-ending quest to chronicle the greatest food scene in America. His work will first appear on March 10 in our new Saturday print section and online at latimes.com/food.