After 27 years, Evan Kleiman‘s Angeli Caffe closed its doors for good on Jan. 13. LA Weekly columnist and KCRW Good Food regular Jonathan Gold wrote a touching eulogy on Kleiman’s Melrose restaurant:

“The chilly Wednesday evening before Angeli Caffe closed for good, you could grab a bar seat at Pizzeria Mozza without waiting, and there were only two or three dudes in line at Pink’s hot dog stand. If you were ambling down Melrose on your way to a bite or a drink, you could have had your choice of any table at any restaurant on the usually crowded strip.

But Angeli was really crowded, astonishingly crowded, with people there to wish the restaurant well — longtime customers, mostly, some of them with college-age kids who had been going to Angeli since infancy: patting out floury balls of pizza dough as toddlers, graduating to roast chicken as children, perhaps having their first dates there as teens, knowing the mashed-potato croquettes and the gnocchi with brown butter and sage would never let them down.

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Last year, we told you about The Butcher Blog’s spreadsheet of Jonathan Gold‘s 99 Essential Restaurants.

Well, blogger Sarah Gim at The Delicious Life has created the ultimate spreadsheet of Gold’s annual selections dating back to 2005:

Jonathan Gold’s (mostly) annual list of 99 Essential Restaurants is a set of data to me. And a current list combined with previous years’ lists? It is data over time. I can hardly contain myself when I think about it. I count, I record, I double-back and marvel at the stupid things I’ve figured out that are totally irrelevant to the point of the list, but are fascinating enough to me waste my time doing it. Like, wow, there are 22 restaurants that have been listed every year since JGold started compiling these lists!

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Just in time for the weekend, LA Weekly foodie Jonathan Gold released his list of “99 Essential Restaurants” for 2011.

The question on Gold’s mind this go-round was “what is an essential Los Angeles restaurant?”:

I was thinking about that over lunch at Providence a couple of months ago, contemplating a dish of Santa Barbara sea urchin cosseted with gently scrambled egg, wondering whether the uni might go better with an Alsatian pinot blanc or a Central Coast viognier.

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Earlier this year, we wrote about food critic Jonathan Gold making sly reference to restaurant review game-changer Yelp.com. Though he did not name the service outright, it seemed pretty clear who he was referring to in a chat with Poynter.

This week, at USC’s Journalism Director’s Forum, Gold made more pointed remarks, mentioning Yelp by name. As Jessica Zech blogs on Inside Annenberg, the Pulitzer Prize winning food critic sees his role as having shifted because of Yelp:

“The role of the individual critic is I’m not sure becoming less, I’m not sure becoming more, but it’s becoming different,” Gold said. “Instead of being the person whose opinion mattered, what you’re sort of doing is leading the herd. It’s being more of a shepherd than being an arbiter of taste.”

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The Association of Food Journalists announced the winners of its annual awards over the weekend. As to be expected where food writing awards are concerned, LA Weekly‘s Jonathan Gold did quite well for himself–earning first place in the “Best Newspaper Restaurant Criticism” small circulation category. He also earned second and third place in the “Best Newspaper Food Feature” category.

The SF Chronicle also acquitted itself nicely in this year’s competition. The paper picked up both first and third place in the “Best Newspaper Restaurant Criticism” large circulation category. Staffer Sophie Brickman, who picked up the first place award, also earned a third place nod in the “Best Newspaper Food Column” category.

Congrats to all!

Full list of winners at Poynter.

I was offered a gig as managing editor of the award-winning mega-blog Crooks and Liars and I’ve decided to take it. Regrettably, this means I will not have the time to blog here any longer. So because I’ve been an editor at FishbowlLA for over three years–the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere (I am a freelancer)–I wanted to pen my own exit interview:

Q. What is the weirdest thing to happen to you at FishbowlLA?

A. Remember the Mini Me sex tape? Vern Troyer had this tape leaked of he and his girlfriend going at it. The girlfriend just so happened to look a lot like my co-editor at the time, Mayrav Saar. So I thought it would be hilarious (it was) to write a post with the image saying, “We just wanted to get in front of this – this is NOT Mayrav in the Mini Me sex tape.” The next day we got a cease and desist letter from Troyer’s lawyers telling us to take down the image. So the weirdest? A cease and desist from Mini Me’s attorney over an in-office joke.

See my response to the lawyer here.

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For the first time this Fishie can remember the LA Weekly picked up only one first place award at the annual AltWeekly Awards. The paper cleaned house at the awards for years under Laurie Ochoa. But this year only Patrick Range McDonald got the nod in the Advocacy Journalism category. Jonathan Gold may have been a Pulitzer finalist this year, but his efforts somehow earned him only second place in the Food Writing category.

Also surprising, no first place awards for the OC Weekly.

Both papers did pick up a number of second and third places, however–as did the Pasadena Weekly and the San Diego CityBeat. Full list of winners here.

The 2011 Altweekly Award finalists were just announced. For the first time in what seems like many, many years, the Village Voice leads this year’s pack with eight nominations. L.A. Weekly has five finalists this year–including Jonathan Gold and Gendy Alimurung--while OC Weekly has three.  San Diego CityBeat also picked up three nominations–including finalists in the long news and short news categories.

Winners will be announced at the annual Altweekly convention on July 22 in New Orleans.

Congrats to all. Full list of finalists here.

The Association of Food Journalists just put out the list of finalists for its annual food journalism competition. Surprise, surprise, LA Weekly‘s Jonathan Gold is a finalist three times in two different categories. He’s up against himself in the Best Newspaper Food Feature category and picked up another nod in the Newspaper Restaurant Criticism Category. Gold is LA’s lone representative among the finalists.

The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, seems to be the paper de jour of food writing, with finalists for four different awards in three categories.

Full list of finalists at Romensko.

Up until Jonathan Gold in 2007, no food critic had ever won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, thanks to Gold, Michael Pollan and the dawn of Yelp, food writing has taken on a whole new importance in the cultural consciousness. Poynter’s Dawn Fallik put together a series of interviews with prominent food editors and writers on the emerging impact of food writing.

Here’s Gold discussing, presumably, Yelp–although he doesn’t say it by name.

The online food world runs the gamut. Some of it is good because there is so much food information out there. And some of it is less good because there are so many people reporting news that is so little news.

The public has a power they didn’t used to. I’m certainly an expert on a lot of things, but you always have readers who know more than you do, and these days they have a voice.

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