Good Food on the Road

Jonathan Gold was the restaurant critic and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Gold also hosted KCRW's Good Food on the Road.

His love of all things gastronomical took him from the LA Weekly, where he started as a proofreader in 1982, to the Los Angeles Times which featured his "Counter Intelligence" column. At Gourmet, Jonathan served as the magazine's New York restaurant critic, before relocating back to California to rejoin the LA Weekly for more than a decade. In 2012, he returned to the L.A. Times. If you follow the Southern California food scene, you know about Gold's ability to find and savor Uzbek, Korean, Peruvian, and Islamic Chinese cuisine, and turn readers on to his latest obsessions like the only Trinidadian restaurant in Inglewood.

In 2007 Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism — the first win for a food writer – and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2011 as well. He has been honored twice as a National Magazine Award finalist in criticism by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Photo Credit: Duston Todd

Evan Kleiman is a true culinary multitasker. Chef, author, radio host, restaurateur and sought after speaker, she has been called "the fairy Godmother of the LA food scene" for her central role in bringing a community of food people together through her radio show, Good Food. As host of Good Food on KCRW since 1997, Evan has interviewed more than 6000 guests ranging from celebrated chefs to local farmers, enabling her to explore every aspect of food and how it intersects with human life.

As proprietor and chef of Angeli Caffe for 28 years before its close, Kleiman's improvisational style, while rooted in the Cucina Povera of Italy, showed her reliance on simple ingredients and economical ingenuity to produce delicious and satisfying food with a fresh, honest, pared down aesthetic that people intuitively understand and appreciate. When Angeli opened in 1984 Evan was credited with reintroducing rustic Italian cooking to the US.

As a natural extension of her longtime exposure to everything to do with food, Kleiman's interest now extends to issues of food policy and agro-ecology. The founder of LA's, Slow Food Chapter, which she ran for eight years, Evan now serves on the Stewardship Council for Roots of Change and is a member of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. She is an active speaker on issues of food culture and sustainability and just to maintain a balance, is also attempting to become the Queen of Pie.

Kleiman is the author of eight books on Italian food and one video app, "Easy As Pie."