Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who richly chronicled the city’s vast culinary landscape and made its food understandable and approachable to legions of fans, has died. He was 57.

Gold died of pancreatic cancer at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles this evening, according to his wife, Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa. He was diagnosed with the disease in early July.

One of the most widely admired voices of Los Angeles, Gold wrote about restaurants for four decades and became indelibly linked with the city in which he was born and raised.

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Los Angeles Times owners Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele, said in a note to the staff today about the death of Jonathan Gold: “Jonathan was a national treasure. He was the only food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for his lyrical accounts of the Los Angeles food scene. He represented the best of L.A. He captured the stories of Los Angeles’ communities and inspired people across the vast expanse of L.A. to explore our city.”

To help you explore Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles, we have lifted the paywall on our coverage of his death from pancreatic cancer and the many tributes to his legacy — as well as his guide to L.A.’s 101 Best Restaurants. Here is The Times' developing coverage:

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Until I began reading Jonathan, I knew nothing of the San Gabriel Valley’s Hong Kong seafood scene. I gave little thought to birria — the savory goat stew of Central Mexico — until I read Jonathan’s take on a restaurant called El Parian in L.A.’s Pico-Union neighborhood. I could not have defined “congee” until he extolled its virtues in a 2014 review of the Hollywood pop-up restaurant Porridge and Puffs.

“It is easy to laugh at the idea of a porridge-intensive restaurant,” he wrote, “until you taste a spoonful of the rice porridge with pickles and jam: an arrangement of herbs, fermented mustard greens and a spoonful of a sharp, lemongrass-infused chile condiment as dazzling in its complexity as anything coming out of the most famous kitchens in town.”

Jonathan was an unusually generous critic. He could make a restaurant but he would never break one. Unlike so many restaurant critics who seemed to derive pleasure from composing the clever and quotable put-down (as, for instance, New York Times critic Pete Wells, who infamously compared the soup at Manhattan’s high-end Per Se to “bong water”), Jonathan was never unkind. This empathy did not lessen his impact as a critic; on the contrary, it conferred a kind of superlegitimacy on him, as chefs knew that he knew what they were trying to do, even when they fell short.

Last year’s inaugural Michelin Guide to Los Angeles restaurants was appalling, ignorant of the way Angelenos eat, reading as if it was put together by a team too timid to venture further than a few minutes from their Beverly Hills hotel. This year’s guide, although it is more or less identical, is just boring...Unless you happen to be a French business traveler terrified of the teeming masses outside your hotel, I see no reason to pay attention to the Los Angeles guide at all.

From Santa Monica to Downtown, a glowing tribute