The food world lost its greatest critic on Saturday. Jonathan Gold, the beloved sovereign of Los Angeles eating, passed away at the age of 57.

Jonathan Gold’s page on the L.A. Times website has long lived at the top of my bookmarks page. I visited it every day hoping to find a new review.

The man was quite simply a legend. He began his career by incredibly eating at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He cemented his legacy with an eponymous documentary that demonstrated his virtuosic command of the food scene in the second largest city in the United States.

The loss feels overwhelming. I don’t know what we will do without America’s finest investigative eater. Chefs around the world don’t know either.

But we don’t have to figure that out right now. Right now we can enjoy the writing of Jonathan Gold. The Los Angeles Times has lifted its paywall on all of his work. We have a lot of reading to do.

And we should all take a moment to remind ourselves, just as we did when we faced the tragic passing of Anthony Bourdain, that eating new things with new people is an embrace of our existence akin to prayer.