City of Gold
Director: Laura Gabbert
Rating: R (some language)
Runtime: 91 minutes
Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles
by: Jonathan Gold
You probably have a preconceived notion of Los Angeles well-placed in your mind. I know I do. To the outside world the city can seem like a giant rolling movie set stocked with wafer-thin blondes, flashy vehicles, and mile after mile of standstill traffic. Or it can seem like one giant boiling cauldron overstuffed with violent gangs and newly arrived migrants, all of which is hemmed in on all sides by privileged white wealth. Or it can be that vague blur on the periphery of your caring, that city you haven’t given much thought to. It has, at one time or another, been all of those things to me and many others. In some way all of those notions are partial truths. It does have a lot of wealthy women concerned about maintaining their looks. Traffic there is also some of the worst in the country. The streets of the city are occasionally violent. It is a huge magnet for migrants coming to the US. It is often ignored by the east coast as just another one of those out-there California cities, too far away to be bothered with. Or maybe all those notions are just mine. Either way, they are most definitely ready for retirement.
The documentary City of Gold is the best place to start poking holes in those biases. The movie is ostensibly a biography of Jonathan Gold, the first critic in America to win the Pulitzer Prize for food writing, showing that just such prose can have the same punch and cultural signifigance of any other critical writing. However, because Gold is so in love with his city, the documentary becomes a gushing love letter to Los Angeles too.
Early on in the documentary, Jonathan Gold expertly summarizes those notions I mentioned earlier and how much they have come to anger him. He sees it countless times: people fly into LAX, rent a car, and hit up Beverly Hills for a midday cruise followed by a mediocre and overpriced Reuben at some kinda-sorta Jewish deli still eking out an existence from the diminishing afterglow of its halcyon days in the 50s. His contention is that folks like this obviously have it all wrong. The Hills ain’t the city. And the diners and delis near the studios aren’t what define Los Angeles eating any longer. The City of Angels is now the city of every conceivable cuisine in the world, a Queens/Astoria blown up to 503 square miles. Helping people get to know the varied and far flung barrios of his hometown, “his glittering mosaic,” has been his mission as a food writer for the last 30 years. But it certainly didn’t start out that way for Mr. Gold.
Raised in a household obsessed with culture, Gold grew up devouring every book he could from the family’s large library of titles. His father was a frustrated English Professor who just happened to work in the Los Angeles County correctional system. Gold has two brothers and Jonathan makes jokes about his father’s plans to form a string trio with the three siblings. The plan never came to fruition, but young Jonathan did fall in love with classical music, taking up the viola and cello. He describes his years as a kid and teenager as cloistered and nerdy. He spent most of his time holed-up in music practice rooms, scraping his bow across the disobedient strings of his cello. His family was reform Jewish and all the Jewish kids could tell their family’s socioeconomic standing by taking note of what delicatessen they were loyal to. His family’s preferred diner, Junior’s, like most of its competitors, is long gone, but at the time denoted upper-middle class status.
College at UCLA meant cello practice by day and punk rock concerts by night. Laurie Ochoa, his wife and a fellow writer, claims that the exposure to Punk Rock is what made Gold the man he is today. That might seem an odd statement but stay with it. Ochoa contends that Punk Rock’s subversive nature and go-it-alone style opened up Gold’s eyes to a new way of seeing culture. All of the sudden the classical music cave where Gold was self-exiled was torn open. Gold finally woke up to the fact that he lived in one of the great cultural capitols of the United States, and therefore the world. It became okay to transcend the more eurocentric and traditional influences he had grown up with. Jonathan Gold was off and running.
That tendency to look past the familiar European influence is what led a newly graduated Gold to take it as his mission to eat at every restaurant on Pico Blvd., a 16 mile stretch that starts in downtown LA and finds its terminus in the warm sands of Santa Monica. Fresh out of college, Gold was working as a proofreader at LA Weekly and wanted to take a crash course in Los Angeles. He figured the food of this main artery was as good a place as any to start. For a year he ate his way down the 16 mile stretch, consuming almost every conceivable dish from well over a hundred different cultures. He came to truly know his city in that span of time and what made it so great, exponential diversity. For example, not only could you find great Mexican dishes, you could find dishes unique to every one of Mexico’s 32 states along that stretch of boulevard. His exploration of these immigrant communities was also, as he describes, “a miracle of entry level capitalism.” Back at the LA Weekly he went from proofreader to music critic and by hard work and chance found himself perfectly placed to cover the rise of West Coast Rap in the late 80s. His down to earth style and willingness to go where others wouldn’t got him access to Dr. Dre and Snopp Dogg. He was even in the studio when the famous duo recorded “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang”. But as much as Mr. Gold may have loved the world of music, this late-bloomer came to realize his real passion was food.
And so the music critic became more and more the food critic. He’s been doing it ever since. His style was straightforward and conversational. He took as his guide Calvin Trillin, the first food critic in America to take his critical gaze away from the Frenchified offerings of haute cuisine to settle on the rib shack and burger stand. Gold was hyper aware that the real LA was best represented by the food of its Asian, Hispanic, and African communities, after all it is a working class city, contrary to the popular image of a plastic town filled with plastic people. Jonathan Gold would grab the phone book and browse for any and all types of food, the less familiar the better. Cruising the city in his pick-up truck he would find restaurants, food trucks, and even illegal food stalls serving up delicious cuisine for patrons who missed the flavors of home.
The documentary does its due diligence in considering a food critic’s role in a thriving metropolis like Los Angeles. In the age of Yelp and food blogs like mine, what advice should you listen to, to whom should you turn? What Jonathan Gold brings with him, and what others can only pantomime, myself included, is a vast store of food knowledge and seemingly endless dining experiences. As evidenced in the documentary, the small mountains of books stacked throughout his house lend credence to this theory, and he’s been known to visit a restaurant as many as 17 times before writing out its review. David Chang, the infamous restaurateur and founder of the Momofuku restaurant group, wishes New York City had its own Jonathan Gold, citing his fairness and that aforementioned endless well of knowledge. On a recent trip, David Chang, thinking he’s found a place in Koreatown that no one could possibly have heard of, decides he’ll just keep it to himself, no one needs to know but him. And then on his way out the door, there it is, framed in reverence, Jonathan Gold’s short but glowing review for LA Weekly. Chang just cursed and laughed as he walked out the front door.
Jonathan Gold certainly looks the part of a well-fed food critic. A rather portly man with what can best be described as a fading orange mullet, he dresses in suspenders and bland button-ups. You wouldn’t assume a guy like Gold would turn heads in any restaurant. Yet he has a certain reputation in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. He has multiple throw away phones that he uses to make reservations and never uses his own name. Food critics in big cities are often given god-like service when they dine. Gold wants to avoid all that, he wants to see the everyday workings of any dining establishment.
And so it might seem odd to think that a food critic should get his own feature length film. Is any critic really that important? Perhaps not, but the documentary City of Gold makes a strong case for Mr.Gold’s impact on the city. Several restaurant owners and their families are interviewed in the film. They all tell similar stories of toiling in obscurity until the day there were lines coming out the door and around the block. No one could understand this phenomenon. Why the sudden explosive growth in customers? Before long, these chefs and owners couldn’t go a day without hearing the words Jonathan Gold uttered from their new patron’s lips. They all agree, whether rightly or not, Gold had saved their restaurants, and in some cases their families. You can see the real love and camaraderie between Gold and these owners, both of them understanding the symbiosis and circle of life they both inhabit and thrive in. That’s what set’s Gold apart. He genuinely cares for these people, he becomes their friends, he goes to their weddings and funerals. He doesn’t want this Los Angeles, the real thing, to die or get paved over. If his public reading in the bookstore at the end of the documentary doesn’t convince you of this, nothing will.
It should be apparent by now that I am an enormous fan of both Jonathan Gold, the writer, and Jonathan Gold, the man. And this brings me to his greatest strength, his words. As of this review, he only has one published book of his reviews. Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles is an anthology of Gold’s writings for the LA Weekly in the 90s and early 2000s. However, you can catch his column for the Los Angeles Times every weekend, and another anthology is in the works.
His prose is a muscular, sinewy practice in explanation. It’s Hemingway’s straight to the point sentences crossbred with the lyrical passion of Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano, Lowry’s masterpiece, is a modernist must-read). The food he describes is painstakingly rendered through all five senses. He brings you to his table side and lets you in on his eating experiences. Here are just a few of his choicer lines:
“…so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it, spicy as a novela and bitter as tears…”
“When it’s done properly, taco should be a verb.”
“In polyethnic Los Angeles, where Japanese cooks prepare Jewish-Mexican food for African Americans and Thai people make Italian food that Salvadorans like to eat, Peruvian restaurants are sometimes the most polyethnic of all.”
“I have noted the hush that fell on a roomful of gangsta rappers when Quincy Jones walks into the studio, and seen a roomful of fiction writers breathe the words of a Raymond Carver story as the emphysematic author struggled through a reading late in his life. I’ve seen the ecstatic look on an oboist’s face as she was singled out for praise by Pierre Boulez. I’ve even hung out with twelve-year-old girls at a Hanson concert. (Don’t ask.) But I have never, I think, seen the un-muted awe that Nobu Matsuhisa commands when he strides through the Japanese fish wholesalers just east of downtown Los Angeles.”
And opening up his reviews to any line can reward you with similarly vivid sentences and paragraphs like the ones listed above. The man seems incapable of writing a throw-away line. Each piece of any particular dish is given the same loving attention by Gold that it was by its culinary creator. Because Jonathan Gold has been doing this for 30 plus years, many have assumed he couldn’t possibly continue to bring his fresh perspective week after week. Well, such a notion gets blown away when one considers that in Koreatown alone, an area of 2.7 square miles, there are over 900 places to eat. The possible dining options are never ending, or might as well be, in Los Angeles. Long before the Rodney King riots, a time when everyone lamented that Angelenos didn’t know their neighbors, and ever since, Jonathan Gold has gone to every neighborhood and eaten, talked, learned, and laughed with all different kinds of people. And hopefully he will be doing it for a good while longer.
His mission is to democratize food writing for all of us. He likes the fine French dishes from time to time. He’ll even dive headfirst into the crustiest of LA eating institutions, the kind of places in West Hollywood with wicker straw Chianti bottles and accordion playing, opera singing, fresh from Naples, Italian waiters. Though his heart is happiest when his rear-end is parked in a laminated booth with a giant bowl of menudo and accompanying lengua tacos.
So, two questions to think about before we finish, questions raised by Mr. Gold himself, When do the efforts of restoration and gentrification become too precious, too self-conscious? And when do the artisanal efforts of dedicated foodies and culinary-minded business folks cut into the meat and bone of a city, mutating it forever?
Think on it. I know I will be.
Be well, eat well, and try to love your neighbors.
-TSM
Between Two Meals 