“I am my car. My car is me.”
So says Jonathan Gold in the first few frames of City of Gold, a documentary about the LA Times food critic that arrives in select theaters starting tomorrow. Over the next 90 minutes, we see a lot of Gold inside his green Dodge pickup—pointing out his favorite restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, musing on his LA upbringing, ignoring calls from his persistent editor when he’s late on an assignment (which is often). Directed by Laura Gabbert, the documentary, which premiered last year at Sundance, is an ode to the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic’s immeasurable influence on LA food culture.
For ardent J Gold fans, there is plenty to love about this film. Gold's affable nature makes him an ideal subject, and his mind-boggling knowledge about not just food, but music, art and LA history, is on full display. His obsession with learning about unchartered territory is palpable; while reviewing a restaurant that served a more unusual cuisine, Gold had to visit the place 17 times. He is a fascinating figure whose story could be told through multiple films: one about the impact his reviews have on floundering LA restaurants; one addressing the influence music had on his writing career; another still about his day-to-day culinary adventures throughout the city. Instead, City of Gold tries to touch on all of these layers, causing the film to feel disjointed and spastic at times.
Still, if you have followed Gold's career for the past 20 years, you'll see now-familiar faces and locations that have benefited from his critical eye: Jazz Singsanong and Tui Sungkamee at Jitlada, Ludo Lefebvre at Trois Mec, Roy Choi at Kogi. Gold's magic touch transformed their culinary trajectory, and the film does a good job at conveying the influence his words had on the city. I say "had" because this is primarily a film about Gold's LA Weekly days, when his Counter Intelligence column focused on the little guys, the strip mall hole-in-the-walls and the Boyle Heights taco trucks. His colleagues at the Times make a brief cameo, though mostly to talk about his difficulty in meeting deadlines.
Above all, City of Gold is a look into the critic's love affair with the city. In one of the film's final moments, we hear Gold reading from an essay he penned shortly after the LA riots. It is about his neighborhood, and the people in his neighborhood, and the comings and goings of a neighborhood in a city that is falling apart. It is not about food until the very end, when suddenly it is: a brief wish for a shared meal, at a time when it seems that food is the only thing keeping LA afloat.
City of Gold debuts on Friday, March 10, at the ArcLight Hollywood, the Landmark and other select theaters in town.
