In the City of Gold, the Streets are Lined with Food Trucks

Yesterday, Jan & I went to our local art theater, the Art Theater in Retro Row on Fourth Street in Long Beach, and saw City of Gold.

City of Gold is Laura Gabbart’s documentary about the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold.

As it turns out the film is about a lot more than food. Not that food is ignored in the slightest. As Molly Eichel writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer, “It’s a documentary that is ostensibly a profile of a man, but is really about the vibrant city he inhabits, beyond the Hollywood sheen and the grit of Compton.”

An LA native, raised in a household of readers, art appreciators, and music lovers, he went on to UCLA to study, well, art and music, and I suspect while not formally his major, some literature. Just out of school he landed a job as a proofreader for the LA Weekly. In order to deal with the phenomenal boredom of being a proofreader, he decided to eat his way from one end of Pico Boulevard to the other.

As Gold would later write, “I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard…” a street that runs some fifteen and a half miles from Central Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles on to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. Most importantly it is filled with food trucks and little hole in the wall restaurants of an ethnic variety that is unimaginable in most other parts of the country.

Gold says, starting “with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach.” He added, “It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.” Indeed, it gave him his life’s direction.

After proofreading he moved on to become a music critic. But, as much as he loved that, food is what called him most deeply. And soon he was writing for LA Weekly digging into the more obscure corners of the metroplex, finding good food, and along with it the mystery of why Los Angeles is in fact one of the great world cities, possibly the city of the future.

As Gold observed this greatness is not found as a melting pot, but rather as a mosaic, although he especially appreciates those intersections where cultures meet and clash, and new dishes and culinary experiences explode into existence. And with that hints of the new cultural permutations, and ever newer possibilities as our world becomes ever more interconnected.

The film is a celebration not just of this remarkable man, but also of the city that made him what he would become. It doesn’t miss the contradictions, and hints at the shadows. There are some very compelling scenes touching on his brother, the environmentalist oceanographer Mark Gold pushing Jonathan to talk about sustainability, and the threats of extinctions. But mostly, it is about the joy of life.

I left this film feeling glad I got to know Jonathan Gold a little better, and in doing that saw more of what makes Los Angeles something astonishing birthing as it is constantly doing out of complexity and kaleidoscopic variety. It actually gives me a little glimmer of hope for us as human beings. And these days, that’s something, indeed.

The aggregate of thirty-seven Rotten Tomato professional reviewers gave it an 89% positive rating, while the near one thousand viewer reviews gave it a 94% positive rating. This is a first rate film.

If you get a chance to see it, you really should.