"City of Gold" is not a film about the explorer Francisco de Coronado. It's about another explorer, one who finds other kinds of treasure in unexpected places. His name is Jonathan Gold, and he writes about food, mainly restaurants, for the Los Angeles Times. Gold is the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. This documentary gives a whole new-to-most-of-us perspective on Los Angeles, both as an eating city and as a collection of neighborhoods.
He's a casually dressed guy of generous girth and a nimbus of hair, tooling around LA in a Dodge pickup truck, exploring what seems to be an infinite number of mostly small restaurants in ethnic neighborhoods. And being LA, that ethnicity ranges far and wide. Oh, he does the high-end stuff, too – there's a meal at Ludo Lefebvre's hot resto Trois Mec, and an interview with Lefebvre – but it's mostly his familiarity with family-owned strip mall spots and the eternal taco trucks and such that has made his reputation, and deservedly so. Until Gold, the newspaper restaurant critics in the biggest cities in the United States just didn't cover places like this, with rare exceptions. (In the next tier down, it was a different story, of course. Long before I acquired this last name, Joe was writing about such places for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Just ask the folks at Cafe Natasha, for instance.)
Gold is probably an obsessive, but that's fortunate for us and it doesn't appear to interfere with his life much – food is a subject that it's impossible to know everything about. His casual writing style manages to inform without condescending, which is probably another secret of his success. Despite his admitted tendency to procrastinate, he has an immense output every year, including writing for outside venues like the magazine Lucky Peach. We see famous food faces like Ruth Reichl and Calvin Trillin, people like his editors at the Los Angeles Times and Lucky Peach, and multiple small restaurant owners.
The film manages to make Los Angeles look good without resorting to tourist shots. The scenes of restaurant kitchens and plating are real-world appetizing, not the remove-that-tiny-irregular-piece-of-cilantro sort of stuff that we've seen way too much in movies recently.
It's nice that the film opens with an MFK Fisher quote. It's even nicer that Gold talks about how important Trillin's work in the early '80's, starting with American Fried, was to his thinking about food and the people around the food, a seminal theme in Gold's own body of work.
You'll leave this movie hungry.
City of Gold
opened March 25, 2016
Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema