City of Gold

Like one of Jonathan Gold’s reviews come to life, City of Gold — documentarian Laura Gabbert’s paean to gastronomic urbanism, its greatest living champion and its natural capital city — finds the lyrical in Los Angeles’ hot-dog trucks, Korean street food and hagfish. Like Gold, a native Angeleno who won the first Pulitzer Prize ever handed to a food critic, the movie is a touch disheveled but quietly convincing in its arguments (give or take anything positive about those slimy hagfish). That is: Food is art; food as art, even when said food has been prepared in a nondescript shack, deserves thoughful and authoritative criticism; thoughful and authoritative criticism is also art. And: Los Angeles has every dish you could want (give or take KC barbecue, which Gold would probably say is more than fair sacrifice).

It isn’t as though a metro as endlessly self-renewing as Los Angeles needs a single champion for its quilt of overlapping culinary influences, obscure enthusiasms and ethnic traditions, a umami tsunami drenching a couple dozen zip codes. But watching Gold swim effortless laps around his city’s bottomless cauldron of funky food counts as inspiration — to visit this place, yes, but also to venture outside one’s local easy comforts in favor of the unknown. For all that City of Gold is a valentine to L.A. and this chronicler of the place, it’s also a rich reminder to sample everything broadly. One culture’s commonplace is another’s luxury and vice-versa — an eel by any other name. Gabbert’s movie makes you hungry. It makes you thirsty. It makes you want to read (Gold, much of whose work can be found online). It may even make you want to write (more than another who-needs-this Yelp review).