City of Gold subject Jonathan Gold eats his hometown

It’s hard to think of anyone who has written about the food, drink and restaurants of Los Angeles more effectively (or, really, just plain more) than Jonathan Gold has. Which means it’s hard to name anyone who has written better about Los Angeles than Jonathan Gold has. That’s among the messages spirited, fortune-cookie-like, inside City of Gold, director Laura Gabbert’s intimate new documentary about the longtime critic (see review, this page).

The film depicts L.A. native Gold, who writes for The Los Angeles Times and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 while working at the L.A. Weekly (a former sister paper of The Pitch), as a devout anti-snob, happy to drive wherever the next surprisingly good taco or dumpling is being made. That means an endless succession of strip-mall holes, claustrophobic food trucks and one-man market stands — each with its own potential reward and its own story, to be relayed in Gold’s conversational, vividly sensuous prose. You get to hear the writer read some of his own work in City of Gold, which makes a fine voiceover for Gabbert’s vibrant, impressionistic shots of L.A. and its millions of food-lucky Angelenos. Gold talked with me by phone last week.

The Pitch: There seem to be moments in City of Gold when you’re at home on camera and other times when you’re a reluctant, or at least very modest, subject. Was making this movie ever hard for you or your work?

Gold: I’m not sure. The shooting took place over a long time — probably four and a half or five years. Some of the earlier scenes, like the one at Antojitos Carmen, I’m by myself and there are 17 dishes of food in front of me. That was for the whole crew, not just for me — the cooks were showing off what they can do — but when you see me and those plates it looks sort of awkward.

Laurie Ochoa — who was editor of the L.A. Weekly and edited me there — she and I have been together for 31 years now, way more than half my life, and it’s hard to tell where one of us begins and the other ends. She doesn’t edit me anymore — that turned out to be sort of odd, especially being nudged awake at 3 a.m. when she had an idea for a transition. In terms of food, my wife is more adventurous than I am. She’s definitely much more into innards than I am. I like innards, but she’s the one who will just destroy a bowl of menudo. She’s the one who will see a spleen or a brain or a pile of tendon and say, “This is for me.”

City of Gold has this wordless coda of you and Laurie and your son and daughter making a meal — a family that looks happy. Are you guys different eating at home than you are when you all go out?

My family is so used to going out to restaurants — I mean sooo used to going out. There aren’t many 13-year-olds who have been to Noma twice, right? In restaurants, I go into this weird fugue state and I’m concentrating on ordering and wine lists and food and the taste, and I’m often zoned out. My son will be looking up gravitational waves on an iPhone because that’s what he does, and my daughter will pay attention, but she’s thinking about the poem she read earlier that day. At home, when you’re handing things back and forth and cooking, there’s something wonderful about that communal thing.

I read pretty voluminously — but strangely, too. I suppose my go-to for relaxation is Balzac — I love the way he describes things.

It happens. I’ll drive by corners where places that I loved, and were there for years, are gone. Sometimes I think of my very early years of writing about food, in the 1980s. I wrote about Chasen’s, which was this hangout for sort of the Reagan crowd — there’d be Betsy Bloomingdale and Joel McCrea and Jimmy Stewart, that sort of strange, creaky, old-Hollywood crowd. The vegetables were out of cans, and the dessert was like birthday cake at a kid’s house with Hersehy’s syrup. I wrote a bad review — a pointed, funny review. I didn’t kill it, but it had never been written about negatively before. But I miss Chasen’s. If I were writing about it today, I think I’d still say what I said about it, but I’d concentrate on what was beautiful about it. And back then, I thought things like mosaics shaped like rattlesnakes and made out of fish roe were the bee’s knees.

It’s such a hard thing to do to run a restaurant. You’re trying to put something delicious and meaningful in front of people, and you’re reaffirming your own culture. But you have food costs and salaries and you worry about disability insurance and the dishwasher needing to be bailed out before a big shift, and your profit margins are super-thin even when things are going well. I have maybe a more holistic appreciation now than I used to for what goes on with all of that.

More than most movies, City of Gold makes me want to go to Los Angeles. What writing or TV or films actually get your city right?

Last year, I thought the movie Tangerine got the look of a certain part of the city so right, and it showed things you never see. I think the novelist Steve Erickson gets at the weird shiftlessness of the city in a way that I love. Edward Soja is wonderful. And there’s a book I love called Understand This, by Jervey Tervalon, that’s a novel about growing up in the African-American community south of downtown, and he nails it. Those are books that, as Bob LaBrasca, my former editor, used to say, make you get lost on the way to the bathroom.

L-a-B-r-a-s-c-a. He was a wonderful man, wonderful editor. He worked at [the alt weekly] Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin, and started L.A. Style magazine. He died of a heart attack 20 years ago. He had the greatest cruel trick for writers. When he didn’t like the way something you were working on was going, he’d read it back to you in a sarcastic voice.

I so hear him in my head. He’s the voice in my head when I do stupid shit.

I finished my column yesterday. I’m free for a day — not free; I’m doing, like, 1,000 interviews. But I was scheduled and I was on deadline. I didn’t have to go hide in a restroom stall with my laptop.