Gold in the food trucks
The first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for reviewing restaurants, Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold is the subject of a new documentary, writes James Croot.
MULTIPLE visits to an eatery are a must for famed Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold. For almost three decades he has been championing the city’s small ethnic restaurants, holes in the walls and food trucks via the pages of Gourmet magazine, LA Weekly and, now, the Los Angeles Times.
Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles to promote the release of a documentary about his career and food philosophies – City of Gold – the avuncular Gold says that while the rule in most publications is three visits are needed before a review can be written, he actually tends to go back four or five times.
‘‘Sometimes, if it’s a cuisine that I’m not familiar with, I’ll go more than that. My record is 17 times. The food was revolting, but you could tell it was exactly what the chef wanted to do. So I kept going back and back and back.
‘‘They couldn’t figure it out. I think one of the waitresses thought I wanted to date her and the guy who owned the place tried setting me up with his daughter. At the end of it, I still didn’t love the food, but I thought I least understood it well enough to write about it.’’
Gold, who actually began his career as a music writer, says he had been turning down documentarians for years.
‘‘Literally hundreds of people have asked. But it’s a funny story how this came about. Laura Gabbert [the director] finally wore me down. She bought ‘dinner with the restaurant critic’ at a school auction and first broached the idea then. I said ‘absolutely not’. Then, it turned out our kids were in the same school and she kept asking.
‘‘By that time, I’d seen some of her other films that I’d loved, including her first film, Sunset Story, which is about an old age home for 80-year-old Hollywood radicals. It’s also hard to say no to someone you see every day in the pick-up line.’’
Filming began in 2010, but not without Gold setting down some ground rules. ‘‘She couldn’t watch me review a restaurant because it’s too invasive and unfair to the restaurant – I had to keep true to my process. I didn’t want them to show my house and, originally, I didn’t want my children in it at all, although it turned out they wanted to be on screen.’’
He was also keen that she focus on places Gold had already reviewed long ago and talk to chefs who had interesting stories.
‘‘I think it’s strange as a restaurant critic that you’re theoretically anonymous, when obviously I’m not. There’s this supposed firewall between a critic and the chef that we don’t become friends, but I hope this documentary shows how you can remove that wall, lift that curtain.’’
Describing Los Angeles as a city of villages, he says part of the fun and joy of his work is finding new ones he didn’t know existed. ‘‘There are great stretches of South Los Angeles that are considered African-American. But once you start going to the grocery stores and restaurants, you realise the culture of these places isn’t monolithic – there are people from Mississippi, Creoles from Louisiana, a community from Texas.
‘‘You can even break it down to a city or county level. I think you can define a neighbourhood culture by looking at its churches or food and I spend a lot more time in restaurants than churches.’’
Gold says that’s been one of the biggest changes in LA cuisine in the past 30 years – restaurants have become more specific.
‘‘When I was growing up, Mexican restaurant menus all consisted of the same 12 dishes. Then we started seeing different styles and regions coming in and now we’ve got the cuisines of individual cities and even neighbourhoods.’’
Another major development has been the rise of pop-up restaurants and food trucks, something that Gold puts down to the high cost of entry into the hospitality industry.
‘‘Sometimes, it can be US$4m$5m just to get the doors open. So instead, young chefs have started taking over places like bakeries that aren’t used at night, or renting out a loft a few days a month. French chef Ludo Lefebvre used to do three-week runs, where you’d make a reservation, you bring your own wine and there would be this brilliant French food that had a vision, a point of view, but wasn’t necessarily overly marketed.’’
And while food trucks have been around since the 1960s, Gold credits Korean-American chef Roy Choi with being the first person to really make a dent with his Korean Taco (Kogi) truck.
‘‘He’d been a chef at fancy restaurants in New York and top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America. Obviously really technically proficient, he was able to feed 600 people from a little truck without much difficulty. Using social media brilliantly, it became a thing.
‘‘I joined Twitter myself in order to find out where the truck was going to be. You’d show up to some abandoned parking lot and there would be a massive line. It was like a pop-up party, which was great.’’
Both Lefebvre and Choi have also found additional fame (and notoriety) through the appearances on TV cooking competitions like Top Chef Masters. While he admits he likes some of it, Gold says the competition shows do encourage ‘‘the very worst in young chefs’’.
‘‘They end up going for things that are novelty for the sake of novelty. What will get their dish noticed out of 12, as opposed to something that’s brilliantly thought through. I find a lot of fine chefs coming out of cooking school not even wanting to work in restaurants at all. They just want to do a cooking show and become famous. It has distorted the process.’’
Still it hasn’t dimmed Gold’s desire to find new places to eat and new cuisines to try. One place recently tickled his fancy.
‘‘There was a place from Yerevan in Armenia that served nothing but Georgian soup dumplings. That was interesting and really good, too.’’ City of Gold screens at Embassy Deluxe tonight, 6.15pm; Embassy Theatre, August 2, 10.45am and Paramount Cinema, August 3, 11.30am as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.