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Riots when he was a young critic, Gold celebrated neighborliness, meditating on the garlic pounded by his Korean landlords, whose son was tragically shot during the rioting. You could read so much of his later restaurant criticism as an extension of this essay’s closing line, “I wish that they would invite me over to dinner.” “I want to make Los Angeles smaller,” Gold once said. As his career progressed, Gold deepened everyone’s knowledge of their neighbors, demonstrating that much of the most exciting cooking in Los Angeles took place within local enclaves where chefs cooked for audiences of their peers. But this is something less than ensuring that Angelenos eat together across the lines of geography, ethnicity, and culture. The irony of City of Gold is that it is a portrait not of an L.A. bound together by food across lines of identity, but of distinct “food nations” that intermingle while remaining, for the most part, separate; and whose separateness is actually a great source of strength, in terms of the cooking itself. To produce an array of culinary microclimates — one way to think about L.A. and food — takes the relative isolation of cultures just as much as intermixing. Diversity doesn’t necessarily mean togetherness. Gold’s dream of commensality begins to seem like an ideal he held out for himself and for his readers, rather than an observation of what was actually happening at street level in Los Angeles. Just as Gold was the gastronomic beneficiary of post-1965 immigration to the United States, he also benefited from the fact that he came to prominence just as the restaurant took on a new centrality as a form of cultural expression in American life. People started to skip the movie and go directly to dinner, the restaurant 192
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experience supplying much of the sense of play and personality that we previously expected from light passing through celluloid. As restaurants rose, so did the trend to level value distinctions between different types of cuisines. Thus we enjoy the high-end taco, or a new restaurant in Koreatown that sells slightly polished versions of the stews already available down the block. When Anthony Bourdain died, Gold wrote, “I cannot imagine how the food world is going to cope with this gaping Bourdain-shaped hole — not at its center but on its fringes, looking exactly like a man throwing rocks at the status quo.” What was true of Bourdain’s career was also true of Gold’s, however: if you begin your writerly life “throwing rocks at the status quo” and find some success, don’t be surprised if a new status quo that centers on rock-throwing emerges, with you are canonized as a primal stone-tosser. Over the arc of Gold’s career, “ethnic restaurants” and street food came to enjoy a visibility in Los Angeles dining they had not previously enjoyed, even as that term, “street food,” started to raise questions. What street? Do you mean carts? Elote? Tacos? What about the street is supposed to be delicious? Is this simply about middle-class (or upper-, or wealthy) diners longing for some magical form of culinary transformation imparted by that often-empty black box of a word, “authenticity”? Unclear. When Gold’s outline decorates the wall next to a booth at a very hip, very popular, post-truck L.A. taqueria, we are riding the line between deep appreciation and canonization. In honoring the critic and his legacy, we must be careful not to turn him into an image, part of a dearly loved status quo that must inevitably move on.
