Famed Food Critic Jonathan Gold Talks Art Alexakis, Goat Penis and Chinese Social Media

City of Gold, a documentary about the legendary food writer, screens in Portland this Friday at Cinema 21.

Jonathan Gold is one of food journalism's only legitimate heroes, and certainly the only one with a Pulitzer on his metaphorical belt buckle.

With his Counter Intelligence column for L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times beginning in the '80s, Gold helped change the way traditional working-class and ethnic fare like tacos and pho are viewed by food critics—as cuisines every bit as layered, vital and full of history as the stuff at high-dollar French spots.

City of Gold, a new documentary by Laura Gabbert that opens at Cinema 21 on Friday, accompanies the legendary journalist as he tours the eateries and neighborhoods of L.A. Gold talked to WW on the phone about Everclear, quinoa and the tiresome kabuki of food-critic anonymity.

WW: So you're a film star now. How does it feel?

Jonathan Gold: I'm a writer, I'm behind a typewriter. It's slightly uncomfortable seeing myself onscreen. But the movie shows what I do in a way that represents me. I love the way it makes Los Angeles look. It's a part of Los Angeles that doesn't make it onto film so often. In a way, it's probably as much about the ecstasy of being in your car as the sun sets as it is about going to restaurants.

You've said food now occupies the cultural position once held by rock 'n' roll, What's the worst thing about that?

The extreme dogmatism. Jesus—you're in Portland. I only have to talk to vegans every couple weeks. I'm sure you talk to them every day. Or the paleo people, or the people who insist on eating gross organ meats because they want to one-up one another. 'Oh, goat penis? I just had a dog anus!'

Any worries about being anonymous as a food critic after doing a movie?

Any critic in town that restaurateurs care about is known within a few months. It's less about absolute anonymity and more about plausible deniability. I got tired of the kabuki. They can't make it better. They don't have magical ingredients in the back. The recipes aren't going to change. Their aesthetic isn't going to change. Shitty waiters aren't going to become better waiters.

It seems weird to complain about service in a specific way. If the food is great, I'm happy to eat in a phone booth. When I first started writing about food in L.A., I was a punk-rock kid who had lucked into a gig. It's not about being served well at Spago. I was surprised that they let me in at all.

Did you ever feel like you didn't belong there?

A little bit. I wore suits more than I do now, but they were always those thrift-shop, skinny-lapel jobs. I'd go with friends who were wearing their one pair of pants. You know this; you work at an alt weekly.

This is not a town that cares what you wear.

I appreciate we've talked this long and you haven't asked a snarky question about Everclear. I used to go to Portland a lot and sometimes I felt I was not welcome after that piece went out. [Gold had written an article in the August 1996 issue of Spin about a feud between Portland musicians Pete Krebs and Art Alexakis—see our recent oral history.] There were a lot of people who didn't like that piece in Portland. Actually, Art didn't like it much either.

What's been your experience eating in Portland?

[Food writer Karen Brooks] almost had me persuaded to move there. We're talking earlyish '90s. It was lovely, and she'd have dinner parties where there'd be the chief of police and somebody who owned two galleries and a house painter and somebody who drove a school bus.

Any food you've liked here?

Jen Louis [of Lincoln on North Williams Avenue] is a kitchen god. The first four or five times I went to Pok Pok were magical. The chicken-rice truck [Nong's Khao Man Gai] is great.

[Le Pigeon's Gabe Rucker] is really good with meat and with meaty flavors, and he plays with gaminess in a way that not a lot of chefs control. The contrast between, say, maybe the sourness and high quality of a piece of duck, what he's able to bring out with the red-wine reduction that comes with it. It's really good—really good rustic French cooking. There aren't a lot of places in the United States that do that.

In the movie, your editors all say you're constantly late turning in your reviews. Why so?

Overresearch, probably. You know the thing, you're doing a restaurant that's an Indian restaurant. You find out the cook is from is Hyderabad, you like the biryani, you discover that Hyderabad has not only an English speaking press but a really extensive one, and they're as obsessed with food as we are, and specifically biryani.

You can read 12,000 descriptions of biryani if you want to do that. At a certain point you say, "OK. 106 descriptions of of biryani suffice. I think I've got it."

If you're a writer you have the word disease. You never know quite as much as you think you need to know—even if you're just going to spend one sentence on it. Go to China, you realize with Google Translate you can read Chinese social media. That's a terrible time suck. Don't do it. Life's too short.

You rarely write bad reviews. Are they worth anything to anybody?

People love bad reviews. They're easy to write, you can make them funny. It's really fun to be mean. Definitely I've done my share of it.

There was a showing of the film at the MOMA in New York. The guy who introduced the film had been maitre'd of the St James Club in L.A. My review was vicious enough it shut down the restaurant and he got fired. He was thanking me because he has a pretty big gig now. I tried to soften it but [St. James Club] was really bad. That was a horrible place.

My reviews are more descriptive than they are evaluative. If you read the narrative one way you know it's a place you'll hate, you read it one way you know it's a place you'll love. I put stuff in context. I put it in culinary context. I try to let you know exactly where and what it is.

I hate lounge restaurants. Loathe them. But sometimes I have to write about them. There are good lounge restaurants and bad lounge restaurants.

When you find a place you don't like, do you refuse to review it?

Probably more often than not. When I review a restaurant I go usually four or five times. When you're writing a bad review you have to go more times, because you can't get the tiniest thing wrong. Imagine going back six times to a restaurant you think is boring. You can't do it. Why would you do it? A restaurant that bores you is going to go out of business anyway.

If there was a sacred cow that had really sunk, would I hesitate to do what Pete Wells did with Per Se? Nah, I'd do it. I've done it.

Had you been to Per Se recently?

Nah, I'd been a couple months after it opened.

Thomas Keller has a very particular style. It's a long meal—there's a not considerable amount of butter involved in it. It's a physical ordeal in a certain way. There'll be two bottles of wine or more, twelve courses, something that you will not have encountered. You're either in for that ride or you're not. The thing he has that he gives you in exchange for this endurance contest is a sort of technical perfection that very few restaurants can pull off… If he's lost that technical perfection, that's worth calling out.

You've said you never want to talk to a New Yorker about pizza ever again. How come?

Because they have extreme opinions and their opinion is always right. There's pizza in Portland that's as good as all but maybe half a dozen places in New York. But you can't tell a New Yorker that, they'll take your head off. Because all good pizza is from New York.

You can't talk to a New Englander about lobster rolls because they start talking about top loading versus side-loading hot dog buns till your eyes glaze over and your head is conked down on the table.

The case that comes up most often is talking to people from Taiwan about beef noodle soup. You'd better have an hour.

Is there anything in your old reviews where you look back and cringe?

I can look back at stuff I wrote in the '80s and wince a little bit at what I may have written about caviar, rattlesnakes and beef tenderloin with kiwi. They were perfectly valid within the culture of the time, even though they were incredibly stupid. There will be a day where I'm actually nostalgic for quinoa bowls and wood-roasted Brussels sprouts.

My wife and I were in Peru. We went to this workshop in one of the barrios. They were having a workshop on how to cook with indigenous ingredients. Women I assume were going to this because they were being given bags of food at the end. At one point, they started talking about quinoa. You see these angry looks on the faces of the women. "Quinoa! Fucking quinoa! You think we walked miles barefoot through the Andes in order to cook quinoa?"

Now I hear there's a quinoa shortage in parts of Peru.

It's better if you pop it like popcorn. Oh—you know, I will never be nostalgic for the era of eggs on everything. I can't wait for it to end.

I think I had eggs, bacon and kale on spelt recently.

Of course it's spelt. Everything is fucking spelt, or sprouted black barley, or grains that our forefathers had the good sense not to put into bread.

What bread would you want on a sandwich?

Depends on the sandwich, but usually a beautifully crackly crusted country white, then you slice it, put it on the grill so it's just a little charred. Whatever you put on it from then on is gravy.

One last question on the way out: What's the last really good thing you ate?

The best thing I ate today was a plate of broccoli rabe at the Mission Chinese in New York City that had what I believe is bonito shaved over it. Once you did that you realized it was sitting on brisket that tasted like everybody's grandma's brisket. I would bet there's something very close to Lipton's onion soup mix on it, which is [Mission Chinese chef] Danny Bowien's secret joke on everyone.

See it: City of Gold is not rated. It opens Friday at Cinema 21. Jonathan Gold will appear live via Skype on March 31 after the 7 pm screening.

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