I’ve never quite understood why Portlanders are so quick to ‘fess up to hating Los Angles. It seems a bit like admitting you lack curiosity, or fear cultures that aren’t your own, or don’t like tacos? “I resent things I don’t understand. But traffic, right?”
Jonathan Gold is LA’s best-known food critic; beloved for taking the city’s ethnic cuisines seriously, he was the first food writer to win a Pulitzer, in 2007. It’s difficult to overstate his influence, both on food criticism as a practice and foodie culture as we now know it, with its fervent pursuit of “authenticity.”
City of Gold is a love letter to Gold—and because Gold is inseparable from his home city, it is also a love letter to Los Angeles.