---
title: "Eight years after Jonathan Gold's death, City of Gold's director on the LA he'd be writing now"
description: "Ten years after her documentary City of Gold introduced the world to LA through the eyes of critic Jonathan Gold, and eight years after his death, director Laura Gabbert reflects on the city he mapped one strip-mall restaurant at a time, and what his voice would make of the pandemic, the ICE raids and the fires."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Omar Haddad"
published: 2026-07-26T13:56:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-26T13:56:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/eight-years-after-jonathan-gold-s-death-city-of-gold-s-director-on-the-la-he-d-b
tags: ["jonathan-gold", "city-of-gold", "laura-gabbert", "los-angeles-food", "documentary"]
---
# Eight years after Jonathan Gold's death, City of Gold's director on the LA he'd be writing now

Ten years after her documentary City of Gold introduced the world to LA through the eyes of critic Jonathan Gold, and eight years after his death, director Laura Gabbert reflects on the city he mapped one strip-mall restaurant at a time, and what his voice would make of the pandemic, the ICE raids and the fires.

Some critics review restaurants; Jonathan Gold used them to explain a city. A decade after the film that captured how he did it, his collaborator is still asking what he would say about the Los Angeles he left behind, [LAist reports](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/jonathan-gold-city-of-gold-laura-gabbert).

## Who he was

Jonathan Gold, born and raised in Los Angeles, became the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and he spent decades, beginning at LA Weekly in the 1990s, writing about the city's food from the strip malls and taco trucks outward rather than from the fine-dining rooms in. He treated a San Gabriel Valley noodle shop or a Koreatown stew with the same seriousness other critics reserved for temples of haute cuisine, and in doing so he redrew the map of what Los Angeles food, and Los Angeles itself, was understood to be. He died in 2018.

There was a texture to him beyond the byline, the kind of detail the film loved: he had played cello in an experimental 1980s punk band, and his family were regulars at Junior's Deli in Westwood. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of specific, rooted Angeleno he wrote about.

## The film

City of Gold, directed by Laura Gabbert, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and reached theaters in 2016. It follows Gold across the city and, through his writing, tells the stories of the immigrant founders behind the restaurants he loved, using food as a way into questions of migration, neighborhood and belonging. It endures because it is less a portrait of a critic than a portrait of a city that a critic happened to see clearly.

## The LA he would be writing now

This retrospective arrives on a double anniversary, roughly ten years since the film's theatrical release and eight years since Gold's death, and Gabbert's reflection is really about absence. "The first thing I always think of is, 'How would Jonathan be writing about this?'" she said. "Because you know he would, and I miss his voice."

The "this" is a Los Angeles that has been through a great deal since 2018: a pandemic that gutted the independent restaurants he championed, immigration raids that fell on the very communities his subjects came from, and the fires that have repeatedly scarred the region. Gabbert's point is that Gold's beat was never really food; it was the people who make it, and every one of those events landed hardest on exactly them. His way of writing, she suggests, is the way you would want them covered, with cultural context, with attention to where an owner grew up and how a recipe traveled, with the neighborhood kept in frame.

That is the lasting argument of both the man and the movie, and the reason this is more than nostalgia. Gold changed food writing by insisting it was writing about a city and its people. Eight years on, the city is still here, still changing, and the case he made, that you can understand a place through what and how it eats, is if anything more useful now than when he made it.

## Sources

- [Jonathan Gold was LA. 'City of Gold' director on what he'd write now](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/jonathan-gold-city-of-gold-laura-gabbert)