A couple of years ago, during a slow Saturday evening with nothing to do, I took the controller of my Amazon Firestick, pressed the Home button and like many others around the same time I suspect, I looked for something, anything, to watch.

How many of us scroll through these befuddling menus and sub-menus in the vain hope of a movie or documentary or sitcom that appeals?  One that isn’t, on face value, a hopeless hash from the commissioning editor’s waste bin?  ‘Because you watched this, we think you would like this…’  These recommendations are almost always completely unwatchable.  Films that grossed millions, or nothing at all, with no artistic merit to speak of, and plied with so much CGI you may as well be watching the cartoon from which most of them are originally based.

However, on this Saturday night, I found a documentary that was really rather interesting: City of Gold.  It wasn’t the title that caught my eye, but the precis underneath.  ‘Jonathan Gold introduces a Los Angeles where ethnic cooking is a kaleidoscope portal to the mysteries of an unwieldy city and the soul of America.’

I pled ignorance to having heard of Jonathan Gold.  It transpired he was an immense authority on the American food scene, not purely through his gorgeous, Pulitzer Prize-winning prose, but as an ombudsman between the provenance of food and community, right up until he died of pancreatic cancer in 2018, aged 57. 

Gold was not what you imagine a food critic to be.  Portliness aside, he had long, red hair with a red beard; a nearly archetypal member of the circus community, perhaps…or a rock band roadie who, having absorbed his entire youth into partying too hard and listening to loud music, clung onto an era that past a while ago.  It’s possible this look wasn’t by accident, because Gold was an art and music graduate and began his extolled career writing in a free newspaper called LA Weekly about classical and, conversely, hip-hop.  But as the film rolls, it reveals how important Gold was to Los Angeles and how many friends and acquaintances he had gathered from the communities that stretch all over the expansive geometry of the city.  

Going to prestigious restaurants was not what drove Gold to write about food.  And the Los Angeles Times, with which so much of his writing talent was blessed, was more into him eating like real people and letting him explore taco trucks, holes in the wall serving one great dish and street corner vendors broiling hot dogs, in his gnarly Dodge Ram pick-up.  In City of Gold, he drives from his own lilywhite neighbourhood to Koreatown to Beverly Hills to Compton, eating, talking, opening up the notion of esoteric food cultures the rest of us are, and continue to be, too ill-informed or prejudicial to explore. 

In many ways Gold was like Anthony Bourdain, the two died only a month apart and Gold wrote a dedicatory piece the day Bourdain was discovered hanged in his hotel room in Alsace, citing his gift for opening the working-class tenets of food culture to the entire world.  Gold could have written the piece about himself.  Admittedly, on this side of the pond he was an unknown, or at least that’s what I told myself because I was guilty for not knowing of him much sooner.  And having loved the work of A.A. Gill, and the majesty of his writing, I felt a bit of rube that there was an American equivalent with a similarly brilliant eye for phrasing and a sentience for what food rewards a community and an occasion, with a pantheon of work that, to me, remained unread.

I hadn’t thought about City of Gold for a while but have spent the last year and a half watching Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on Netflix.  Lord knows how I found it, because if Amazon Prime is difficult to navigate, Netflix is an unnegotiable labyrinth by comparison.  Quite who decides the cataloguing of programming, I don’t know, but there might be special place reserved in Hell for someone who believes it’s perfectly logical to place Ru Paul’s Drag Race next to David Attenborough’s Blue Planet.  A Parts Unknown episode in Mexico City had Bourdain exploring the deliciousness of tacos, and one vendor in particular, Los Cocuyos, whose folded flour and corn wallets were spellbinding enough for him to return on each of the 6 nights he spent filming there. 

For those unfamiliar with the taco, it’s a simple concept affording taste beyond the sum of its parts.  Not to be reductive, but warm a tortilla, add spiced protein (meat or fish), the crunch of a brassica, and a dressing or mayonnaise or ladle of hot sauce, fold over like a clamshell, and you have perhaps the apotheosis of fast food.

Jonathan Gold was synonymous with the taco, some even referring him as the ‘taco poet laureate’ and their most consistent advocate.  There is a dedicated page to his taco quotes, counting them as a way of life, an identity, even arguing they warrant their own classification as a verb: taco-eating. 

Consequently, the meagre act of writing about tacos, makes me want to eat tacos, but in Kent we are hardly blessed with an abundance of taco trucks, pop-ups or restaurants dedicated to the craft.  I think we should be.

I got my most recent taco fix at Wahaca.  MasterChef 2005 winner Thomasina Miers, like Gold, has a tireless proclivity for Mexican street food, and Wahaca is the now soaring chain she set up a couple of years after the show had aired, and to enduring acclaim.  Unsurprisingly, tacos are a lifeblood of the menu along with other staples like quesadillas and enchiladas, and there is a deep list of tequila and mezcal.   

I wasn’t on the side of a Los Angeles boulevard chowing down, but in Bluewater shopping centre, my nearest outlet.  Having been a couple of times before, there wasn’t the need for a menu explanation from the always convivial front of house, who have either bought into Thomasina’s vision hook, line and sinker, or have snorted a little Mexican marching powder in the back of one the converted VW Campers, available with seating for the lucky (or not so) customers first into the restaurant.  I’m certain, for legal reasons, the conviviality is all about the food and the funk.  

Happily, we were seated at a conventional table when our rad waiter, Josh, bounced over and took our order.  There’s a lot to whet the taste buds and, post shopping and our stomachs protesting for sustenance, many dishes were under consideration.  We jumped straight into the Street Food section of the menu and ordered tacos.  Buttermilk chicken, crispy-fried, with pink pickled onions and a spicy mayonnaise and a roasted butternut squash taco with a cashew and herb mole, salsa and pumpkin seeds.  The squash tacos were soft, and the salsa was cheeky with the seeds giving the texture the corn tortillas needed.  Good, but this was all about the chicken tacos and their crunchy, crumby skin, paprika and chilli mayonnaise and the snap of the onions and shredded red cabbage.  I was Jonathan Gold for those fleeting mouthfuls, caught in the reverie of a Los Angeles lunchtime and a foreign world becoming evermore familiar to me through the communion of taste and a mutual food culture I didn’t know I shared.  I could have eaten half-a-dozen. 

 

Brought shortly afterwards were our burritos.  A pulled pork with pickled onions and a chargrilled steak in chipotle salsa and spring onions.  Both were stuffed, and it’s very difficult to emphasise just how stuffed.  Loaded with meat, rice and kidney beans and weighty enough to do a passing assailant serious harm should they be thinking our Mexican food experience is so authentic cartel rules of engagement apply in the vicinity.  But I’d rather be eating the burrito than swinging it around like a Louisville Slugger and, happily, the heft is belied by a soft flour tortilla and components which are nicely cooked for casual street eating.  I would recommend asking for extra napkins, however, because a burrito is not for the knife-and-fork ninnies or pinky-finger-pointers.  They have to be manhandled.   

As much as I wanted more tacos, my body declined, and I thought I would save them for another visit.  It will likely be around the same time I re-watch City of Gold and put on another episode of Parts Unknown, when I’ll lament the passing of two brilliant souls.            

MWB