Ostensibly, City of Gold is a documentary portrait of Jonathan Gold, the Los Angeles Times writer who, over the course of 30 years of exploring the lesser-known cuisines and cultures of LA, became the country's most beloved and respected food critic. Because Gold writes about the restaurant meals ordinary people eat every day, director Laura Gabbert follows him around Los Angeles doing ordinary, everyday things.

As Gold points out his favorite tacos through the driver's side window of his pickup truck, eats spoonfuls of Southern Thai curry at Jitlada restaurant, and walks hand-in-hand with his daughter through a museum, a picture of him emerges: a writer, a father, and a husband who is endearingly empathetic, nerdy, and human. Gold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, but he's also a chronic procrastinator whose laptop keyboard is missing its "E" key.

As the film progresses, another portrait emerges, this one of Gold's beloved native city. A self-proclaimed "culinary geographer," Gold logs more than 20,000 miles a year in his truck, traversing the vast grid of Los Angeles, navigating the enclaves of its nearly 20 million residents. He manages to tame its almost unfathomable scale into something that might be comprehended through Oaxacan mole, Ethiopian doro wat, and Szechuan toothpick lamb. He maps how immigrant culture has defined, and continues to define, what Los Angeles looks like—and how it tastes.

Gold's written words play a prominent role in the film. His reviews are read aloud over scenes of line cooks sweating over hot woks and families pushing strollers down streets in the sweltering midday sun. Even if you've read Gold's reviews before, hearing them allows you to experience and appreciate them anew: the always approachable yet surprising prose, the way he draws equally from art, music, history, and literature. While his democratic approach to food is what he is most known for, it is actually Gold's quiet, dogged insistence that food is equal to these other fields that distinguishes his work most.

Gabbert gives a substantial amount of screen time to people such as Genet Agonafer, Roy Choi, Bricia Lopez, and Tui Sungkamee and Jazz Singsanong—chefs and restaurateurs whose businesses and lives were positively impacted by Gold's work. It's moving to see and hear these stories, but with each one, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch various brown people say, over and over, that Jonathan Gold, who is white, essentially saved them from something.

By approaching Gold with only affection, and using interviews with writers and editors who praise his ability to make the "exotic" and "ethnic" familiar, Gabbert reinforces a well-established but dangerous media narrative that Gold is bestowing value upon or legitimizing traditional foods and cultures. It's an idea he dismisses.

"I don't think of what I do as legitimizing [them] at all," Gold told me over the phone. "The idea of being the great white explorer giving value to noble savages—I totally reject that. I never use the word 'ethnic' to describe these restaurants, because using 'ethnic' means there's an idea of an 'other.' It means that you are from a superior culture looking in, and that's just not true at all."

Gold is methodically and insatiably curious. His home is filled with culinary history books, and he's been known to visit a restaurant as many as 17 times. He thrills in the discovery of a new dish or cuisine, but not nearly as much as he does when he begins to truly understand it.

For such a loving portrait of a man and a city, City of Gold is also tinged with a somber undercurrent. When a city is composed of so many disparate parts and communities, wondrous cultural overlaps emerge, but so too do fault lines and misunderstanding.

"I can't tell you how much I love Los Angeles," sighs Gold in one of the film's final, transfixing scenes. Suddenly, it's clear that Jonathan Gold needs the restaurants of Los Angeles—the people, their food, and their stories—as much as they need him, maybe even more.