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Cruising the 'City of Gold' and finding a city's culinary soul along the way (Mmm. Tacos)

Growing up in Northern California I was taught to hate Los Angeles. Fake. Stuck up. Smoggy. Pick a cliché. Only later in life, when I actually started spending time in the city, did I realize I'd been hoodwinked. Assigning a blanket value to L.A.'s infinite and infinitely rich variety of cultures is a fool's errand.

The new documentary City of Gold, opening Friday, is a gastro tour of that variety, led by a man who knows the city and its culinary delights about as well as anyone. "Everybody thinks they know what Los Angeles is, even if they've never been there," says the film's tour guide, the Los Angeles Times' Jonathan Gold, who became the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

An ample, quietly gregarious man who favors suspenders and spicy food, Gold finds the soul of the city in its taco trucks and out-of-the-way Thai restaurants, in Koreatown and in Little Ethiopia. He cruises San Gabriel in his truck, rattling off tidbits about every eatery he passes. He is what he eats, and he eats it all. (Go to his Twitter account, @thejgold, and you'll discover the best spots to eat pig feet).

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Throughout the journey he drives home a salient point: The way to a city's identity is through its stomach.

"Food in a city speaks a lot to its aspirations," Gold says. "It says a lot about how a town thinks of itself, sometimes in ways you wouldn't predict. More important, it says a lot about the people who live there."

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What Gold seems to love about L.A. is similar to what I've come to love. It's a city of neighborhoods, or, if you really want to wrap your arms around its vastness, a city of smaller sub-cities.

Gold doesn't like the word "ethnic": "If you say something is ethnic, what you're saying is it's other than the dominant culture. You're looking at it in a sort of parochial way." So let's say Gold is a connoisseur of traditional foods brought to the region by its vibrant immigrant cultures: Mexican, Thai, Afghan, Ethiopian, Vietnamese. "Not necessarily the fancy Vietnamese place that's opened in the hipster district," he says. "The one in the intermediate part of town where there's an actual Vietnamese community serving and cooking the noodles that they themselves like to eat for breakfast."

So what about Dallas? If a city if largely defined by its cuisine, who are we? I posed the question to Dallas Morning News restaurant critic Leslie Brenner, who also happens to be a transplanted Angeleno.

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"Dallas wants to be sophisticated, and wants to be considered sophisticated by the rest of the country," she says. "You can see it in our architecture and our cultural institutions. If we don't have it here, we bring it here. But it doesn't work that way with restaurants, which need to be homegrown and express a sense of place in order to be aesthetically interesting."

It's that sense of place that City of Gold conveys so well. Gold is firmly entrenched in his native land; he gave up on the ideal of anonymity long ago. He's a civic institution, as deeply woven into L.A.'s fabric as traffic and sunshine.

But there I go again, with the generalizations. What can I say? Old indoctrination dies hard.