"The seventh meal in an evening is hard to do," said Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic at the LA Times. "I ate at 150 places in Chicago for a magazine cover story a long time ago."

If you think you've seen someone who looks like Gold eating around Chicago the past few years, you might be right. His daughter is a University of Chicago senior, so he's been chowing down among us for years.

Get a better look at Gold in the new documentary film in which he stars, "City of Gold," which opens this Friday at the Century Centre Cinema in Lakeview. (I highly recommend the big screen, instead of waiting for Netflix, plus he'll do a live Q&A Friday and Saturday. Details below.)

In the film, we ride along -- because it is LA and Gold drives his pickup truck everywhere -- and wish we could eat along, reaching into the sun-dappled screen to cradle the mounded tortillas from chef Wesley Avila's Guerilla Tacos truck. And we sweat along as Gold fights his surprising procrastination.

Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips writes in his review, "Not long after the 1992 riots, an LA friend of mine told me that the only thing holding the city together was Jonathan Gold's columns."

For food fans who read reviews and menus just for fun -- and sometimes solace in these newly tumultuous times -- Gold's writing ripples far beyond the sprawl of Southern California. Plus his roots run deep in Chicago.

Gold's grandmother ran the flower shop at the old Ambassador East, once the must-stay celebrity hotel. "When my mom was in college, she'd take dates to the Pump Room," he said by phone from LA recently. "They'd be floored and intimidated that everyone knew her. That was cool."

Both of Gold's parents were from Chicago, so he naturally followed his father's hot dog heritage, going to Fluky's when it was on Western Avenue, until it closed. The building is now a mosque. "That's fitting because it was a site of religious pilgrimage for my father," said Gold, laughing.

"Now I go to Byron's. They just make the essential Chicago hot dog, a great solid dog. I think it's better than the Vienna factory," he added blasphemously. "I love the unripeness of the tomato. Anywhere else it would be intolerable. But if you put a great tomato on a Chicago hot dog I think the world might explode."

Gold may be best known for his decades-long coverage of food carts, trucks and dives, so his current Chicago must-eat may be surprising. "I always go to Next," he said, "It's one of my favorite places in the world. There's no other restaurant that does anything like that. Everyone there is so engaged. It's like a theatrical opening."

"I also like Table, Donkey and Stick. They've got that gastro pub with German thing going on, and the food is just beautiful. And Fat Rice, how can you not love Fat Rice?"

"The last dozen times I was (in Chicago), I stayed on the South Side," said Gold. "I'm kind of there a lot, but I'm not eating around as much as I wish I could."

But that may just be comparative. In the film, he says his record was 17 visits to one restaurant before he wrote a review.

"It was a new Taiwanese restaurant," said Gold, "They served bitter melon that sometimes had the lusciousness of the best melon of the summer, but other times had a bitterness like medicine. And a soup, they called a potage, with a weird, odd mucilaginousness, that tasted like someone had stubbed out cigarettes in it."

"I just wanted to flee. But it was crowded, and everyone was enjoying their food. I wanted an understanding of what made it so enjoyable. I went so often that one of the waitresses thought I wanted to date her. The owner called me his one American customer. In the end I didn't love it."

Gold declined to name the restaurant and said it has since closed.

"There are two things I don't do: write about, like, look at the 'gross things' I eat," he said, "Or the semi-detached looking at a butterfly pinned to a cork board.

"It's a process. To see if there's a thereness to it."

"As the critic for LA Times, I can't do that as much as I wish I could anymore. Just like Phil Vettel can't," said Gold, "Now I visit a restaurant three, four or five times before I write a review."

"I think I had it in my unwritten contract when I was at Gourmet that I did not have to eat more than three meals a day."

"I just wish some day I can eat, at my leisure, at all the Korean restaurants on Lincoln Avenue."

Until then, Gold reads reviews written by some local civilians. "Chicago has the best, healthiest Internet food scene in the entire country," he said, "LTH (the Chicago-based food forum) is amazing. The attention paid to the meals of marginal cultures. I wish we had something like that here in LA."

Gold will do a live post-film Q&A this Friday and Saturday nights after the 7:15 p.m. showings at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago. "City of Gold" director Laura Gabbert joins Gold on Friday only. I will moderate the Q&A on Saturday. (Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., 773-248-7759; for information, go to www.landmarktheatres.com.)

lchu@tribpub.com

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