‘Master Of None’: Aziz Ansari’s Eating Disorder

Season Two of Master Of None begins with Aziz Ansari making pasta and ends with him eating tapas. In between, he gorges himself on cheese and ribs and ramen and seemingly endless glasses of premium wine. In Ansari’s world, love is uncertain and tender. It causes anxiety and even grief. But the tasting menu, often served in an awesome secret pop-up restaurant, will never be untrue.

Aziz Ansari loves food, as the media is fond of telling us. Within the last month, Time magazine published “A Complete History” of Ansari’s “obsession,” including the highly-relatable story of how GQ once sent Ansari to Japan to eat food with the guy from LCD Soundsystem. People published an article called “Aziz Ansari Rants Against The Term Foodie” (“ahead of the Met gala,” but of course). Bon Appetit added “Master Of None Cast’s Best Tinder Pickup Lines About Food” to the suck-up menu. Ansari is the captain of the luxury food culture yacht, urging us all to treat ourselves.

Ansari’s lens on food culture is as generous as his brunch helpings. If you really want to know a culture, as Andrew Zimmern is fond of telling us in front of a green screen, then eat what the grandmas are cooking. And Master Of None, approximately every third episode, does an incredibly good job of replicating that principle. This season’s highlights include an African cabdriver obsessing about owning a Dairy Queen franchise in Florida and a moving and hilarious storyline where Ansari’s character finally comes clean to his Muslim parents about eating bacon. The rightly-lauded “Thanksgiving” episode contains plenty of yam references and forces us to listen to Ansari talk about “matters of the tum-tum,” but only as a backdrop to a clever and sweet lesbian coming-of-age story and to a great guest performance by Angela Bassett. The sequence where Ansari takes his devout cousin to eat at pork trailers at Smorgasburg is a little hipster-schticky, but it’s well within story bounds.

But in the main plotline, Ansari is an elitist food jerk. He doesn’t just eat at restaurants, he eats at the best restaurants, in the back room, having the most incredible delicacies brought to him in person by the top chef. He sups on magnificent appetizers at a private party where John Legend drops by to play the piano, which is amazing, he thinks. No reservation cannot be achieved, and there’s never fretting over the price of a bottle of wine. The whole thing reeks of dinner at Versailles, circa 1786. Let them eat tagliatelle.

For all of the good press Ansari’s received about his love of neo-realist Italian movies, those movies actually addressed poverty, inequality, and injustice. Ansari’s attitude toward Italy is much more magical realist, where anything amazing can happen at any point, usually having to do with food. And if the food Bastille does get stormed, it will be because of this season’s second episode (“Le Nozze”). Arnold, Eric Wareheim’s character, just dropping by Italy for a wedding, interrupts Ansari’s pasta-making idyll in Modena. Previously, Arnold was a Kramer-like figure, offering off-kilter avuncular advice and collecting strange dolls. Suddenly, he’s transformed into a linen-suited rich idiot, and is much worse for the wearing of the pocket square.

Somehow Arnold procures a table for two at the world’s greatest restaurant, presided over by Chef’s Table maestro Massimo Bottura, who serves such delicacies as peasant under glass. Wareheim and Ansari gaze at their squid moonily and clink glasses. They drive scooters many miles to go sniff cheese. It’s got all the noblesse oblige of The Trip To Italy, except instead of genius comedians doing amazing Michael Caine and Sean Connery voice-overs, we get a couple of twinks singing “Eating in Italy is my fav-o-rite thing…Eating in Italy is my fav-o-rite…thing!”

At some point, as they wander through a market, sniffing sausages, Wareheim says, “I’m sick of America, can we just be Italians now?” Apparently, America is so worn out that our enlightened classes must seek the authenticity of Italy, a beautiful country to visit that also has double-digit unemployment and a terrifying fascist history. People have been trying to escape Southern Europe for centuries. But for Americans, it’s a lovely setting for a life-changing adventure. We traverse dead empires on our Vespas, rich friends crowing about flavor, sucking the marrow from the bones.

Back stateside, Ansari takes some nifty shots at The Food Network, with a funny Cupcake Wars parody that probably should have been funnier. But then once again, he steers the show into food yuppie territory with the introduction of BFF (Best Food Friends), a distressingly pathetic travel show-within-the-show that Ansari’s character co-hosts with an Anthony Bourdain type. We’re subjected to yet another annoying Bobby Cannavale performance, and then a potentially interesting plot twist gets quickly discarded.

When it comes to anything related to his true love—food and food culture—there’s no punch that Ansari won’t pull. Yet maybe he has more self-awareness than we think. The show’s new love interest is Francesca, a manic-pixie Italian girl who’s so much Ansari’s dream that she actually grew up in a pasta shop, like a beautiful lady Pinocchio. But she has a different attitude toward the table. To Francesca, Italian food is just food. She makes an offhanded comment to Ansari that “all you do is eat in different restaurants.” At a special party thrown by Cannavale, he slices some obscure Iberian hock, and asks them for one word to describe what they’re eating. Ansari says, “MMM DELICIOUSNESS!” Francesca curls up her mouth adorably and says “ham.”

That sums up Master Of None pretty well. All the people who love to eat and love to watch Aziz at the buffet are busy proclaiming its deliciousness. Once in a while, usually the episodes featuring Ansari’s parents, they’re right. But most of the time, it’s just ham.

Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Watch Master Of None on Netflix