‘Ugly Delicious’ Is Officially The Best Food Show On Netflix

Ugly Delicious is the best food show on Netflix. Yes, it’s better than Chef’s Table and Cooked and Rotten. It’s really that good, and that is saying something. What gives chef David Chang‘s fun and frenetic series the edge is that it’s one of the only food documentaries with the cajones to reflect on the food doc genre itself. Ugly Delicious doesn’t just serve up a tremendous visual feast for foodies, it also examines what makes food, well, food. Chang and his compatriots travel the globe in search of the best eats, and in doing so, they question why we like the things we like.

Ugly Delicious also brazenly satirizes the sanctimony of foodie culture. Chang not only skewers the cliché of chefs who treat their work like ground-breaking art in a goofy sketch, but he forces friend and noted pizza chef Mark Iacono to try Domino’s right there in Lucali.

Ugly Delicious isn’t afraid to go where other food documentary series won’t: the real world.

David Chang’s deep-dive into the world’s favorite foods is part escapist foodie porn, part searing condemnation of prejudice. Like Netflix’s other stellar food docs, Chef’s Table and Cooked, Ugly Delicious features some sumptuous filmmaking. It is, first and foremost, a glittering Netflix food doc. There is some sexy cinematography here, people. Ugly Delicious makes rolling pizza dough look sensuous and slippery Chinese delicacies come off as austerely beautiful. We get to see the bright kitchens of Massimo Botturo, a stellar pizza eaten against a perfect Italian sunset, and an appetizing array of Mexican fruits, plucked from the Tulum jungles. Simply put, Ugly Delicious is very, very pretty.

Ugly Delicious is also star-studded. Yes, Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel, Ali Wong, and Nick Kroll all pop up to offer their comedic perspectives on food culture, but the series also features a who’s who of international food experts. We hear from everyone from Ruth Reichel to René Redzepi. David Chang’s own wife and mother pop up in an episode dedicated to the heart and soul of all cuisine: home cooking. But Chang goes deeper still. He and his partner-in-crime, Peter Meehan, learn how to cook local delicacies from unknown maestros. Often its these humble home cooks, working far away from the glitz of Michelin star ratings, who dazzle the most.

A lot of food documentaries lean on famous faces and celebrity chefs to draw eyeballs, but Ugly Delicious uses its cavalcade of food-lovers for a different purpose. Ugly Delicious is a show that wants to understand what drives personal “taste.” How much of what we love about food is based upon how good the food is and how much of it is based on our personal experiences? Each episode circles around the same answer: though we’re united in our hunger for good food, we’re divided by cultural differences that determine what makes food “good” in the first place.

Though the series features Chang in various moments of self-reflection, one episode seems to provide the lynchpin for the entire series. In the “Home Cooking” episode, Chang says, “Home cooking, what I call ‘ugly delicious food,’ has now become the food I wanna make in the restaurant.” It’s not just about sharing his Korean-American culture, but recapturing a primordial feeling. Chang keeps musing that what makes food truly delicious is how it triggers some deep-rooted memory of being well-fed by our families. And Chang believes that everyone should be well-fed.

While most food shows are about the splendor of food or the moral and economic cost of it, Ugly Delicious wants to get down to how our tastes reflect our humanity. It’s the only food documentary series I can think of that asks questions that we don’t have easy, obviously, moralizing answers for. What even is good food? Is the best food from the most creative minds? Or is it something born from love and toil? Or is it just the shit we like to eat even though we know it’s bad for us? And why should we make a point to get out of our comfort zones? At one point, Chang explains why he’s so dead set on expanding his diners’ palates. He tells friend, Master of None creator Alan Yang, “I can’t change their politics, but maybe I can by opening up their viewpoints to food.”

Stream Ugly Delicious on Netflix