Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
And we’re back. TEPTS went on spring break for March—what happens in South Padre stays in South Padre—but we’re back with a look at stuff you can stream about stuff you can eat.
One of the more anticipated food-related releases of the 2019 is the new season of Chef’s Table. Created by David Gelb of Jiro Dreams of Sushi fame, each 50 minute episode focuses on the story of a single chef. This season, we meet Mashama Bailey of The Grey, in Savannah, Ga, Dario Ceccini of Solociccia Panzano, in Tuscany, Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express in London, and Sean Brock of Husk, with locations in Charleston, Nashville, and Greenville, SC.
A major difference between Chef’s Table and Chang or Nosrat’s shows comes in the focus – Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and Ugly Delicious are about food, while Chef’s Table is about people who cook food. It may be that I find food more compelling than people, but the episodes in a series focused on people instead of food tend to blur together, in spite of the very different stories these chefs bring to the table, if you will. One major liability of Chef’s Table is the music, which is snippets of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons pretty much everywhere. I am sure Vivaldi has his fans, but it’s music that indicates, more than anything, that you are watching a documentary.
I found the episodes about Mashama Bailey and Asma Khan more compelling than the ones on Brock and Ceccini – Brock’s story is pretty familiar, and he has already had a season-long run on The Mind of a Chef, and watching Ceccini cook big old steaks does not translate that well to television. Conversely, Bailey and Khan will be less familiar stories for most viewers, and cover more exciting terrain. Charleston enjoys a deserved reputation as a culinary mecca, while Savannah, its Georgia sibling, has languished with restaurants that just don’t rise to the level of the scenery, including Paula Deen’s notorious Lady & Sons. For a Black female chef to survive and thrive in that context is a story worth hearing. Similarly, at a moment when the abusive masculine culture of so many restaurants has become a focus of the #metoo movement, what Asma Khan is doing in London is nothing short of radical. I’d suggest watching these first, and if you have room for more Vivaldi, move on to the dudes. Better yet, re-watch Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat while you wait for Season 2 to drop. Alternatively, wait for the Chef’s Table spinoff – Street Food. The trailer looks exciting, though it has the look of one of the many food TV shows that will make viewers miss Tony Bourdain.
More On:
To Eat, Perchance To Stream
Elsewhere, Wayne Haydin goes MST3K on a crawfish travesty – “all those crawfish lost their lives for nothing.” If you want to watch the whole thing, it’s Man Fire Food, Season 6 Episode 9.
Further down the road, food TV fans will want to keep an eye out for the Netflix adaptation of Comfort Me With Apples, the first installment of Ruth Reichl’s biography. The grande dame of food writing just dropped Save Me The Plums, a book about her time at the help of the late and much lamented Gourmet magazine. It will be interesting to see how the adaptation goes – Reichl was an enormously powerful critic, but it will be a challenge to put the work of a critic on a TV screen. If you are curious to see how other showrunners handled the challenge, you can stream The Critic on Crackle.
Finally, if you have six seconds, you can watch controversial theorist Slavoj “A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” Žižek demolish two hot dogs while walking down the street.
Jonathan Beecher Field was born in New England, educated in the Midwest, and teaches in the South. He Tweets professionally as @ThatJBF, and unprofessionally as @TheGurglingCod. He also sometimes writes for Avidly and Common-Place.
