Course correction
You will learn nothing about cooking from Netflix’s new series Chef’s Table— but everything about food
Watching Chef ’s Table, the new six-part documentary that debuted on Netflix this past Sunday, it becomes immediately clear that the series has a strong through line. It’s not simply its focus on chefs — each episode of Chef ’s Table is a 45-minute investigation of one of the world’s greatest culinary minds — but the rather the primary motivator that drives each one: a desire for innovation, often against all odds and advice.
“All these chefs had forged their own way,” says David Gelb, the series’ creator. “Massimo Bottura was explicitly told: Never mess with your grandmother’s recipes. Now he’s this celebrated chef, No. 3 in the world. These are real visionaries.”
Gelb is something of a visionary himself: He’s the director of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the hit 2012 documentary that has become a cult classic among food-minded cinemagoers. When Gelb set out to make that film, he had something completely different in mind — originally, he set out to Japan with the intention of making a movie about a number of dif- ferent sushi shops, but settled on Jiro after his subject proved too captivating. For Chef ’s Table, the plan was clear: Each of the six chefs — Bottura, Ben Shewry, Niki Nakayama, Francis Mallmann, Dan Barber and Magnus Nilsson — would get the Jiro treatment.
“We call them the spiritual sequel to Jiro,” Gelb says. “Each episode is its own documentary film, sort of a portrait of the artist, trying to get to the heart of why they’re so obsessed with what they do, and the cost of greatness. We talk about family, origin stories, their craft and aspiration.”
To be clear, this is not a series of cooking shows — “there’s nothing instructional,” Gelb says. Over the course of each episode, Gelb trains the camera not only on his subjects’ creations — menu items that are highlighted one by one at the end of each instalment — but on the characters themselves: Nilsson walks a dairy cow pasture in coldest Sweden as he explains his decision to cook the meat of dairy cattle rather than beef ones; Nakayama picks leafy greens as she discusses her ingredient-focused cooking; Bottura’s muse Lidia cradles fresh pasta with her hands as the Michelin-starred Italian chef reflects on the butting heads of tradition and forward thinking. Chef ’s Table is a series of six character-driven dramas, where the food plays an awardworthy supporting role.
“Any creative person has a great story,” Gelb says. “When I made Jiro, people didn’t get it. There’s a whole art behind it that people don’t really realize. It isn’t about what they’re cooking, but why.”
Each episode in Chef ’s Table was filmed over an immersive two weeks that saw Gelb and his crew following their subject from the professional kitchen to the living room. “We’re always trying to put the audience into the chef’s head,” Gelb says of the documentary series’ particular filmic perspective, which favours shallow depth of field, close focus and, sometimes, cheekily dramatic classical music. “We choose music and we choose our shots in ways that best bring out that perspective.”
He’s not entirely forthcoming in explaining why the six chefs he focuses on were chosen, saying simply that it had a lot to do with “making sure that our stories were different.”
“There are so many great chefs that have incredible stories,” he continues, “so narrowing it down was one of the hardest things. It also had a lot to do with which chefs were going to be the ones who are go- ing to tell their stories in a compelling way.”
The series is just the latest in a long line of documentaries, films, TV series and dramas focusing on food, a topic that Gelb agrees has become de rigueur on the big screen in the past decade. Chef ’s Table distinguishes itself stylistically — each episode lingers on its subjects and scenes in such a way as to risk slowness — but also in that it lets its central characters tell their own stories: there is no narration, Gelb points out, and no host. It’s as characterdriven as it gets.
And anyway, Gelb is happy to be part of a 21st-century tradition of food-based entertainment. Not just because he likes the idea of knowing more about what’s on his table but rather because, more simply, he likes sitting at it. “Food is an emotional thing for a lot of people,” he says. “Why food, for me? Because I like to eat.”
In his Chef ’s Table episode, Nilsson offers a different perspective — one that, aside from the idea of innovation, seems to tie the whole series together: “Food is the more important cultural manifestation we have,” he says, “because we all need to eat.”