Chef builds brand as he roams world, talks comfort food
David Chang and his new series, "Ugly Delicious," can most easily be defined by what neither is.
Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy U.S. showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer.
“Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a packyour-bags travelogue.
The series' eight episodes — available for streaming on Netflix — take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking.
The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four-letter word, and the occasional nonculinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.
What Chang and food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is ambitious: an extended TV essay, in the form of free-associative, globetrotting conversations about food and culture.
The conversations often take the form of arguments.
Working with the production company of Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville, Chang and Meehan dress up “Ugly Delicious” with stylistic flourishes that recall Bourdain’s shows as well as “The Mind of a Chef,” which Chang and Bourdain originated.
The restaurant visits and chef interviews are broken up with fake commercials, animations, film clips and more. The eighth episode is structured as a debate between Chang and chef Mario Carbone over the relative merits of Italian filled pastas and Asian dumplings.
These techniques, and a generous Netflix budget, are on display in the pizza episode, which was filmed in New York; Tokyo; New Haven, Connecticut; Copenhagen, Denmark; Naples, Italy; Los Angeles; and Las Vegas.
Demonstrating his trademark contrarianism, Chang praises Domino’s — even donning the company vest and delivering pies — and declares New Haven and then Tokyo as homes to the world’s best pizza.
What the show is truly selling is the Chang attitude and mystique, a combination of ego, exactitude, foul-mouthed rebelliousness and self-deprecatory nerdiness.
An important part of Chang’s persona at the start was his outsider status, casting stones at the bastions of haute cuisine where he had learned his trade. That became problematic as he built an international restaurant empire that recently added the 200-plus-seat Momofuku Las Vegas.
In “Ugly Delicious," he moves with a band of insiders that includes Meehan; superstar Danish chef Rene Redzepi; and Ansari, Chang’s fellow Netflix star. It’s also a boy’s club.
The series often allows Chang’s rough edges to show, and sometimes the picture is unflattering in ways that don’t seem intentional.
“I don’t know how the hell it all happened,” says Chang, mulling the franchise that he has become.
The claim seems unlikely. And one way to see the show, with its focus on pizza and tacos and dumplings, is as a branding exercise — a pivot away from highintensity cooking and toward the ugly deliciousness of comfort food.