Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another.Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
Ugly Delicious is a series on Netflix made by chef David Chang and his food critic/cookbook author friend, Peter Meehan. If you haven’t heard of David Chang, he is a first generation Korean American who opened a noodle bar called Momofuku in New York City in 2004. That noodle bar spawned something of an empire. David Chang now has fine dining restaurants not only in New York but in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington, DC, Toronto, and Sydney, Australia. He is only 41 years old and he is now pretty much a restaurant mogul. But more than that, he is a really thoughtful guy as this series shows.
Fair warning, the language in the series is pretty earthy and may not be appropriate for young children.
The show is about food that is very common — the sorts of things that are widely popular. This is not the rarified food of fine dining but food found in diners, cafes, and home kitchens. The episodes center around:
- Pizza
- Tacos
- Home Cooking (think Thanksgiving)
- Shrimp/Crawfish
- BBQ
- Fried Chicken
- Fried Rice
- Stuffed foods (like dumplings or stuffed pasta)
But Chang and Meehan also weave in the history of these foods, the cultures that make them, how they came to America, how they evolved here, and how the foods went mainstream. There are discussions about authenticity vs. innovation, appropriation, and (very topical for this moment) immigration and the immigrant experience. Can food lead to greater tolerance? Chang thinks it can — and I do, too.
There is much to learn here, all sorts of stuff. For example, some of the best pizza in the world can be found in Tokyo. One of the best restaurants in America according to Bon Appetit is a Barbacoa taqueria in Philadelphia — run by an undocumented immigrant. (If you go to Netroots Nation this summer, you can eat there!) Houston has delicious Viet Cajun crawfish developed by the Vietnamese community there — but New Orleans never will because everything has to stay rigidly traditional there. And fried chicken has a tragic, emotionally loaded past, very much linked to the time of enslavement of African Americans in the South (a fact that I was shamefully ignorant of). There is so much information packed into each episode that I am watching them all again, to pick up on things I missed the first time.
The structure of the episodes is very fluid, dancing from location to location, from history to contemporary interviews — if it were music, it would be jazz. I cannot recommend this series highly enough. It is entertaining, educational, and thought provoking. Thankfully, a second season is in the offing.
As an aside, David Chang and Peter Meehan also published a food “magazine” for a few years (each issue is more like a book, really, and centers around one theme) called Lucky Peach. It is no longer in publication but copies are still available. I just checked out a couple of issues through my library and they are very interesting.
The weekend begins now. Come in, be comfortable, and share your day, your weekend plans, your menus...