David Chang and his new Netflix series, “Ugly Delicious,” can most easily be defined by what they’re not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer. “Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a pack-your-bags travelogue.
The show would, in some ways, look at home on the Food Network. Its eight episodes 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 non-culinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.
What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.
Since this is Mr. Chang we’re talking about, the conversations often take the form of arguments, and include a fair number of insults, which we’re to believe are good-natured.
And those arguments aren’t really, or solely, about pizza or barbecue. Those familiar foodstuffs are vehicles for Mr. Chang’s cranky, obsessive pursuit of questions about tradition and innovation, authenticity and migratory mash-ups, the racist roots of attitudes toward food, and Americans’ unslaked appetite for Italian cooking.
Working with the production company of the Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville, Mr. Chang and Mr. Meehan dress up “Ugly Delicious” with stylistic flourishes that recall Mr. Bourdain’s shows as well as “The Mind of a Chef,” which Mr. Chang and Mr. Bourdain originated. The restaurant visits and chef interviews are broken up with fake commercials, animations, film clips and parodies of Japanese TV comedies or the “Saturday Night Live” Julia-Child-bleeds-out skit. The season finale is structured as a debate between Mr. Chang and the 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 Brooklyn, Tokyo, New Haven, Copenhagen, Naples, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Demonstrating his trademark contrarianism, Mr. Chang praises Domino’s — even donning the company vest and delivering pies — and declares New Haven and then Tokyo as the homes of the world’s best pizza.
The visual curlicues and the attempts to impose a larger thematic structure and narrative — there’s an awful lot of tired talk about how food tells stories — don’t hide the reality that there isn’t a whole lot new or surprising about “Ugly Delicious.” (The exception: the openness with which it discusses racism as a fundamental force in culinary culture.) Its primary influence, as with other food shows, will probably be to max out reservations at impossibly cool-looking restaurants like the Tokyo pizzeria Seirinkan or the locavorish Salare in Seattle.
What the show is really selling is the Chang attitude and mystique, a combination of ego, exactitude, foul-mouthed rebelliousness and self-deprecatory nerdiness. With the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar 14 years ago, he fortuitously caught the waves of both millennial casualness and fangirl-fanboy-style fetishization (of ingredients, of methods, of chefs) that swept through the restaurant business.
An important part of Mr. Chang’s persona at the start was his outsider status, casting stones at (or at least making withering remarks about) 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.
And in “Ugly Delicious” he moves with a band of insiders that includes Mr. Meehan, the superstar Danish chef René Redzepi and Mr. Ansari, Mr. Chang’s fellow Netflix star. It’s also a boy’s club. An episode about home cooking is the only one with an equal representation of women and men among the significant speaking roles. In all the others men outnumber women by 2 or 3 to 1; in the pizza episode it’s 8 to 1. This may reflect the state of affairs in the food industry, but it’s surprising for a series that wants to talk about diversity and representation.
(African-American chefs and commentators are even less present, appearing almost exclusively in an episode about the coded meanings and cultural signifiers of fried chicken.)
The show often allows Mr. Chang’s rough edges to show, and sometimes its picture of him is unflattering in ways that don’t seem intentional. His jibes can cross over into meanness, and his pontifications can appear oblivious, as when he compares the art of barbecue to the art of jazz in an episode focused entirely on white and Asian cooks.
“I don’t know how the hell it all happened,” Mr. Chang says, contemplating 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 high-intensity cooking toward the ugly deliciousness of comfort food. The penultimate episode ends with him holding a plate of kimchi and Spam fried rice toward the camera. In the Chang vernacular, it looks bonkers, and you’ll want to crush it.
