David Chang's Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner is proof that celebrity food TV has gone too far

Slate

Chang's four-part Netflix follow-up to Ugly Delicious is too focused on celebrities and consumption, says Nicholas Cannariato. "I came of age watching food television that was all about the act of cooking itself: how to chop an onion, mince garlic, fry an egg, roast chicken, emulsify a vinaigrette," says Cannariato. "Mostly on PBS, Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, Ming Tsai, Lidia Bastianich, and the cooks at America’s Test Kitchen gave televised tutorials to teach the public how to cook well for themselves, their families, and their friends. The hosts of those old PBS shows were skilled professionals who conveyed the nuances of food for the enhancement of public knowledge and well-being, not celebrity chefs and their celebrity friends reflecting on life as they savored delicacies in some photogenic locale. Food television was about ordinary people learning to cook and create. But now it’s become much more about consumption and contemplation, with more than a dash of half-baked insights into culture and life. How-to cooking shows still exist on PBS, Food Network, and elsewhere, but they’re overshadowed by travel food shows like Somebody Feed Phil and chef-as-philosopher shows such as Chef’s Table and The Mind of a Chef, which deliver a fusillade of platitudes and self-satisfied semi-insights into culture and life." On Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, Chang travels the world with celebrities Seth Rogen, Chrissy Teigen, Lena Waithe and Kate McKinnon. But the problem with a celebrity-focused food show, says Cannariato, is that the food becomes overshadowed by the celebs talking about fame and their own success. "Chang and his friends’ approach to those more foreign cultures is open and curious to a point, but their desire to experience culture competes with their need to reflect on their worldly success and its pitfalls while in those places," he says. Cannariato adds: "In Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, the viewers are at risk of 'spinning off the planet' themselves. It’s how you know food programming needs to return to its how-to roots, stripping itself of its celebrity focus and its anxious inwardness and its casting about for “what it all means” in the midst of profound earthly success."

ALSO:

• It's unavoidable to draw comparisons between David Chang and Anthony Bourdain
• Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner unexpectedly delivers "the next Bourdain" in Chang
• Breakfast, Lunch & Diner comes across primarily as a vehicle for Chang to hang out with the fellow stars he would otherwise like to befriend in private