NETFLIX'S CHEF'S TABLE first aired in April of 2015, following show creator and American director David Gelb’s much-acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which centred on 85-year-old Jiro Ono, considered to be one of the best sushi craftsmen in the world, the running of his ten-seater restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro in a Tokyo subway station and his relationship with his son and heir Yoshikazu.
Gelb brought a similar auteur’s eye to documenting food, kitchens, ingredients, chefs and cuisine histories to Chef’s Table. His style felt lightyears away from the cooking shows captured by static cameras showing cooks over their chopping boards or stoves. In Chef’s Table, the camera is dynamic, alive and thrilling like it’s shooting a car chase sequence. It draws the audience into these tiny, organised spaces; it is intimate; and it has been described as “the most beautiful show about food, ever”. Over its six main seasons and three topical ones so far, it has welcomed us into a new-found appreciation for food – its production and its preparation. But it has also heavily contributed to the mythmaking of chefs as geniuses, celebrities and stars.
It wasn’t until the late great Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential, published in 2000, that chefs became cool. They became part of the culture. And with chefs across reality television competition shows being given humanising backstories, they weren’t simply a functional tribe of round pegs in square holes anymore. They were also the frills. And over the years, in response to growing criticism of being a white boy’s club, Chef’s Table has also begun to consciously highlight more women and people of colour across the F&B industry in its more recent seasons.
And it’s binge-time again, after a two-year hiatus, it’s back! Netflix has just promised us three new seasons of Chef’s Table on its menu. This time around, it returns on October 2 with Chef’s Table: Noodles, a single-topic focussed season of four episodes. This off-shoot on noodles promises to be like their previous in-depth takes on pastry, barbecue, and the show’s last season – on pizza-makers in the United States, Rome and Japan, which aired in 2022.
Chef’s Table: Noodles will feature Evan Funke, a Los Angeles-based chef known for his handmade pasta; Guirong Wei the London chef who practises Shaanxi cuisine – known for its ‘fragrant spicy’ flavours and it uses noodles more than any other Chinese cuisines; Nite Yun, a Cambodian chef based in Oakland, California who is popularising her home cuisine in the United States; and then, there’s Peppe Guida, the Italian chef of the Michelin-starred Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa.
And, on November 27, a new series of the original program Chef’s Table: Volume 7 will be released. Here it returns to familiar format spotlighting chefs from across a range of cuisines. The names released so far are: Nok Suntaranon of Philadelphia’s Kalaya; Kwame Onwuachi of New York City’s Tatiana; Ángel León of El Puerto de Santa María, Spain’s Aponiente; and Norma Listman and Saqib Keval of Mexico City’s Masala y Maíz and Mari Gold.
And there’s more for fans of the show. In 2025,to mark the food documentary series’ tenth anniversary, they’ve planned Chef’s Table: Legends given the calibre of the forty-four chef’s featured so far. It’ll be exciting to see who they decide are the ‘legends’ to feature.
But honestly, I’m excited to hear the stirring sounds of 'Winter' from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; Chef’s Table might be one of the few opening credits I don’t ever skip. And a focus on noodles – it’ll be great. Who doesn’t love noodles?
Netflix’s Chef’s Table: Noodles will begin streaming on October 2.