Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man eats all he can and weirdly enough, that seems to be the plan. Today’s post is a couple weeks late, and, in the end, it’s kind of underwhelming. An apt description of Jon’s dating life as well as his work. But you didn’t come here to read me rag on…me. (Well, statistically, several of you probably did, it’s a recurring theme in my work. It’d be like saying you didn’t come to see Sondheim for talk about romantic relationships.) You came because of the title: what’s going on with Ugly Delicious Season 2?

An Apertif

When we first reviewed Ugly Delcious season 1 back in 2018, we gave it a tentative 4 out of five stars. In case you forgot the fundamental details, Ugly Delicious is a show hosted by this man:

An asshole?

That’s David Chang, a big mover and shaker in the food world at the moment. If you don’t know about him: he created Momofuku, a noodle bar in New York that got rave reviews, and he worked that acclaim into a bunch of other projects. At this juncture, he’s already made two different Netflix series, he made a podcast, he’s got like, 20 restaurants. This is a man with HUSTLE. And the first season of Ugly delicious was a man trying to comprehend culture through cuisine: each episode focused on a dish (or style of dish), and approached it from various angles to really inspect its elements. I think, in retrospect, I might have been a little harsh on the program, and would give it 4.5 stars.

How does the second season add up? Frustratingly, because I think it’s just as good as the first season, but there’s only 4 damn episodes! That’s HALF the first season, DAVE. What the hell, man, what makes you think you can just-

Oh. I see. Yeah, let me just shuffle backward out of this.

That’s a good point to start, obviously, because it’s where Dave starts the season: Last year, Dave and Grace, his wife, had their first child. And the first episode, “baby food” is all about raising kids as a chef, the food we give children, families and children, and Grace and Dave’s journey through her pregnancy. It’s a heart-felt episode, showing Dave and Grace both getting perspectives from various other chefs, experts, and family members, on how their lives will be different once the baby is born. There’s some interesting details, some of which will be fairly controversial. For instance, one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer gave up on the season 20 minutes in, when a woman who’d been studying guidelines for ‘safe’ pregnancy revealed that some of the recommendations are overly cautious, notably with seafood and alcohol: while the US has long had a “you shouldn’t drink at all while pregnant”, other countries such as the UK have held “you should only have 1-2 drinks per week” as a guideline. And studies show…there’s almost no danger to that approach. It turns out that several of the “don’t eat/drink X while pregnant recommendations aren’t based on hard science, but rather a soft of vague “why take the risk?” mentality, or on basic food points dialed up: You could get food poisoning or harmful chemicals from bad sushi, so pregnant women shouldn’t eat any sushi, because ‘why take the risk”?

They have this conversation in a very-high-end sushi restaurant, to highlight the silliness of that stance.
Like, i don’t even LIKE most fish, and I’m not going to claim you’d get sick from that mackerel, unless it’s sick with envy.

After the kind of mushy opener, the second episode is perhaps the most “normal” of this season’s shows: it’s an exploration of Indian food, undertaken on the grounds that Dave is offended with himself that he knows so little about it. He talks with many Indian Americans (including writer for the NYT and Bon Appetit Priya Krishna, who’s cookbook I keep meaning to make something from), as well as straight-up Indians as he travels to the subcontinent to learn in person. This one feels a lot like your kind of standard cooking show, other than a return to what you could call the “cue ball narrative” effect the show showed in the first season, where often, we, the viewers will meet a chef or author with Dave, and then later we’ll go off with that person for a while, leaving Dave completely behind, like a cue ball starting the momentum for other balls to resolve the shots. (I don’t play a lot of pool.) So we’ll meet a chef in India, talking about how there are regions of India he hasn’t been to yet, and he’s excited to go check them out, and then 10 minutes later, we’re there with him, learning as he learns.

The third episode is about Steak, and more than the previous two episodes, brings back the implicit social commentary present in several season one episodes. The others contained SOME of the social commentary, but it was relatively minor asides and sort of implicit points. Here, there’s a point where Dave sits down with a woman who points out all the coding and loaded phrases present in a Burger King commercial.

It’s subtle, but if you look, you might see some gender bias here.

There’s some beautiful looking meat, and some discussions and ideas about what a steakhouse MEANS, and what eating beef in the future could be. There’s also a nice section where one of Dave’s friends goes to a bath/steakhouse, and there’s more discussion of masculinity. And also paying dudes to have sex with your wife!

The last episode…ooh buddy. There’s some heavy shit in there. Complicated, too. It is, in theory, a discussion of vertical spit-roasted foods. Which means it is the discussion of the diaspora of Arabian, Levantine and other Middle Eastern peoples, and their relations, since they are the originators of that technique. (Dave’s ignorance of this fact, and his assumption that it was simply a universal thing, is a small detail of the narrative: as with many, Dave had been unaware that Tacos al Pastor, the Mexican pork taco with pineapple, exists because of Lebanese immigrants fleeing the Ottoman empire.)Particular emphasis is given to several Syrian chefs, and their efforts to spread their culture and food following the refugee crisis of their Civil War, which includes a line heart-breaking in its resiliency.

“I will make you admit my people still exist” is such a…terrifyingly low bar.

Overall, as I noted earlier, my major complaint isn’t with anything here, but with what ISN’T here. Namely, another four episodes. Though others note that there are some troubling omissions (there is no representation of Israel in the 4th episode, which is…fine, since it’s more a discussion of Arabic peoples…but there is a moment where they’re literally defining the word “Levantine”, and name all the countries in the middle east bordering the Mediterranean EXCEPT Israel, which kind of feels like an unforced error. I get it, Israel’s relationship with the Arabic world is a fraught one, and it would be hard to integrate, But that also feels like the kind of topic that is right up this show’s alley, and could have been its own episode. )

One interesting absent portion is Peter. The first season of Ugly Delicious was kind of co-hosted by David Chang and Peter Meehan, co-author of his cookbooks, co-owner of their relatively short-lived Lucky Peach magazine and collaborator. Indeed, apparently the show Ugly Delicious was originally pitched as “The Lucky Peach Show”. Unfortunately, since the first season’s release, Peter and Dave have parted ways: Dave to continue his hustle, and Peter to move across the country and become the editor of the LA Times Food section, after the tragic passing of Jonathan Gold (a critic featured in the first season). It’s fascinating, because it wasn’t until I sat down to talk about the show that I realized Peter hadn’t been in the episodes, other than a quick moment in one of the episodes, where a chef I hadn’t expected to see again returned, and I momentarily thought “huh, I would have expected Peter to do this part”.

Overall, I definitely recommend Season 2, just as much as Season 1.

Huh. This is… another kind of short post. I just…tread a lot of ground this week that I’d already covered. Hmm. Now I kind of wish I’d handled the other topic I wanted to do today…You know what? Let’s go crazy:

SATURDAY: AN EXTRA POST AS JON DRINKS HIMSELF CRAZY IN QUARANTINE. WE’RE TALKING COLA, AND YOU MIGHT WANT SOME COKE TO GET THROUGH IT. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD.

MONDAY: JON MADE A SANDWICH THAT’S KINDA SPICY, KINDA SWEET, AND COMES WITH PUNS. EVEN BETTER, IT LETS HIM GO CRAZY ALL WEEK, WITH A EGG-CELLENT WEEK OF ANOTHER THREE POSTS. EGGS, EGGS, AND MORE EGGS.