Why hello there, and welcome back the Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re doing a Catastrophic Review! Man, it has been a minute. I’d argue we haven’t done a “real” one of these since August! February’s was weird because I didn’t get to see the whole show, January’s Princess Switch, while a fun little flick, was not nearly food-focused enough to be legit. So let’s instead talk about a 2-year old Netflix documentary I watched to make myself feel better the week before last…and then turned out to be surprisingly appropriate to review this week!

The Dish Comes with a Bitter Side

Now, this has been an interesting topic for me to consider, because, as I discovered last year, David Chang has become something of, as the kids say, “a problematic fave”. If you’re unaware, since we last talked about Dave on the show, some tragic things have come to light about both David and Peter Meehan. And by “tragic”, I mean “they have treated others tragically poorly”. Both, I have learned this year, had terrible anger management issues, and treated a number of their employees heinously. Peter, who had recently transitioned to run the LA Times food section, resigned after it was brought to light that he created a toxic work environment of fear, favoritism, and some very borderline social interactions, best recorded by Eater here.

Many have noted that Peter did exemplary work…just with a vastly too-high cost in the emotional wellbeing of his staff. And with that unveiling, a similar reappraisal of David’s behavior has unfolded, though notably not with effects as potent as Peter’s.

Chang’s most recent public suffering was on Celebrity “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”.

David has long been open that, when he began his climb as a chef, that he was a young man without skill at managing people, or the tools to properly manage his emotions. His restaurants frequently had to pay for repairs from “Korean Termites”, a euphemism he developed to refer to his habit of punching holes in the walls of his own restaurants, as well as breaking furniture or desks, due to his emotional outbursts.

If there’s one thing that’s saved David, and it’s a factor that weighs heavily in my choice to continue to enjoy his work, it’s firstly that aforementioned openness: he was admitting these problems YEARS ago, addressing that he knew his behavior was bad, and secondly he seems to mean that, and mean it more as he’s learned more of how harmful his actions were

Last December, he published a memoir, and one response to it was for a former employee of his to read it, and note that, while David mentions his fits of rage, he doesn’t apologize to the people he hurt with his actions. They note that him screaming in their face led to them struggling to continue their work, as their team no longer respected them, and that David’s behavior at that time was much more cruel and problematic than he presents it in the memoir When asked about the article, his response seems to me to be…well, damn near the platonic IDEAL of an apology, to my mind:

"While I do not recall these specific instances, they are entirely consistent with my behavior at the time, which I did not begin to correct until several years later. The bottom line is that I'm sorry. I'm still working to get better and repair many personal and professional relationships, but I also respect that the path to forgiveness does not exist on my terms. No one but me deserves to carry the burden of my past failings."

That’s potentially an especially poignant last line because it implies either that he read the article, or (less generously) that whoever asked him for comment gave him enough of a context for the article’s point, because the article is VERY focused on the idea that many people who worked for him have borne the scars of that experience, the burden of his mistreatment, for years since: that he has been allowed a healing they have been denied. (The author herself notes that she accepts the apology, but that said apology does not undo the damage it has done to her and her career.) So perhaps it’s merely a well-orchestrated façade, but for now, I believe him, and therefore will continue to approvingly watch and consume his content.

This is a picture of a dish made from a recipe he gave the New York Times while that former employee worked for him. Does it feel slightly more sinister, knowing how he treated them? Or is that just how all short rib looks?

Now, with all that baggage out of the way, let’s talk about my problems with his show.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, with some WHINE

Honestly, here’s my one biggest complaint with the show: it’s sometimes frustratingly vague in presenting what is, overall, a fairly standard food travel show. Like, take the name of the show. Why is it named “Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner”? Because that is the format of the show: Over the course of the episode, Dave will join a celebrity guest, and they will have breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and a couple snacks here and there) in a given location. And the (slight) frustration I have with that is that nothing in the show explains that, other than the name itself…which the first episode tells us is actually technically ‘Ugly Delicious Does Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner”, which is a little clearer, but you’re never directly TOLD that’s what we’re doing. It’s like…Look, I’ve been watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier lately, okay? (great, my example is going to date this immediately) and one complaint I have with the show is that it’s edited a little weird, and sometimes I feel like that weird editing leaves the audience a little adrift, which it brushes off with a “you’re a smart kid, you’ll figure this out” kind of attitude.

Like…Jesus, this’ll take a bit to explain. So, new Captain America and his buddy Lemar bust into a house. They cross to the stairs, guns drawn. NewCap covers the stairwell above as Lemar walks up to the next turn. Then he moves, and stops, looking down the stairwell, as we, the audience, see Lemar moving up to the next landing. Lemar walks out of frame, and 4 seconds later NewCap (who has not stopped looking downward), whispers to check in with him…with no response. Then he whispers again, STILL not looking up. He KIND of tilts his head as if MAYBE he will look up the staircase to where we saw his partner walk mere seconds ago, but doesn’t, and then a second later, we hear a faint and distant gun shot. It’s maybe the dumbest “we got separated” moment I’ve ever seen in television, since it’s two military veterans entering hostile territory where they expect to be outnumbered, and I guess Lemar just... reached the next landing and then SILENTLY SPRINTED AWAY. The only thing that makes it kind of understandable is that (unstated, but revealed very shortly), NewCap is currently experiencing the after-effects of taking Super-Soldier Serum…but the show doesn’t give us the standard “oh, he’s messed up right now” signifiers. It just lets us sit there as he blankly stares down, and then his friend vanishes off to magical “far away and hard to find” land.

In re-watching the scene, NewCap actually finds Lemar’s gun at the top of the stairs, meaning, I guess, that the banging we heard was meant to be a door slamming…meaning instead of Lemar sprinting away, he was GRABBED in what should have been Cap’s peripherals, and dragged away IN COMPLETE SILENCE.

If that example was more confusing than clarifying, I mean that, like FAWS,  I feel that BLD consistently, if the choice was between “explain ourselves” or “let them figure it out”, picked “let them figure it out”, and the result is I spend a lot of time not sure what I’m supposed to ‘grab onto’. In both cases, I’ve never before felt like I was being insulted by being treated like I was SMARTER than I think I am. And, even more frustratingly, the more I sit and think about the show, the more I ‘get’ it…but I feel like I’d have enjoyed the show more if I ‘got it’ while watching. Like, to use the dining analogy, there’s a reason there’s still a menu in most pris fixe restaurants: people are more comfortable when you give them a bit of context. You can give us the ‘amuse bouche’ to understand the menu, David.  Another publication noted you could call the show “uneven”, and I think this plays into that experience: Like, two of the four episodes end with a kind of voice-over thoughtful summary of the episode, so why not start the first one with like, a 15 second set-up of the idea of why you think it’s a valid enterprise to eat 3 meals in a place as a kind of sample? Instead, the first minute of the first episode is closer to a fugue-state nightmare that symbolically introduces us to a concept he will not bring up or revisit for the next 30 minutes, which is his fear that his fame has made him powerful enough that by him bringing attention to a restaurant by posting about it on social media or talking about it, he’ll ‘destroy’ the restaurant.

It’s very clearly communicated.

And you know what? It’s a solid moment when it lands, and It’s part of a recurring beat: Every episode starts with him having a dream that foreshadows stuff in the episode before waking up to start the day of eating, (number 4’s a little wobbly, but whatever). But A: it can’t have been impossible to do both. Have your artistic dream sequences that matters for the rest of the episode, cool, but then have some brief thing of you getting ready in your hotel room and making some kind of basic “it’s impossible to learn all there is to know about a city in one day. But with the right people, and the right choices, you can learn a lot about a place in just one breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Boom. Thesis for the show.  And B: if that’s the tactic you want to take…DO IT. The first episode’s dream sequence pay-off is emotionally affective, but with each successive episode, the ‘dream sequences’ feel less impactful, and mostly seem to just show off ‘something that you’ll see later, but that also fits the tone of the piece.’ (Like, episode 2 he sees a camel, and Chrissy Teigan, and later they go camel riding. Episode 3, he’s stuck in LA traffic, experiencing an array of things about the city, which all kind of snap-by, and none of which totally line up in a clear way with the rest of the episode, and then Episode 4 is like, an apocalypse now homage with the faded split screen of his face and the helicopter, and later they talk about the Vietnam war and he rides in a helicopter.) Like, if every one of the dream sequences landed as well as the first one, I’d completely burn my complaint about the lack of explanation, and it’d be a “cool recurring art-house element”.

Alright, that’s my big whinge. So, do I like the show?

On the Sunny Side

Generally, yeah, actually. There’s something kind of amazing about the mix of people, places, ideas, and attitudes, that, like I said, borders on a kind of art-house gestalt, and includes this element of how much the guest changes how the location is approached. Like, the first episode is Seth Rogen in Vancouver, and it is very much just “hey, Seth Rogen is from Vancouver, let’s get high with him and let him take us wherever he wants to go.” A bunch of places from Seth’s childhood or teenage years, discussions about creativity and work-life balance, there’s no indication that these restaurants are super emblematic or important, they’re just “places Seth likes/one his friend recommended.” It’s a chill vibe of easy discussion and deeply personal connections, culminating in a joking offer at the end to “just do this again tomorrow”.

Aquariums: chill places to hang.

Marrakech with Chrissy Teigan feels more polished, and more pointed: Chrissy last came to Marrakech when she was pregnant, and David’s wife is, at the time of the recording, pregnant, so there’s a running theme of parenting through the episode, interwoven with the discussions of how Marrakech is a constant weaving of the old and new.  (A subtle parallel summation of parenting itself).

L.A. he visits with Lena Waithe, and the discussion focuses on how both of them are residents of L.A, but that the sheer size and diversity of L.A mean that the two of them are, in many ways, residents of DIFFERENT L.A’s: the neighborhoods, businesses, and ideas that Lena (a gay Black woman and actor/writer/director/producer) and David (a straight Korean man and chef/producer) are comfortable with are very different. The episode also hilariously gives me the THINNEST of tie-ins to justify putting this review here, courtesy of their Breakfast location.

Do I detect some browning potatoes?

That’s right, suckers! Turns out rösti is back on the menu! (The best part of this discovery is the knowledge/humor of giving up 7 minutes before it appeared on screen, delaying covering the show for 2 weeks so that this week, I discover how beautifully it all fits together now)

The last episode is the most…adventurous, I think, in that it intentionally hurled itself into a confusing place, with less of a plan, and you can kind of see that the show is really trying to figure out what it’s going to be about as it goes: Kate McKinnon joins David in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. A location explicitly chosen by McKinnon on the grounds that she loves to explore places that don’t have a defined US expectation of them: in the way that the US “knows” what Ireland, or China, or Japan is like by having a list of stereotypes, foods, and images associated with them. Cambodia, by contrast, is really only known by the tragedy of the Killing Fields under Pol Pot. And that is certainly a heavy topic for a show ostensibly about food to confront, but I think it tries to do so in an admirable way.

It’s at least much nicer than this ACTUAL NEWSBROADCAST about the country they show.

Overall, I think the show is, while certainly not perfect, a fascinating piece. It’s an attempt by David to focus on places and people, with food as the binding agent, not the focus, as it is in his other shows, and while it lacks a bit in some regions, I like that it pushes itself. It’s a show that, the more I think about it, the more interesting some of the through-lines become, and the “smarter” it feels. Like, it’s cool how the episodes get progressively less ‘comfortable’/ more exploratory: Episode 1 is Chang and Rogen, who are clearly friends, in Rogen’s hometown. Episode 2 is David and Chrissy in a city Chrissy’s been to several times, talking about shared experiences. Episode 3 is David exploring new parts of the city he semi-recently moved to with Lena, who he introduces as “knowing through mutual friends”, and episode 4 drops him into a place he’s never been, with the direct incentive of “we don’t know what this will be like”, with someone he does not know exceedingly well.

David says he wanted to make the show in part as an homage to his friend Anthony Bourdain, whom he called “Uncle Tony”, and who gave him his first TV hosting job through PBS’s show “Mind of a Chef”, and whose tragic suicide the year before rocked many. David spent an entire episode of his podcast discussing his own battles with depression in…’honor’ feels like the wrong word…to honor his friend’s memory, and aid others who might suffer as he suffered. And you can see it, in the basic kind of “travel show trying an array of dishes in a local, getting to know the history and the people” ideas. But I think it’s different enough that it stands on its own.

Do I recommend it?  I can tell you I enjoyed my time with it. But I think it is, in a way, so personal, that I wonder if I’d have the same interest if not for all the other knowledge I have of David Chang. I’ll say that it’s a cool insight into the guests, with some cool points and ideas about the places, and that at only 4 episodes, it’s not that hard to give it a shot.

MONDAY: IT’S EITHER CHICKEN OR BEEF, SINCE THOSE ARE GOING TO GO BAD FIRST. SO WE’LL EITHER BE IN THE MIDDLE EAST OR KOREA.

THURSDAY: WE MIGHT TALK ABOUT SPICE MIXES, DEPENDING ON WHICH THING I DO.