When Chef’s Table premiered on Netflix back in 2015, I remember having a stupid fleeting thought: Who would want to watch such a thing? This sort of docuseries, I assumed, would just make a person hungry. Culinary foreplay without the payoff. If you’re going to make a show like Chef’s Table, my feeling was that it’s better to do it with a punk rock vibe. And it should have a host who’s profane, who has a bit of an edge, wears a leather jacket, and blazes a trail of devil-may-care charm across the world (gee, I wonder where I got the idea for all that from).
Obviously, it’s a good thing I’m not a decision-maker at Netflix. Because in the decade since its debut, Chef’s Table has gone on to become one of the most transportive, soul-stirring franchises ever to have launched on the streaming giant — it’s not just about food, but about obsession, memory, craft, and the haunting ache of wanting to make great art.
Across its core seasons and spinoffs — including Chef’s Table: France, Noodles, BBQ, Pizza, and the newly released Legends — the show from creator David Gelb has remained a sumptuous visual feast. It also honors food not merely as fuel, but as an extension of self, ancestry, pain, joy, and hope. Each episode centers not on the dish, but the journey: A fight for a creative voice, a leap into the unknown, and a desire to leave something behind.
Chef’s Table has given us food porn, yes — slow-motion drizzles, glistening glazes, flames dancing under copper pans — but more than that, the show offers a way to understand the artist behind each plate. A reason to care about why someone devotes their life to baking bread, grilling meat, or coaxing poetry from flour and broth.
No show has treated food more cinematically. And none has treated chefs more like poets, philosophers, and renegades.From Argentina’s fire-loving iconoclast Francis Mallmann to monks on mountains and noodle-slingers on Tokyo side streets, Chef’s Table taught us to sit still. And to understand that the best meals often start as anything from a memory of childhood to a rebellion against tradition, or even just a search for meaning through flavor.
As Mallmann put it in Episode 3 of Season 1: “I am a cook that uses cooking to send this message of a way of living… Get out of your chair or your sofa or your office, and go out.”
Chef’s Table is a show about masters, but not in the cold or unreachable sense. These are people who’ve failed, quit, wandered, and changed. They walked away from restaurants, some of them. Others from fame and even family. Because something inside keeps pulling them forward toward reinvention.
Mallmann, who closed his beloved Los Negros, explains: “I have to go on with my life. I have to go on living and growing and doing what I have to do.” His career trajectory underscores the salient truth that growth costs something. And maybe that’s the deepest lesson Chef’s Table has imparted over its run these last 10 years: That comfort is the enemy of greatness. We don’t flourish on safe, paved roads. As Mallmann also says during his episode, “You don’t grow on a secure path … In order to grow and to improve, you have to be there a bit at the edge of uncertainty.”
So many of us settle into routine, while a show like this dares us to chase meaning. It whispers that beauty lies in the devotion to something difficult, in the relentless pursuit of flavor, precision, emotion — of anything. Process matters as much as the result.
After 10 years, Chef’s Table remains one of the most beautiful, profound things Netflix has ever made. It’s a meditation on what it means to care so deeply about something that it changes you. And it’s a love letter to my favorite quote of all from Mallmann, whose ethos is simply: “All of us should conquer something in life.”
