As Chef’s Table returns to Netflix with a four-episode seventh season, it’s on the heels of the spinoff Chef’s Table: Noodles and the announcement of the upcoming Legends, a season to celebrate ten years of the Emmy-nominated docuseries from creator David Gelb (Jiro Dreams of Sushi) and director Brian McGinn. Season 7 of Chef’s Table presents four new chef profiles, supported with delectable shots of their food and its preparation: Kwame Onwuachi of Tatiana in New York City; married Mexico City restaurateurs Norma Listman and Saqib Keval; Ángel León of Aponiente in Cádiz, Spain; and in the first episode, Nok Suntaranon, chef-owner of Kalaya in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Opening Shot: “I live in between two worlds,” Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon says over matched shots of the chef observing the Philadelphia skyline and visiting her native Thailand. “As a child, my reality was painful, full of uncertainty and fear. But I buried the not-beautiful part of my life.”
The Gist: Suntaranon opened Kalaya in 2019, and won her first James Beard award a year later. In the bright, clean space in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, Suntaranon serves Thai cuisine that elevates the dining experience far beyond the standard American concept of cheap Pad Thai takeout. “Tom Yum with giant prawns the size of sea monsters,” says food journalist and former Top Chef Masters host Francis Lam. “Dumplings, pleated and sculpted to look like birds.” Dishes like these highlight Suntaranon’s creativity, and celebrate the flavors of Southern Thailand, where she was born. “At Kalaya,” the chef says of the restaurant she named after her mother, “I use my memories to create my food.”
Season 7 of Chef’s Table adheres to established house style for the series, with Suntaranon featured in voiceover and on-camera interviews, cutaways to highlight her restaurant’s physical space and signature dishes, and tasteful, considered camera work that captures scenes from Philly – the chef gathering fresh ingredients from local markets, or greeting diners in the restaurant – and follows Suntaranon as she visits Thailand and shares more about her background. As a child, she experienced poverty and domestic violence. But her father also adored goat curry, and enjoying the dish with him is imprinted on her memory. “Why is it so spicy?” Nok remembers thinking of the curry as a kid. But also, “Why can’t I stop eating it?!”
The goat curry Suntaranon put on the menu at Kalaya requires time and effort to prepare. Four or five hours, just to cook down the bones in a bath of coconut milk. But the result, served with a cooling accompaniment for balance, “is painful but delicious.” In its seventh season, Chef’s Table remains proficient in placing an individual chef’s influences and process into the larger context of how diners experience the food they prepare, and the emotions that are transmitted through each bite.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In addition to Chef’s Table, David Gelb and Brian McGinn also teamed up to make Street Food for Netflix, which has traveled to Asia, Latin America, and the US across its three seasons. The series Mind of a Chef, narrated by the late Anthony Bourdain, always felt like a kindred spirit of Chef’s Table. (These days it streams on Tubi.) And both The Pasta Queen, featuring chef Nadia Caterina, and Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy nail down the scenic travels-and-sumptuous foods comfort watch angle.
Our Take: The look and feel of Chef’s Table is so dialed in that every new season is like being welcomed back as a regular. No prior knowledge of a chef, their food, or their restaurant is necessary, as the series employs an unbusy approach to its camera work, forgoes external narration, and presents beauty shots of the food – typical of any reality/docuseries – but without added histrionics or spiky editing. Table gets out of the way, and lets the boldness of the cuisine and its profiled person speak for themselves.
What this creates is a one-to-one ratio for the viewer. And if you were to ask the featured chefs, that’s probably what they would want any marketing or advertising to do for their spots. But this isn’t about free plugs. The docuseries finds ways to dig deep unobtrusively, so that it establishes the connectivity between a food professional’s influences, creativity, restaurant industry acumen, and method of operation before it shows off the finished product. It works to make the dishes and the described experience more real, so that even through a TV screen, you can feel the emotions that went into it, and revel in its flavors. And isn’t that better than watching a celebrity host take a bite and have to try and impart to the viewer with empty declarations how delicious a dish really is?
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Nok gets emotional as we see images of her preparing and eating a meal with her mom in Thailand. “I don’t know how long my mother will be with me. But the restaurant Kalaya will be here forever.”
Sleeper Star: With any episode of Chef’s Table, the sleeper star is always hero shots of the food. Listen, look, marvel, and pull out your phone to make flight, hotel, and restaurant reservations, because a step-by-step sequence featuring Kalaya’s Goong Phao, complete with Nok Suntaranon’s narration of how she prepares the grilled river prawn, is a complete sensory spectacle. “It’s like I’m taking you to Thailand with me in one bite.”
Most Pilot-y Line: “It was difficult at first,” Suntaranon says of opening Kalaya at 50, marking the beginning of her second career. “I did not know if this restaurant gonna make money, or if I am going to make it. But every night, I go to every table, talk to them, listen to them. Make them feel like they’re coming into my home and learning my culture. We start getting busier and busier. The pot of curry getting bigger and bigger.”
Our Call: Stream It! Now in its seventh season, the trademark visual aesthetic of Chef’s Table continues to offer enterprise-class food porn, while its chef profiles are insightful and often quite inspiring.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
