104: Chef's Table goes rogue
Hello, welcome to Border Crossing issue one hundred and four. I hope you’re rocking.
This issue I’m confused by the Chef’s Table episode on Jamie Oliver.
This weekend we went on a Sussex winery tour for a friend’s birthday. It was fascinating, very convivial, terrific picnic, and obviously involved a lot of wine (mostly sparkling, no reds, a bit of vermouth) to the point that I’m still recovering. Which is to say, please excuse wobbliness in the edit.
Also, unconnected but… last week I moved our bed around in the bedroom, swivelled it ninety degrees and backed it onto a different wall. This has vastly improved how it feels to sleep in the room. It’s ace, but also annoying, given it was in the previous position for twenty years, I’ve pondered moving it for maybe a decade, and it took me about ten minutes to do. A reminder (note to self) to prevaricate less, do even small things that might improve life. Especially small things, because of that effort-to-reward ratio.
Top tip: when you do a web search, if you want to get rid of those distracting A.I. results they now throw up the top of search results (full of weird bias and bullshit inaccuracies) just add a swearword to your question, or your search terms. So, you’re searching ‘industrial revolution’ for example, type in “fucking industrial revolution” and the A.I. crap at the top is magically gone. If you swear, the A.I.’s not there.
Another top tip: if you’re making a curry, right near the end of cooking it — when it’s almost ready — take two decent ladles of your curry and stick them in the blender with a tiny splosh of water, whizz them, then pour back into the main pan of curry. Bang. Thicker, creamier curry sauce, suddenly the whole thing feels and tastes somehow more.
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“Money’s like heroin for boring people.”
— Benji Kaplan, A Real Pain
On we roll. xx
gems
1
Two conversations with hot US stand-up comics: Taylor Tomlinson’s excellent live conversation from South By South West and current ‘sploding (and restlessly fertile) new star Josh Johnson (who may turn out to be a true great of twenty-first century stand-up) on Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast (YouTube links).
2
Amy Poehler’s new podcast Good Hang is pretty good, obviously she’s terrific fun and gets excellent big name guests. With my podcaster hat on, I wish it was better edited, it’s baggy as shit, to the point of sometimes undermining the guests. But still, super fun.
3
Down here on the English south coast, Sussex Wildlife Trust is running an email campaign to stop Brighton Marina dumping their dredged waste into the Marine Conservation Zone at Beachy Head. Unfathomably, the firm currently has permission just to leave it there, which is wrecking the ecosystem. But with its Marine Licence is up for renewal, we have a chance to stop it happening, putting pressure on Steve Reed, Secretary of State for the Environment.
4
Excellent interview by Tanya Mosley with filmmaker Ryan Coogler for NPR’s Fresh Air.
5a
The great food writer and broadcaster Samin Nosrat is finally publishing a follow-up to her game-changer first book, the ‘system unlocking’ Salt Fat Acid Heat. Nosrat’s new book Good Things is out in September and now available to pre-order. Nobody anywhere has helped improve my slapdash, recipe-avoiding cookery more than Samin Nosrat.
5b
Partly to promote her book, Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway (creator of SongExploder and West Wing Weekly podcasts) have reactivated their delightful (originally launched for pandemic lockdown) foodie show Home Cooking.
6
John McEvoy reports for Declassified on Labour front-bencher Lisa Nandy’s unlikely stint as chair of ‘Labour Friends of Palestine’ only four years ago (despite, with hindsight, her obvious allegiance to apartheid Israel) and how Nandy’s piss poor (to the point of sabotage) stewardship brought the already embattled group to its knees, just in time to be useless in a genocide. Perhaps that’s why she’s now Culture Secretary and Starmer is planning to wind up that shit altogether.
7
Brilliant new book alert: Ian Penman has a new biography out, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, on Fitzcarraldo Editions. No better writer on artistic lives, anywhere.
potato gems
• A heartening regional story of potato retailer solidarity: Tamworth’s Spud Man drives online support for Warwick’s Potato Lady, after an injury threatens her livelihood.
• Western media is widely reporting Russia’s potato crisis impacting prices there.
• Ideal Home has a hack for removing rust from garden furniture using potatoes. Utterly horrible writing, by the way, looping phrases for SEO. Though I suppose that’s why it got on my radar in the first place.
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Chef’s Table goes rogue
I generally love the glossy Netflix show Chef’s Table. Still, after many years and seasons, it’s a must-watch in our house, each episode a beautifully shot, unabashedly hagiographic portrait of a different storied chef from around the world. Chef’s Table leans into a lionising tone that elevates the chef to near messianic degree, made with full co-operation, in part (usually) narrated by the chefs themselves with just a couple of high profile talking heads intercut. And all of that (the romanticising of the gig, the brushing over and tidying up of flaws or kinks in the tale) is wholly forgivable to me, because these life stories are genuinely intriguing, sometimes entrancing. The show works because the global high-end restaurant trade is a front-line thrill and, crucially, its filming of food — the inclusion of signature dishes as a key part of the story — is done way more gorgeously than anyone else. The opposite of Bourdainian realism, but food porn heaven.
I’d been pondering that Chef’s Table could do a great crossover episode with The Bear where they showcased Carmy Berzatto, except I suppose he’s still too young for the show. But then earlier this month, Chef’s Table released another series of four episodes that they called Chef’s Table Legends. And if you watch it, you may already know where I’m heading with this but, to my astonishment they kind of have focused an episode on a fictional chef, because they’ve done… Jamie Oliver.
The New Labour era Britpop drummer / cooking superstar, born of handheld camera fave Naked Chef, multiple-site restauranteur of (to put it politely) mixed success, and divisive yet passionate food campaigner, Popbitch’s (alright, yeah, very cruel, if funny) “fat tongued cunt” himself.
Often, in context, in reasonably small doses, I like Oliver as a public figure. I admire a chunk of his activism career and I definitely wouldn’t say I’m a hater. But honestly, watching Chef’s Table apply their hyper sensual slow-motion hifalutin visual and narrative language to the life and work of Jamie Oliver, it’s a deeply strange cognitive dissonance. Both at once fascinating, and kind of horrific.
Of course they tell his official life story perfectly well, with loads of access to archive footage of the young Jamie scootering around, playing drums, partying with pals. He’s got five kids but just one of them features, perhaps because the lad is hoping to go into food himself. They score Tony Blair as a ‘talking head’ and this highlights how Oliver’s stardom gained him entry to the heart of the Blair government, and how he utilised that ‘for good’ once he was campaigning. In turn, this leads us deftly through everything you might imagine about the episode: loads of heady (still politely told) stuff about dealing with sudden young celebrity, tough aspects of the restaurant trade (they don’t avoid the huge collapse in 2019 of Oliver’s chain) and of course The Battle of the Turkey Twizzlers and his other activism.
The backbone of the episode is the food campaigning work. I briefly wonder how well-known Oliver is outside of the UK — but of course he’s a global giant. He’s the biggest selling British non-fiction author of all time. His TED Talk is an award-winner. He’s done all the American shows too and been syndicated everywhere. Even after the collapse of his chain, he still retained a hundred million quid fortune to his name. Just a couple of years ago there was a minor scandal whereby he’d written a children’s book in Australia that was casually racist in how it depicted the indigenous first Australians. In turn, that reminds me of a time he made a travel show in the American south-west and apologised to some Latin American contributors that “I don’t speak Mexican”. Point being, in both positive and negative exploits, Oliver is global.
The thing missing from this Chef’s Table episode is beautiful food.
They just can’t make it happen, as careful as they are about dish choices. They strain hard with expensive lighting on a fish pie and other Oliver ‘classics’ but all it does, especially watching this on the back of a few other episodes, focused on real Great-with-a-capital-G chefs, is to expose the epic paucity and mundanity of this scaled-up television celebrity chain store cookery, contrasted to the fame and wealth of its nominal maker.
The other three people featured in this ‘legends’ strand are Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who drove the farm-to-table revolution, The French Laundry’s Thomas Keller, greatest American classicist of all, and the Spanish master José Andrés, who, like Oliver, pivoted to campaigning to create World Central Kitchen, feeding people in disaster areas and war zones. Andrés is the closest comparison, though you only need to watch him dash off a quick Spanish omelette to appreciate the chasm.
So, is putting Jamie Oliver on a par with these other three as pure laughable as I found it, in the moment, snorting out my tea in front of the screen, or is he in fact a perfectly reasonable inclusion? Perhaps my Englishness colours my perception, and I over-rate others, via overseas exoticism and sexy accents? To the middle-aged British viewer Jamie Oliver is just so fucking familiar, long hard-etched as prosaic and over-exposed. I bet if I research them (even a five minute wikipedia trawl) the other chefs’ biographies will be messier, stuff will show up, they will have been just as carefully tidied up by Chef’s Table as Oliver has been.
But to my mind, watching it, this is the first episode of Chef’s Table ever, where food itself takes a backseat.
To be fair to Oliver, he permits the show give air space to his long-time mentor Gennaro Contaldo, who Oliver first encountered way back pre-fame when they both worked for Antonio Carluccio. Their banter-drizzled onscreen friendship has always been one of the more enjoyable aspects of Oliver’s television, though I haven’t watched that much. Last time I remember losing myself in a lengthy stretch of Jamie Oliver on telly was sitting in the corner of one of his restaurants at an airport (so this has to be pre-2019) possibly even eating some of his chips or something, waiting for a flight, falling into the screen as they ran endless clips of Oliver cooking on a big screen on long loop. Contaldo as light relief and straight man, as well as expert mentor.
I honestly don’t care that Chef’s Table is not ‘journalism’ and remains strictly within each chef’s own vision of how they want to be portrayed. Everyone does this shit nowadays. This Jamie Oliver profile comes off remarkably similar to the David Beckham documentary from a couple of years ago that was produced by its subject, in the modern way. But watching this Chef’s Table episode, I do long for the show to dig — more honestly and deeply — into that companionship between Oliver and Contaldo, and who is doing what, when a celebrity chef is producing actual food.
To my mind, it’s not that Oliver isn’t a ‘great enough’ chef for Chef’s Table — it’s that he isn’t really a Chef in that sense at all. I cannot see him in that world. Placing him there in these hues is spotlighting, rather than smothering, the sheer unreality of Oliver’s career, versus the people they usually document.
He'd barely started adult life in professional cookery, still working the line, learning pastry at Carluccio’s, then a sous chef at River Cottage — Bourdain might’ve called him a “fuckin’ greenhorn” — when suddenly in his early twenties he became very famous and desired and an avatar — cute face and charming, untidy manner — upon which TV producers and their test kitchen chefs could build a new style of cookery show. From there, he survived (thrived under) the scrutiny and parlayed that intense period of celebrity into being, again not so much a chef per se, but a multi-venue restauranteur, food author, campaigner and life-long public figure.
None of that is a value judgement of the person. What was he supposed to do? Does his early (and then continued career) embracing those other roles tell us clearly that the nuts and bolts of the fine dining chef was not in fact his calling? We’ll never know what Jamie Oliver might’ve done, had fame not come calling. He’d struggled badly at grammar school and his family’s original plan was he’d learn enough at restaurants to help his parents open a second pub. Solid Brit pub beano, done unexpectedly good?
I’m sure Oliver is a net positive for the world. I’m actually (really!) not trying to criticise him — though it’s coming off like that tonally because of decades spent finding him a bit annoying (perhaps partly because his irritating traits are traits I sometimes spot in myself, and of course I’ve achieved far, far less in life than he has). He’s done important stuff, campaigned in the cruel heart of the British mainstream to improve young people’s diets, despite the usual onslaught of the UK press. He did a brave, sincere (if profoundly capitalist) thing, opening that restaurant Fifteen as a way to train up under-privileged abandoned kids to work in the catering industry and ‘turn their lives around’. And so on. I’m definitely not saying he doesn’t ‘deserve’ this kind of a profile (and it scarcely matters to him, anyway, in any real sense). My bemusement can easily be cultural snobbery, I hold my hand up to that.
But. Fucking hell, those dishes, subtitled with that typeface and that hero music, in this context. I may have to watch it again.
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email: chris@christt.com
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