Chef’s Table believes there’s more to know about José Andrés, Thomas Keller, Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters.
To mark its 10-year anniversary, the Netflix docuseries has turned its lens on four modern icons of cooking—deemed Legends who have been in the public eye for more than three decades. The new season drops April 28, nearly 10 years to the date from when the show was first released.
We don’t know how Netflix and Chef’s Table decided on Andrés, Keller, Oliver, and Waters, but they do have a few things in common.
The four have each in their own way harnessed the power of food to push policy, change social attitudes on what makes a great meal, raised the bar on what we should expect from a restaurant, fed those who are hungry, inspired people to raise their cooking skills, and brought folks together at the table.
Now, the four chefs have been given the Chef’s Table treatment, beautifully shot visuals of food paired with a story that digs deep into the lives of each chef with a promise of exclusive details that don’t just get at food and restaurants that have made them household names, but what fuels them to do it.
“I have a job to guide as many people toward the joy of food and cooking, and I’m gonna give it my best shot,” Oliver says in the trailer for the show that was released on Tuesday.
The show has featured other chefs who would be considered icons over the years, including Dominique Crenn, Grant Achatz, Nancy Silverton and Francis Mallman, but David Gelb, the creator of Chef’s Table, compared the latest effort to the 2021 documentary he produced on Wolfgang Puck, himself a culinary icon and arguably the chef who spawned the modern day celebrity chef.
“Much like I did with my Wolfgang Puck documentary, people know the television persona. They don’t know the deep, full story,” Gelb told Bon Appétit. “Jamie Oliver is an incredible cook. He’s a great, great cook, and I feel like the stories of his business dealings and everything like that have kind of taken over, but he’s just an amazing chef who cares deeply about what he’s doing and so do the others.”
Gelb himself directed the episode that features Waters, which he described as “a lot of fun and really, really interesting and just meaningful, and that was very cool.”
Legends is the latest spin-off from its usual format, featuring the invigorating stories of four chefs from vastly different backgrounds. Others have included barbecue, noodles, pizza.
Chef’s Table, which was green-lighted by Netflix on the heels of Gelb’s success with his bare-budget cult documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011), has gone on to be longest-running docuseries for Netflix, earning eight Emmy nominations during its run, turned passionate chefs who went under the radar into celebrities and revolutionized food TV over the past decade.