The first episode of Chef’s Table almost never came to be.
David Gelb, the creator of the show, had trekked a multi-million dollar crew to Modena, Italy for the episode with Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura. About 15 minutes into a probing interview, Bottura stormed off the stage. The question that touched a nerve, “Tell me about your father.”
It turned out fine. Bottura would cook pizza later that day for the entire crew, and the two have since become close friends. But the moment would prove to be a learning experience for Gelb about the power of the kind of storytelling that has fueled the long-running Netflix docuseries, which celebrated its tenth birthday on April 28 with the release of its latest season, Chef’s Table: Legends.
“He walked out of the interview. I was like, I'm f*#%ed. We've spent so much money on this already, just schlepping everybody over to Modena, and our subject has literally walked out on the episode in the first 15 minutes of the interview,” Gelb said during a sitdown interview with Bon Appétit.
“It's a sensitive thing for people to get triggered by certain things, and so I knew I was onto something, but you have to build trust, and that was a big lesson for me,” Gelb said. “The operatic response to that was absolutely thrilling, but that was the episode where I had the most kind of growing pains, just figuring out what we were doing and how not to piss off our subjects.”
Back then Gelb was relatively unknown, looking to build on the success of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, his low-budget, well-received documentary about Jiro Ono, a revered Japanese chef behind a 10-seat sushi counter in a Japanese subway station and the complex relationship with his eldest son. “Trusting people the first season was very difficult because we were still training everybody to do what our style was,” Gelb said. “And then the casting was difficult. None of the chefs wanted to give us two weeks of their time. Normally a food show comes in. It's a day, they make a few things, and then the crew goes away.”
Gelb, executive producer Brian McGinn, and the rest of the team spend weeks in a restaurant. In the early days they would ask to leave gear in the restaurant, set up lights all over a kitchen, and attach a robotic camera rig on the ceiling to capture the slow, beautiful footage that is a signature element of the show. “It was wild. It was wild for the chefs, and they were like, ‘what is this?’” Gelb said.
These days Gelb and the rest of the Chef’s Table directors ease in as they put chefs through hours of interviews over multiple days, listening and letting chefs tell their story their own way first, before delicately prying into their lives.
“The chefs have their own idea of what their story is,” Gelb says. “They've been telling it over and over again. But we exhaust them to the point where we just get to a new truth because they keep on saying the thing that they've said before. And then by hour three, and we do maybe two or three hour interviews, we just start going extra deep. We get past the surface, we get past the facade, and we get past what they want the story to be and what the story actually is.”
“And our saying is, and this is what it should be for all documentaries obviously, you lean into the truth in all cases,” he adds. “So sometimes the story doesn't fit the superhero story that we want it to be. It doesn't fit the story structure that we're coming into the episode with. And if that doesn't happen, then we lean into what is actually there and then something new and exciting and special comes out.”
The result is a style of storytelling that is often gripping for viewers but also revealing to the chefs themselves.
“We all learn who we are by him telling the stories of the chef,” says chef José Andrés who is one of four culinary icons featured in the current season along with Thomas Keller, Jamie Oliver, and Alice Waters.
Niki Nakayama of n/naka, the Japanese Kaiseki restaurant in Los Angeles that was featured in the first season of Chef’s Table says that “it allows the chefs to really be able to tell their own personal story versus competitive cooking shows or things that have more edginess to it.”
To Nakayama and her partner and co-chef Carole Iida-Nakayama there are so many chefs who have wonderful, exciting and interesting stories to tell and what Chef’s Table did is humanize the experience for customers.
“Guests come and they're like, oh, we can relate, or they tell us that they understand what it feels to have the same struggles, and I think it's such a human experience to have different styles of struggles, but to be able to connect on that level with so many people was what I felt very lucky to have experienced.”
Gelb’s approach to personal storytelling, with no single narrator, slow and beautiful footage all set to classical music, has revolutionized documentary film making and led to critical acclaim, including eight Emmy nominations. His characters just happen to be chefs, but the stories that have fueled Chef’s Table for a decade could be told through almost any art form.
“Chef's Table always kind of connected with my love for superheroes,” Gelb said. "I continue to say that the chefs are like superheroes. They have a special power, they have a talent and a spark in them, and then something triggers that and sets it off. And sometimes they start out doing it using it in the wrong way. And then the journey takes them to realize something, something, and then they become whole and accept themselves for who they are.”
Tom Quinn, the film executive who discovered Jiro at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, and helped bring it to theaters in the US, recalls that about a year after its theatrical release he was out with his wife and overheard someone say, “he's the Jiro of teachers.” He asked her “what do you think they mean?”
“She's like, he is the representative of the model teacher wherever he's working,” Quinn said. “And I was like, oh my God, so the film has sort of taken on the significance in a way that you could see in the film Jiro represents an approach to work in life and your passion that moved well beyond sushi.”
“David invented an entire category of entertainment all by himself. David is an industry unto himself, and that film is where it all started,” he adds. “That category as in some cases it's dismissed as food porn, but food is such a staple and a part of life and culture that the visual representation of that, the storytelling around that.”
The complex lives of folks striving to be the best, being humbled as they learn to carve their own path is part of Gelb’s DNA.
Gelb was born and raised in Manhattan, the son of Peter Gelb, a long-time classical music administrator, who is currently the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and Donna Gelb, a food writer and recipe writer who has worked with icons including Francis Mallmann. His grandfather Arthur Gelb, was a former managing editor of the New York Times.
“My grandfather was known to say, ‘you can do anything in the world that you want as long as you are the best at it,’” Gelb says. “And it's not like a particularly healthy statement, but that was him being a progressive dad in the fifties or something. And it stuck with me. And so the story about being in the shadow of your father or having large shoes to fill really resonates with me. I think it resonates with a lot of people.”
Gelb went to film school at the University of Southern California, enamored by the superhero comics he consumed as a child and the lofty goal of making a movie akin to Star Wars. “I thought that when I graduated I would just get drafted to do the Harry Potter movie or something,” Gelb says. “I know they don't really teach you about how to survive in the film business and the turnover. The transition from film student to film director is not a smooth path, and it rarely happens, to be honest.”
In the years after, he found himself doing a lot of behind the scenes work, specifically music videos with a classmate. He had an idea to make something about sushi, along the lines of Planet Earth, the 11-episode intricately shot BBC docuseries about natural wonders of the Earth.
“The first idea actually was to make something about food in general…but more akin to a Planet Earth thing,” Gelb said. “Every episode would be different, country was kind of amorphous. And then I narrowed it down to sushi, and then I narrowed it down specifically to Jiro and realized that it should be a character-driven journey, and that was kind of a big revelation. And the technology was just at a place where I could make something that looked like a Planet Earth that had that kind of filmic, big cinematography and beautiful music and sound design.”
Gelb had visited Japan several times in his life, joining his father who was then an executive at Sony Music on trips. With the help of his father’s Japanese translator, Gelb worked with Japanese food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto, who would be a narrator in the movie. The initial idea was to make a movie about three or four Japanese sushi chefs.
“And then he took me into Jiro, and he was just so poetic in the way that he described the sushi. He described what he does in the film…the omakase being like a symphony, with its acts and its ebbs and flows and dramatics and everything. And I could hear the music in my head when I was eating the food. It was exactly what I was looking for. And I didn't even realize it until I got there.”
The movie’s critical success included chefs who were moved by it, which would be a key part of the creation of Chef’s Table.
“It really touched a chord with chefs and the food community,” Gelb said. “Anthony Bourdain got behind it. Eric Ripert. Literally, I would hear stories of we'd send them a screener and then they would call in their sous chefs to come sit and watch this. I've always thought it's interesting that it was that film that kind of broke through in that meaningful way to sort of the industry culture.”
From the theaters, Jiro Dreams of Sushi made its debut on Netflix in August 2012. Roughly a year later, Gelb approached the streaming service with the pitch for Chef’s Table. A newly created documentary unit was looking for acquisitions.
Adam Del Deo, Netflix’s Vice President of Documentary Film and Series in the US, had started a few months earlier and Chef’s Table would turn out to be one of his first acquisitions.
“What struck me in the pitch was David's kind of a grasp of cinematic language and storytelling,” Del Deo said. “What really struck us was the ability that we felt that he had to capture incredible stories around chefs, but also coupled with the ability to capture the great kind of cinematic strength of the dishes that the chefs were making. So we thought those two things, that they could work together in tandem and create something really synergistic, amazing storytelling that could redefine the food space. And we got that one right.”
Gelb has since gone on to apply the same passion to feature length documentaries about chef Wolfgang Puck, Spiderman Creator Stan Lee, and a documentary about the history of the Ford Mustang. His credits include a Star Wars documentary.
Among his current projects includes an adaptation of “The Perfectionist,” the book about the tragic story of French chef Bernard Loiseau, who took his own life in fear he was about to lose one of his three Michelin Stars.
“Perfectionism has always been kind of a theme for me, and this is where perfectionism becomes kind of a deadly trap for someone that everybody thought had everything and also the weight of trying to be something instead of just trying to be yourself,” Gelb says. “ almost trying to show people that yes, they're trying to be perfect, but they're not perfect and they're coming in terms of the lack of perfection.”