"Chef's Table: Pizza (Episodes 2-6)": comprehensive review

Right, so I lied. I decided to review the rest of "Chef's Table: Pizza."

I think I introduced the "Chef's Table: Pizza" series when I reviewed Episode 1, which focused on Chris Bianco. I later remarked that I hated Episode 2, which was about Chef Gabriele Bonci (a man, to be clear), after watching only five painfully pretentious minutes. For this review, I ended up watching that episode last (but I did watch it all the way through!). What follows are some one-paragraph reviews of Episodes 2 through 6 of the series, with Episode 2 being reviewed last. Together, these reviews make up one big, comprehensive commentary on the whole of "Chef's Table: Pizza." I hope this will give you a... taste... of what the series is like.

Episode 3 is about Chef Ann Kim, owner/manager of Pizzeria Lola and Young Joni in Minneapolis (she also has two other restaurants). Kim was born in Busan, South Korea; she and her parents emigrated to the US, where the family had to adapt to a new culture. Kim recalls feeling ashamed of her heritage when she realized how different she was from her school classmates, but she channeled her energy into theater and later realized, thanks to her husband Conrad, that her real passion was cooking. Much of the episode is about how Chef Kim learned to overcome her various fears—fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, and fear of rejection. She found her voice in an innovative fusion style of pizza (that I have not seen replicated here in Korea). Critic Brett Anderson (from Episode 1) reappears to talk a bit about Kim's pizza and philosophy of life; a new critic named Dara Grumdahl, freelance writer, offers her own commentary as well. You do have to get past the fact that Ann Kim is an inveterate uptalker. All of her sentences sound like questions? And that becomes grating after a while? I also noticed that, when she speaks Korean, she has a very strong gyopo accent. That's not meant as a slight: I suspect she's pretty fluent, but I had to smile when I heard the accent because I've heard LA gyopos who sound the same—as if their Korean pronunciation has become Americanized, like lightly gringo Korean. There's also not much specific insight into her techniques; I missed that Zen feeling I got from Episode 1, where you see Chris Bianco getting intimate with his ingredients as he banters with sellers and farmers. The irony of Episode 3 is that Chef Kim does mention the Korean concept of sonmat (hand + taste, the integration of the senses when cooking well), but we don't get to see much sonmat in action except during a moment when Chef Kim shows us the connection between making dough and making kimchi. All this reminds me: the Netflix subtitling for this episode is annoying, being more of a transliteration than a transcribing. Sonmat is spelled "son mas" in the subtitles, which accurately conveys the fact that the syllable mat (맛) ends with the Korean letter "s" (ㅅ), but does nothing to help a non-Korean pronounce the syllable accurately. A final "s" in Korean is often pronounced as an unaspirated "t." When Chef Kim meets her dad at her restaurant, the Korean 아빠 ("Dad") is rendered on screen as "Oppa," which I would mentally pronounce as 오빠 ("oh-bba"), meaning "big brother" from a sister's point of view. I'm not sure which was more annoying—the uptalking or the poor subtitling. It was also a bit disappointing that more wasn't made of Chef Kim's training. I had to go to Wikipedia to learn she had trained at Tony Gemignani's International School of Pizza in San Francisco. Still, despite the annoyances and disappointments, a good episode.

Episode 4, directed by Brian McGinn, gives us Franco Pepe, whose surname also happens to be a common ingredient (black pepper). This episode feels, in many ways, like a partial return to what made Episode 1 of this series so good because we see a man dedicated to elevating the art and science of making pizza (and the Italian word pizzaiolo, a pizza-maker, is now burned into my brain), who is intimate with his ingredients and, like Chris Bianco, determined to rely on local resources. Ironically, this episode shows us much more of the sonmat that was talked about in the previous episode but not shown to nearly the same extent. Franco Pepe also shares with Ann Kim a desire to express his own vision of pizza, and as with Kim, this desire for self-expression has come at a cost—separation from his wife and kids as well as from his beloved brothers, who had wanted to continue the tradition established by their father, himself a pizzaiolo. For Kim, self-expression took the form of integrating Korean ingredients into pizza; for Pepe, owner of Pepe in Grani (lit., "pepper in grains," but also a play on the owner's surname) in Caiazzo, Italy, self-expression means coming at traditional pizza from an oblique angle. The major example of this is Pepe's take on the classic Margherita, which normally has a tomato-y base and basil on top—basil that Pepe claims is often picked off and thrown away by the diners. Pepe's version is self-deprecatingly called a Margherita Sbaliata, a "Mistaken Margherita," because Italians generally don't want their classic dishes to be altered. In this version, Pepe begins with a white-pizza base of cheese; for the tomatoes, he applies a savory sauce made from fresh local tomatoes, and for the fresh-basil taste, he adds an oily basil-purée reduction, dotted all over the surface of the pizza. It's a genius idea except for one thing: I know Pepe didn't intend this, but the way he applies the tomato sauce looks an awful lot like a swastika. (If you watch the episode, you'll see what I mean.) I'm sure Pepe meant no harm, and if I were to go to his restaurant, I wouldn't have the bad taste to point this resemblance out, but once seen, the swastika can't be un-seen. More positively, we see a fried pizza that looks small but absolutely amazing—Pepe's modern take on a street-food classic, split in half and served in holders that keep the halves upright. Most of the narration in this episode comes from Pepe himself, speaking Italian. Supporting commentary comes from Chef Nancy Silverton and the imposingly authoritative-sounding Faith Willinger, author of Eating in Italy. One gets the impression that Willinger actually speaks Italian. If Chris Bianco is about pleasing people, and Ann Kim is about self-affirmation, then I'd say Franco Pepe is about finding innovative ways to express old ideas in pizza. Chef Kim's self-focus could be a little off-putting at times (although I understand and respect the difficulties she had to surmount), but the two men I've seen so far seem to put their craft ahead of themselves, so I'm a fan of Episodes 1 and 4. I'd say that "Chef's Table: Pizza" was scoring about a Men 2, Women 0.5 at this point, but Episode 2, which features a man, would have to be a -1.

Episode 5, directed by Abigail Fuller, features Yoshihiro Imai, whose restaurant Monk is located in Kyoto, Japan. There are times when the episode veers a little too far into the Western stereotype of what Japanese culture is like—the whole "mystical Far Easterner" shtick. But the episode is generally quite grounded, with just a few pretentiously posed shots. One of the more interesting aspects of this episode is the captioning of the pizzas: previous episodes provided captions right away whenever there was a dramatic closeup of an on-menu pizza, but in this episode, all the captioning is left to the very end. This gives most of the pizza closeups an interestingly ineffable quality: these are Unnamed Pizzas, at least until they're named at the end. Imai talks about coming from a family of dentists but, breaking away from the tradition of carrying on the family business, he decided to follow the path of the pizzaiolo—a path that called to him, he says, not a path he consciously chose to follow. He worked in a famous Japanese pizzeria before scoring an internship to work at the prestigious Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. Back in Japan, having found out his girlfriend was pregnant, Imai did a dull stint at a hotel where, coincidentally, a group of his Noma comrades found him: they'd done a pop-up gig in Japan and happened to choose the hotel where Imai was working. This chance meeting rekindled in Imai the desire to found his own restaurant, and Monk was born soon after. The restaurant is comfortable, with an open-plan format; business was a mere trickle at first, but word of Monk spread, and now the restaurant is buried under advance reservations, with customers from around the world. By Episode 5 of this series, we have established that pizzaioli tend to be oddballs following a dream, and Imai is no different. As with the previous people the series has covered, Imai prefers locally sourced, seasonal ingredients. In his case, many of these ingredients come from nearby Japanese farms and gardens and rivers (most of his pizza is fish-themed). Imai narrates his own story in Japanese (how did he manage in Denmark?), with help from translator Emmy Reis (who looks at least half-Japanese herself) and Masayo Funakoshi, the chef-owner of Farmoon. (I briefly wondered whether Masayo Funakoshi was a distant relative of Gichin Funakoshi, founder of Shotokan karate.) Both Reis and Funakoshi add some vital cultural insights to what we hear from Imai, who has a serene, stoic demeanor befitting someone who owns a restaurant called Monk (we never learn why this name was chosen). I'm still not sure whether to call Imai a "chef" or not; normally, the difference between a regular cook and a true chef is that the chef has gone through formal training and gains some kind of certification at the end. According to the documentary, Imai studied baking on his own, developed a passion for it, moved to working at the aforementioned Japanese pizzeria, then interned at Noma. I imagine the experience at both the Japanese pizzeria and Noma would have the same value as formal training, but did Imai come away a chef? Maybe it doesn't matter. Imai and his restaurant are apparently on the map now, and that's what counts. If you can get past the stereotyping—with the mystical music, the Initially Unnamed Pizzas, the posed shots (including some involving bowing at religious sites, which made me a bit uncomfortable)—I'd say that Episode 5 was a good and worthy addition to the series.

Episode 6 caps off the series. It is directed by Danny O'Malley and presents Sarah Minnick, owner of Lovely's Fifty-Fifty, a restaurant in Portland. Much is made of the "Portland ethos," which involves do-it-yourself entrepreneurship as can be seen on the streets: start-up coffeehouses, carts, and pizzerias are everywhere. One thing Minnick didn't see, as she surveyed the Portland market landscape, was a place that focused on pizza and ice cream. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Minnick is largely self-educated (at least, the documentary doesn't mention any formal training); she started off working for places like Adidas before remembering that she had enjoyed running a kitchen-like space: she had managed a campus coffee shop in college, which is where a friend told Sarah that, despite her wish to be a painter, she (Sarah) seemed happiest at the helm of that coffee shop. The remark stayed with her, and Sarah eventually opened Lovely Hula Hands. She worked at Adidas during the day and managed Lovely Hula Hands at night, roping in family members to help. Finances became strained while she was thinking of opening another restaurant, and she eventually went all-in on the second restaurant while closing Hula Hands. The new restaurant, Lovely's Fifty-Fifty (so-called because of the equal stress on pizza and ice cream), began to make gentle waves in Portland. Sarah got help from local farmers and from a friend of hers: Lane Selman, a researcher involved with seed breeding. Lane opened up for Sarah the vistas of what was possible to put on a pizza, and this brought Sarah's philosophy of toppings into focus: minimal cheese, very minimal sauce, and plenty of vegetal ingredients that are off the beaten track—plants with strange names like Astiana tomatoes, purslane, and orach. Flowers, weeds, and wildly extraterrestrial vegetables became the core of Sarah's menu. This could be seen as an utter rejection of traditional notions of pizza, or as an affirmation that what can be considered "pizza" includes more than one might think. Either way, Sarah Minnick is an unrepentant pioneer, and after a crucial visit from a food critic she knew, her restaurant suddenly found itself on the map. And the customers flooded in. The documentary doesn't say whether Sarah is married, but it does tell us she has made space in her life to allow for the work-life balance one needs to retain one's sanity. She works long hours these days, and her daughter Sophie is now old enough to work with her in the restaurant, but Sarah is no longer killing herself by working two jobs: she has found her métier, and as we all know, if you love your work, it isn't work. This was a good, well-balanced episode that gave us biographical insights alongside scenes of Sarah at work. The episode let us inside Sarah's head so that we could understand her particular passion for pizzas with esoteric ingredients. (And she does seem attached to that word, Lovely.) Her narration is aided by insights from the aforementioned Lane Selman and Karen Brooks, food critic for Portland Monthly. Thinking again about men versus women in this series, I thought this episode was a solid point for the women.

Going back to the episode I initially hated...

Episode 2, directed by Brian McGinn (director of Episode 4, above), focuses on Gabriele Bonci, a pizza-slamming TV celebrity and proprietor of Pizzarium Bonci, who enjoyed national fame and international acclaim from the likes of Anthony Bourdain. When I first tried to watch this episode, I was viscerally turned off by how the episode violated a basic rule of documentaries: you don't turn your subject into an actor. Generally speaking, documentaries are curated and maybe a wee bit fake, but they strive for a certain level of vérité. If you put the subject of your piece in front of a mirror and have him stare into it with furious intensity, as he were about to put his fist through the glass, then you're no longer in the realm of vérité. When I forced myself to watch the episode this time around, I set the video speed at 1.5X to get the experience over with. In other words, I was prepared to hate Episode 2. It turns out, though, that Episode 2 is a disjointed, frustrating, but also fascinating mix of narrative and cinematographic styles. This is partly because McGinn is at pains to show that Gabriele Bonci is a complicated man who has lived several lives in his one lifetime. Bonci says, at one point, that he's 44—a fact that startled me. The man looks to be in his fifties, and given everything he says about how fame led to temptation and desperation, it's no wonder his poor body has been worn down by all that fast living. Back in his heyday, Bonci was grossly overweight; the Bonci we see today is a slimmer, trimmer fellow. How Bonci comes off to the viewer depends largely on what subject he's expounding on. I liked what he had to say about using locally sourced food (a common theme among all the pizzaioli in this series) and the necessity of ethical farming. He also said what may be the most memorable line in this whole series: eating is an agricultural act. Probably more than any other pizza-maker in this series, Gabriele Bonci sees the process going from farm to table as an absolutely organic chain of being. While the "chain of being" idea is rather commonplace in a no duh kind of way, Bonci wants to emphasize that the consumer is playing an agricultural role, and that it would be good for consumers to be more in touch with the farming aspects of the products they're consuming. When Bonci talks like this, he can be charming. But then there's the other Bonci—the one who remembers (and maybe, somewhat, still pines for) the limelight. When this Bonci appears, everything is arrogance and vanity. In talking about how he elevated supplì (breaded and fried balls of risotto around a core of mozzarella) and other Italian delights, he uses phrases like "I invented this," and he talks of "revolution." This is the unpleasant side of the man, and again, this may be why the episode on the whole feels disjointed. We do get plenty of shots of Bonci working in the kitchen as well as some lovely shots of his finished pizzas. In fact, I'd say this episode, which I was initially so eager to skip, features some of the best cinematography of the series. Because I saw Episode 6 before watching Episode 2, I was amused when I saw Bonci put flower petals on one of his pizzas, very much in the rebellious spirit of Sarah Minnick. The two commentators in this episode are Katie Parla (co-author of Tasting Rome) and Bonci's friend Elisia Menduni, a food journalist. Menduni, in particular, offers some interesting personal insights into Bonci's mind. The episode's greatest failing, though, is that, in its attempt at approaching the complicated Bonci from multiple angles, the result is a jumbled mishmash. Bonci might almost be deserving of a two-parter, one devoted to Bonci the media star and another devoted to Bonci the aggressive ethical agriculteur. Although my initial revulsion at this episode has died down, especially now that I've seen the whole thing, I still think this is the most pretentious, and arguably the least-well executed, of the six episodes in this series. As off-putting as Ann Kim's uptalking was, Bonci came off as someone who may have learned some harsh life lessons, yet still has a lot to learn. He's not a guy I'd like to hang around with. Chris Bianco, by contrast, is.

My method for writing these reviews was to sit down and watch an episode, then write it up while it was still fresh in my mind, cross-referencing with online sources as I wrote. I did an episode a day that way, so the above review is essentially six days' worth of writing. What I've learned from "Chef's Table: Pizza" is that pizzaioli come in all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, but they are united by a passion for pizza-making that (1) takes advantage of fresh, local ingredients and (2) acts as a vehicle for self-expression. There is a sense that these six people are doing what they do to elevate their chosen art. In some of them, more than in others, there's a strong desire to make people happy. For a number of these pizzaioli, the important thing is to keep relentlessly experimenting. For others, conscious rebellion against tradition is key. One of the ways I judged the episodes was by the extent to which they showed the main subject interacting with ingredients. My favorite episode remains Episode 1, which spoiled me. I think Episode 1 had the most balanced approach in terms of showing Chris Bianco's past, his present family life, the pizza-making and restaurant team he works with, and his interaction with prime-quality ingredients as well as with the local people providing them. The rest of the episodes all had something good about them, but many of them also had some truly annoying, grating aspects that kept them from rising to the top. Overall, though, "Chef's Table: Pizza" was worth the nearly six hours it took me to view it, and if you're looking to take a deep dive into the wild world of pizza, this Netflix series created by the guy who directed "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is not a bad place to start.

You can't unsee it.