Ugly Delicious: Season 1 (2018)

David Chang is an unstoppable force in the food world and that world is so much bigger than we thought.

Netflix's Ugly Delicious follows chef David Chang (Momofuku) as he journeys around the world to investigate some of the most influential dishes, cuisines, chefs, celebrities and restaurants. Throughout the series, we are taken through so many different cultures and cuisines but we're not lost due to the fact that David Chang is presenting all the information in a spectacularly fun way, sometimes with well-known actors or big names in the food world, who may be lesser known in the mainstream but we recognise their authority and we immediately trust everything they're telling us, as through everything, they refer back to their personal experiences and their personal upbringing leading to what they've achieved.

The title "Ugly Delicious" refers to a style of food Chang describes as delicious but that he wouldn't serve in a restaurant as he believes it to be reserved for home, due to the presentation or the uniqueness. It carries with it a certain guilty pleasure, which is a charm that isn't lost throughout the series as we're presented with plate after plate, bowl after bowl of luxurious food, so close yet so far.

The show offers a fresher look into the development of food culture as it doesn't reserve itself to a specific area of dining; we see Michelin star chefs dining at home, world-renowned critics eating from street vendors and celebrities indulging in guilty pleasures like KFC or Domino's. By connecting these elements, you get a new experience for the audience that connects to an area they can relate to, with something new for them to learn, thus creating a repetitive cycle of understanding and familiarity which is rarely found on TV  these days.

The basic structure of each episode consists of a simple intro; What type of food are we tackling? Then we move on to specific influencers and their history with the food, then to a deeper history behind the culture and what that food represents and finally a summary of what the audience now understands about the food that they so easily misunderstood before they started. The show feels a little like the television equivalent of jazz; a lot of events, stories and experiences happening at once but all aimed towards a singular objective or question that's being answered.

So far, there have been 8 episodes facing very different subject matters:

Pizza: Italian culture and ancient traditions VS originality and uniqueness.

Tacos: Mexican culture, immigration, amalgamation of cuisines into singular categories and respect of different cuisines.
Home cooking: Expense VS intent and how it effects quality and the restaurant business.
Shrimp and Crawfish: South American and Vietnamese culture, vietnamese immigration and integration of vietnamese and cajun foods into traditional regions.
BBQ: What was the "Original BBQ"? The difference in American and Korean BBQ and Korean representation in America.
Fried Chicken: Black representation in America and how food can negatively represent culture and race.
Fried Rice: Chinese culture and misrepresentation of cuisine; "Chinese-American cuisine".
Stuffed: East VS West; Who did dumplings first?

Thinking about what you eat shouldn't mean counting the calories or worrying about the fat content, it should be knowing the origins of the food, the experiences of the chef that lead them to create that dish, it should be the history and the influence, not fear of the ingredients. This seems to be the lesson David Chang is teaching us and so far, we're loving it.

4.5/5 - A taste of everything you can imagine and so much more.