How Chef’s Table Creator David Gelb Revolutionized Food TV

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, co-creator 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.”