The Netflix series, Chef’s Table, is on the face of it, stories about great chefs their, food and their restaurants. What makes those stories so compelling is that the narrative is far richer, far more compelling.
These chefs are all entrepreneurs in the classic sense. They are risk takers on a journey, and in the process, creating their own realities. The defy the odds ultimately winning fame and fortune.
The most interesting piece of each story isn’t about the food. There is something much more intriguing going on. Each chef has a need to expand experiences, they are searching for something more, making meaning, and they aren’t sure what that is, or where it will take them, but there is an obsessive drive to create, expand and reinvent.
In almost every episode, the director captures this lightning in the bottle that reveals the true character of the chef, in a way that is poetic. Something that wraps up the dream, the food, the drive to be different. They are wonderful stories. A favorite part is when one particular chef says, “...we’re not doing this to simply create a meal, we are doing this to create wow.”
It’s worth pointing out that we first played with the idea of ”wow”, on a project that we did for Zappos some years ago. We’d say that Tony was thinking the same way in the early days. It wasn’t about shoes, it was about “wow”.
