David Chang is coming out with a new food show and we’re already hungry.
The restaurateur will be teaming up with director Morgan Neville to launch a documentary series on Netflix called “Ugly Delicious.” According to a press release the show will go outside of “polished kitchens” to explore the intersection of culture and food.
“Food is something we all have in common. It’s an essential part of who we are and how we create connections across cultures,” Chang said in the release. “In that spirit, we brought together some of the people we admire most to make ′Ugly Delicious’ a collaborative forum, a place where it’s okay to have strong opinions and honest conversations about food.”
The show, an eight-episode series premiering on Feb. 23, will feature writers, fellow chefs and celebrity guests, including comedian Ali Wong, chef Nina Compton and actor Steven Yeun. The episodes will tackle a wide range of eats from street foods to haute cuisine, with topics like Viet-Cajun cuisine in Houston and Neapolitan pizza in Tokyo. In the teaser clip above, Chang and Wong discuss finding a good, authentic pho spot.
And according to Wong, the best pho isn’t always served by the most pristine, Yelp-approved establishment.
“Yelp is still not trustworthy,” she says in the clip. “There’s those who fuck it up. They mislead me to some whack-ass pho place because people were polite and the bathroom’s nice. But the broth is bullshit.”
She adds, laughing, “I want to know what percentage [of Yelp users who] gave it five stars are Asian.”
The show’s title refers to Chang’s #uglydelicious movement, which started as a hashtag on Instagram applied to photos of food that may not look beautiful to everyone, but taste damn good.
Chang began using the hashtag after deciding to embrace foods that he once found uncool, like home-cooked meals, Korean food and anything he grew up eating, he told Eater Upsell in June. But he’s since shifted his point of view, learning to feel comfortable around foods that don’t fit the Western mold.
“Like curry — curries are probably the ugliest food you could possibly make. A lot of Korean food, some Chinese food, is ugly if you look at it from a Eurocentric, American point of view,” he said. “It’s beautiful and quite natural for basically everyone else.”