Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chef’s Table: Pizza’ On Netflix, Where The Long-Running Docuseries Profiles Top Pizza Makers (2024)

Chef’s Table: Pizza continues the long-running docuseries where each episode profiles a chef doing amazing things in locations all over the planet. This new season centers on the food that it seems like almost everyone loves: Pizza. The six episodes go to some expected places, like Rome, and some that are unexpected, like Phoenix, home of one of the leading pizza makers in the world.

CHEF’S TABLE: PIZZA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of Addeo & Sons Italian Bakery in the Bronx.

The Gist:The first episode profiles Chris Bianco, who has been making some the best Neapolitan pizzas in the country since he opened Pizza Bianco in Phoenix in 1994. It’s so good that food writer Ed Levine called it “the best pizza in the world” in a book. As much as you may not think that the best pizza in the world could be made in Phoenix, by the time you meet and hear the story of Bianco, you’ll want to book a flight just to go to his restaurant.

He was certainly the forerunner of the “pizza boom” in the US, where small artisanal pies are made in wood-fired ovens, with their bubbling, charred crusts and top-notch ingredients. Bianco was born in the Bronx, suffered with severe asthma, and ended up dropping out of school when he was 16, biding his time learning to make fresh mozzarella at Mike’s Arthur Avenue Deli. He moved to Phoenix in the mid-’80s, mostly on a lark and a desire to get a fresh start.

Selling fresh mutz door-to-door, he started his pizza-making journey out of the back of a grocery store. When he moved to Santa Fe, he found out how abundant local farms were and the wonder of using local ingredients. Back in Phoenix, he opens Pizza Bianco and an empire was born.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of?Chef’s Table has pretty much established a tone and style over its many seasons, and the Pizza season continues that tradition. It certainly has been an influence on shows likeTaste The Nation With Padma Lakshmi and others.

Our Take: One of the things we’ve always appreciated about theChef’s Table series is that it’s more concerned with the lives of the people making the food than the actual food itself. Sure, there are still lots of lovingly-shot views of the food in question. But the often extraordinary lives of the people who make that food, and how passionate they are about making that food, is what’s really interesting.Chef’s Table: Pizza continues that tradition.

While the series starts in a pretty obvious spot — Chris Bianco has been winning James Beard Awards for a couple of decades now — the show is going to some less obvious pizza hotspots. Also profiled will be Gabriele Bonci from Rome, Ann Kim from Minneapolis, Franco Pepe from Caiazzo, Italy, Yoshihiro Imai from Kyoto, Japan, and Sarah Minnick from Portland, Oregon. Yes, they visit a couple of spots in Italy. But they bypass some well-known pizza areas in the US, like New York, Chicago or New Haven, because they’re going where the stories are more interesting.

The story about Bianco leaves out a few details, like the fact that he went to Phoenix when he won plane tickets to anywhere in the US, but it makes up for it with some emotional moments where Chris talks about how he almost had to give up pizza making due to “baker’s lung,” and how he’s had to slow down and delegate more, which has also opened himself to enjoy more of the pleasures of life — including marriage and two young daughters at 60. We see him touring the local farms where he gets his ingredients and he also dispels the myth that the Southwest isn’t an abundant region, despite its arid climate.

Sex and Skin: Just some very sexy shots of pizza.

Parting Shot: Bianco looks out over a sunset and talks about how he thinks coming out to the desert changed his life in the best way.

Sleeper Star: Bianco’s wife Mia, mainly because she acknowledges that “Chris has this really gruff exterior, and he says ‘fuck’ a lot, but he is so, so sweet. He wants to make people feel good, and that’ll keep him up at night.”

Most Pilot-y Line: Chris goes back to Mike’s Deli and sees his old friend, David Greco, and the Bronx banter starts. “You know something, the worse your eyesight gets, the better I look,” he says to David when his old friend says he hasn’t changed.

Our Call: STREAM IT.Chef’s Table: Pizzacarries on the show’s long tradition of putting the chef first, while still giving that person’s food more than enough time to make viewers’ mouths water.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.