In recent years, as a home chef and frequent over-eater, I’ve come to the opinion that cuisine is the ultimate form of artistic expression. Read a great novel. Watch an award-winning film. Go see your favorite band in concert. None of them stimulate you visually, audibly, and chemically like food. The things we eat directly affect the makeup of our bodies. The Mona Lisa itself is second to a sizzling fajita platter. As a fan of comic books, science fiction, and professional wrestling, I’ve also embraced the idea that there is no “high art” or “low art;” only art done well or done poorly. Please apply that reasoning as this season of Netflix’s Chef’s Table takes us on a world tour of the primal, pure, and sublime nature of BBQ.
In Lexington, Texas, we meet “Tootsie” Tomanetz. A woman who had spent her entire adult life in the meat industry, she has memories of community picnics full of fried chicken, potato salad, and Christian fellowship made bittersweet by the fact that those times are slowly disappearing. A pitmaster for over 50 years, Tootsie has buried a husband and son that worked alongside her. She works Monday through Friday as a custodian at a local high school. Sunday is for The Lord. Saturday? Saturday is when she wakes up in the middle of the night to drive to Snow’s BBQ where the 83-year-old grandmother shovels glowing coals under slabs of ribs, pork steaks, and brisket that have earned her a place in Texas folklore.
Lennox Hastie began working in a hotel restaurant in his native England at the age of 15. At a young age, he had numerous Michelin stars attached to his resumé but a lack of fulfillment. It was at mountainside kitchen in Spain that he discovered a spiritual connection to cooking with fire and an affection for his bristly mentor. Since then he has maintained a healthy obsession with mastering the ingredients from fresh vegetables to crabs hunted down in a mangrove forest and techniques for things as unorthodox as grilling caviar and steaks dry-aged to an unheard of 200 days. At his acclaimed restaurant, Firedoor, in Sydney, his flames kiss local Australian beef, rum cakes, kangaroo meat, seafood. The man grills salad and it looks sublime.
American barbecue is specialized by region. In Texas, cattle is king but, in The Carolinas, Rodney Scott was raised in the art and tradition of the whole hog. BBQ was a feature of his parent’s corner store in a crossroads outside of Charleston, SC. The work ethic instilled into him by his father was coupled with a dreamer’s ambition. Restaurateur Nick Pihakis recognized this and began needling him that he had anxiety but he also had drive to push through it, his father’s stroke, and a fire at the store. Fast forward and writer Lolis Eric Elie is commenting on the relationship between American cuisine and black culture as Rodney walks the woods with his son, cutting wood and feeding hogs because tradition matters, family is first, and a James Beard Award looks great on the wall.
An interpreter is used to convey Rosalia Chay Chuc’s love and reverence for preserving Mayan tradition. She resisted learning Spanish or even leaving her village. Tending the boar, the corn, and the citrus on her farm is all she’s known or cared to do until it became time to pass those skills down to her children. She is not a restauranteur. She is a woman who makes her own clothes, makes her tortillas by hand from masa, and who has professional chefs from all over coming to her home in the Yucatan to sample her cooking. When they come to her backyard, pits are dug in the earth where rocks are heated by burning wood and pork, slathered in freshly ground achiote, is buried in the earth just as it was thousands of years ago. Once scared that her beloved traditions would disappear, she now has found joy in sharing them with the entire world.
Netflix does a superb job of highlighting just what barbecue is and who does it. It’s the very definition of virtuosity: the common thing done uncommonly well. It is the ultimate art in its most raw form. It’s meat and fire and tradition. And it is people from all different backgrounds from all over the world that put themselves into the food. The narratives and interviews of Chef’s Table is a good base for their stories… but I’ll bet they’d be best understood after our first bite.
