Chef's Table: Legends, review: before Jamie Oliver, cooking was for losers

Telegraph

28-04-2025

Television is laden with food. From drama to entertainment factual, from The Bear to Boiling Point to Bake-Off to MasterChef, chow is cool. Ten years of Netflix's Chef's Table, which casts chefs as rock stars and restaurants as their much-hyped backing bands, attests to a complete reassessment of what food means. There was a queue 200-long for a pop-up selling baked potatoes in Soho last week. This means something (although it may just be that the spud fans have never heard of the Emperor's New Clothes).
For its 10th anniversary, Chef's Table has re-emerged as Chef's Table: Legends (Netflix), granting an hour each to Jamie Oliver, José Andrés, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters. Of these, British viewers will most likely have heard only of Oliver, unless the names (and prices) of American restaurants The French Laundry, Chez Panisse and minibar happen to be palatable. But while Legends may appear to be just hagiography – and there is indeed a great deal of kissing the ring – over the course of the series it does make a compelling case that what these four chefs have done is more than just amusing bouches.
Oliver's societal influence is the most obvious – it's why he gets people's backs up even as he's selling millions of books. With the calm and ease of hindsight, Chef's Table makes a strong argument for how he has changed British cuisine. It's not that complex a history – before Oliver, the British were not great chefs, cooking was for losers and no self-respecting young Oasis fan would be seen dead at a fishmonger's. After Oliver, cooking was cool and something boys did to get girls. He changed TV cookery, and cookery, and eating.
The films about Andres, Keller and Waters are if anything even more beautiful to look at (side issue, but food photography in 2025 is so good it is practically Pavlovian) but, as with the Oliver film, they also tease out how something as high-end as fine dining trickles down into mainstream culture. Andres, for example introduced the small plates phenomenon to American cuisine (for which this diner thinks he should be par-boiled, though opinions may differ).
Waters, with Chez Panisse, championed the farm-to-table movement, which has ultimately led to people thinking a little bit more about where their food has come from and why that might matter. And Keller has done his best to de-poncify fine dining, while still maintaining two three-Michelin-starred restaurants for more than a decade.
Are they all democratisers, as Chef's Table maintains? Well millions of us are waiting for the next series of The Bear, which is all about fine dining and food and standards and caring (and indeed, featured one Thomas Keller in a father figure role last season). As this series shows, you don't have to have eaten their food to understand why these people deserve some veneration. Chances are that without The Naked Chef sliding down the bannisters like a prune, very few people in the UK would be watching The Bear or paying any interest to a Netflix documentary series called Chef's Table.