Brian McGinn makes a living travelling the word in search of indecently delicious nosebag. As executive producer and sometimes director of Chef’s Table, Netflix’s most durable food show, he has been to Argentina, Moscow, Australia and all points in between. As we speak, he is enduring blistering temperatures in Spain.
“Well, I can neither confirm nor deny,” he says, laughing, when I ask if he’s researching an episode. “I am on vacation in Spain and it’s an absolute delight.”
He has further excitement to come before autumn closes in. On Saturday, August 19th, McGinn will be in Herbert Park, Ballsbridge to discuss his work at that weekend’s Big Grill BBQ and Food Festival.
“I’m doing a talk, telling food stories with visuals,” he says. “I’m going to talk about the variety of shows that I’ve been lucky to be a part of and about how those come about. How we approached photographing food and telling stories about food. How I’ve developed my personal style of doing that.”
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First streamed in 2015, Chef’s Table takes a lavish, near-cinematic approach to its examination of (for the most part) high-end restaurants throughout the globe. The food is always shot in the best light. The chefs’ stories are told economically. It is comfort viewing of the classiest stripe. Domestic viewers may growl at the dearth of Irish episodes, but McGinn cannot be accused of holding a grudge against our great nation’s cuisine. Last year, talking to an American website, he named the late Myrtle Allen, founding spirit of Ballymaloe, as the chef he would most like to have cook for him. No man has a better grasp of the alternatives. That was quite a compliment.
“Myrtle Allen’s Ballymaloe cookbook has been one of my favourites for a while,” he says. “The more time that I’ve spent in the food world, the more that I find myself attracted to food that makes me nostalgic, and that connects me to my early food memories. I was lucky to grow up with a mom who cooked simple recipes. She grew stuff in our family garden and cooked from that. When I make any of Mrs Allen’s recipes – or from Rory O’Connell’s books – I get that same feeling of a magic elixir that comes from a cook who has that touch.”
Let’s nag a bit though. The Chef’s Table currently runs to 38 episodes. He also works on the funkier Street Food show. Have they come close to touching down in Ireland? Any near misses?
“One of the things that I run into all the time, when I’m casting the show is just there’s far, far, far too many people to cover. My experiences in Ireland are not exhaustive. I haven’t been to all of the great restaurants in Ireland. I wouldn’t claim to be some sort of expert. But I think there are a number of restaurants and chefs – I don’t think it would only have to be head chefs – who I think could fit in great on Chef’s Table. But each series has a balance. There are certainly people in Ireland I am keen to make films about.”
Brian McGinn had an interesting background. His great grandparents were from Dublin. His dad was a professor at the painfully prestigious Stanford University in central California. The younger McGinn jokes it was the sort of house where only PBS – the snooty US public broadcaster – was on the TV and that his diversion into filmmaking felt a little like an act of rebellion. I can’t imagine his parents were that upset. It is not as if he joined a death metal band or an urban terrorist cell.
[ Netflix launches Street Food, from the makers of Chef’s TableOpens in new window ]
“For 40 years my father taught science, technology and society,” he says. “My mother was an art history librarian. I like to say I’m this strange fusion of an academic and art-world upbringing. I was raised in a household where we didn’t have cable television. I was raised on classic Hollywood movies and books. My rebellion against the academic world was to think: what if I just fully pursued a career in the arts? After doing that, I sort of went on a crazy path, making a food show that’s known for slow motion and classical music. Ha, ha! I actually started in the comedy world.”
In the middle of the last decade McGinn made an acclaimed documentary on Amanda Knox, the American acquitted of a notorious 2007 murder in Italy, but it was his partnership with David Gelb that firmed up his current core activity. Gelb’s beautiful film Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a critical smash in 2011, offered a model for their collaboration on Chef’s Table. Careful use of tasteful music. Attractive cinematography. The show offered notable contrast to the bellowing that characterises a Gordon Ramsay joint or the rough-edged charm of a Rick Stein ramble. You get some of this luxury in a Nigella Lawson show. But Chef’s Table is a rare series that could work on a cinema screen.
“We’re pretty intrusive,” McGinn says. “We come in and say: ‘We’re going to take your life over for two weeks while we’re here shooting.’ We’re lighting the kitchens for the movies. It’s like we’re shooting a normal film in there. We’re capturing what their service looks like in a documentary style. Each crew has a different way of doing that. But we’re lighting everything. We’re coming up with clever, creative outside-the-box ways to shoot the food. We’re always going for something that creates the spirit of the restaurant.”
We can use our storytelling skills to tell stories about all sorts of food culture
There is invariably an element of escapism in the more extravagant food shows. We are a long way from Delia Smith telling her audience how to boil an egg (more power to her). Even if the target audience could afford to dine in, say, Magnus Nilsson’s Fäviken or Will Goldfarb’s Ubud they would still – presuming they are not already there – have to make their way to Sweden or Indonesia. It’s like reviewing a Ferrari 250 GTO on a car show. Few viewers are treating it as a buyers’ guide. This is an exercise in vicarious pleasure. Right?
“Absolutely. And I think it’s exciting,” McGinn says. “That part is super-exciting for us because we’ve been super lucky, as a result of the show and the other stuff we’ve made, to travel all over the place. That’s not a privilege that’s afforded to everyone. So, being able to show how food reflects a place’s culture is great. We always try to shoot each location with an eye not only to the authentic insider’s portrayal, but also to show the beauty of each place.”
The production team’s adventures in the Street Food strand feel like acknowledgment that culinary culture is now often at its most exciting away from the formal restaurant space. In food trucks. In stalls. From trolleys on busy thoroughfares. One episode locates soul food on the sidewalks of Harlem. Another serves us mung bean pancakes in Seoul. Was this an attempt to move away from conspicuous luxury?
“Well, I can say that, on Chef’s Table, after a few seasons focused almost exclusively on fine dining, we moved, in our third season, to a Buddhist monk in South Korea who not only was not a fine-dining chef, but didn’t even have a restaurant. I think that marked a turning point for us. We can use our storytelling skills to tell stories about all sorts of food culture. From that point forward, we’ve tried to carve a path that highlights all sorts of restaurants.”
This year McGinn broke into a very different line of food programming. You will see his name among the producers of the current season of hectic, Chicago-based restaurant drama The Bear. That Disney+ show, with its hurtling cameras and dizzying editing, has done as much to communicate the madness of the business as any documentary show.
“We’re just very lucky,” McGinn says. “My partner [and] I got asked to help out on the third episode of the second season. It’s a really cool episode about one of the chefs who goes out and explores Chicago for inspiration. The episode had a number of real chefs that the team wanted to involve in the show. We would never claim we played a critical role. But we were happy to be involved. It’s always been a dream of mine to work in the scripted television and film space. So it was such a cool experience.”
So does The Bear get it right about commercial kitchens? Are they really such scary places?
“I would never wade into that at all,” he says. “I’ll leave that for people to debate on their own.”
Producers are cautious people.
The Big Grill is in Herbert Park, Dublin 4 on August 17th-20th https://www.biggrillfestival.com/
