The Best Show on TV

I’m currently waiting for my fourth meal of Thanksgiving leftovers to heat up in the toaster oven (Monday’s turkey tetrazzini, leftovers of leftovers) and I’m sipping on a dreadful zinfandel, a tart and bitter 2005 Beaulieu Vineyard (but I’m still drinking it). It’s about as far away as you can get from what I saw this morning on After Hours with Daniel, the best show on television these days. Sadly, the show is available only on the cable HD network, Mojo, but you can get the first season on DVD at Netflix.

The concept is: celebrity chef, Daniel Boulud, visits the kitchen of a snazzy restaurant and cooks a late night meal with the chef there for a star-studded guest list. It’s not a cooking show nor is it a true reality show. It’s more like a gustatory fantasy that encompasses all the best parts of eating: the preparation, the presentation and the company. It’s also a chance to see the best chefs in America “let their hair down” and really cook the things that they love and then talk about it. The first season combed the restaurants of Manhattan (WD-50, Daniel, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Maremma, Cru, BLT Prime, and Aquavit) and the second season delves into the blossoming LA scene.

In today’s episode, Daniel cooked with Nancy Silverton at Pizzeria Mozza and I just about died from empathic ecstasy. I should first mention that Pizzeria Mozza, a joint venture with Silverton, Mario Batali and Joseph Bastianich, is one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. The pizza can be doughy around the edges, but otherwise it’s a fantastic thin crust pizza with lovely burnt bits. I happen to love extra crust to chew on and their toppings are unique. Pizza with wild nettles and finnochiona, pizza with squash blossoms and burrata, a pizzete with chanterelles, scallions and guanciale, etc. They change from season to season. But it’s the vegetable antipasti that are truly stunning. Brussels sprouts, broccoli rabe, cauliflower – they’re prepared simply in a way that’s transcendent. So Silverton brought all these dishes out while Daniel roasted a home-cured ham and a pork shoulder made from milk-fed Quebecois pigs. And for 30 minutes, the world disappeared.

To paraphrase celebrity guest, Phil Rosenthal, “A good meal is like a little vacation.” It’s so true. Each of my visits to Pizzeria Mozza has been a (semi-pricey, but not obscenely so) hourlong getaway from the mundanities of daily life. A perfect pizza al funghi with a little quartino of Soave will do more for the soul than any spa treatment or weekend getaway. But top it off with pork product from Daniel Boulud and you’re talking Fantasy Island-level vacation.

And this is what makes After Hours so good. You get to see the work of good chefs augmented by the presence of one of the world’s greatest chefs making the food that they love to eat. Daniel will make something like roasted pineapple stuffed with hand made pineapple ice cream and then declare apologetically that it's a dish too simple to serve at any of his restaurants. And it’s also interesting to see the difference between West Coast and East Coast chefs (represent!). The Manhattan chefs kind of do their things: Marcus Samuelsson makes his Swedish meatballs and Wylie Dufresne does his weird molecular gastronomy stuff. But in L.A., lesser known chefs like Ben Ford and Michael Cimarusti pull out all the stops to try to impress and challenge Chef Daniel.

The irony is that in the first episode, Daniel says that he is excited to come to L.A. to learn how to “cook simple.” He makes rustic foods like stuffed tripe or head cheese, while the upstarts serve Australian lobster sashimi and mojito spheres. Veterans like Nancy Silverton and Joachim Splichal tend to cook more confidently, while young guns like Sang Yoon and Quinn Hatfield seem like they have something to prove, which is great. Either way, the food looks fantastic and exciting. It’s a great time to be an L.A. diner.