Who sits at the Chef’s Table? Food criticism and the spectacle of elite gastronomy

Abstract

The discursive mediation of “elite taste” is a central ideological production of food critics, cultural arbiters of what entails “good food,” as well as who entails a “good cook.” In this paper, we employ a mediatized critical discourse analytic approach to scrutinize one brand of “elite taste” as mediated by food critics in the Netflix series Chef’s Table. Specifically, we identify the role of the white critical voice in legitimizing and problematizing the featured chefs and their food. We present an in-depth analysis of two episodes of Chef’s Table and argue that the program is undergirded by a Debordian spectacle in which white critics attempt to blur the boundaries between chef, audience, and elite food, but ultimately reproduce extant distinctions evidenced in the consumption of food along classed, raced, and gendered materializations of “taste”.