There are a lot of cooking shows on Netflix these days. Anyone with enough time on their hands could absorb them all and gain the sum knowledge of several dozen good cooks (or just a really bad temper). Either way, watching too many cooking shows isn’t advised; there’s a lot of chaff out there, and if you’re going to commit to a binge, you may as well get something worthwhile out of it, whether that’s exclusive tips, entertaining drama, or that perfect brain-massaging experience of watching steamy chocolate ganache drip down the side of a fresh spongecake.
So, to help you trim the fat, we’ve put together our top picks for the crème de la crème, the five absolute best cooking shows on Netflix, with one bonus option that’s a little unconventional. Find out more below.
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5 Salt Fat Acid Heat
Netflix
Salt Fat Acid Heat (or SFAH! as nobody calls it but me) is the one show on this list that you could truly enjoy and ‘digest’ in a single evening. It’s a truly wonderful four-part Netflix original series starring Samin Nosrat and based on her 2017 book of the same name. Around 20 years ago, Nosrat ate at Chez Panisse in Berkley, CA and immediately applied to be their dishwasher. She worked her way into the kitchen and continued to cook in some of LA and Italy’s top restaurants before becoming a private cooking teacher.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
It was while teaching that she distilled the impossibly vast world of culinary traditions and flavor profiles and practices into just four key elements. Many chefs will terrify you by insisting that a good dish must achieve a perfect balance between sweet, sour, savoury, spice, tang, tartness, tannins, textures, and whatever the hell umami is (yes, okay, you know what it is, well done), Nosrat made things a bit more simple. Go watch SFAH! and learn the value of these four core elements while also enjoying a beautiful, understated, diverse travel show at the same time, one which gives center stage mostly to women and home cooks – a welcome change as noted by Maura Judkis in her glowing review for the Washington Post:
4 Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
If chefs were musicians, Anthony Bourdain would be Dave Grohl – he’s totally badass, and he was putting in the grind for years before you ever heard of him (side note: Guy Fieri would totally be the singer of Smashmouth). Bourdain grew up in New Jersey and was taken on vacation to France by his farther, Pierre, where he quickly fell in love with elegant and exotic cuisines. He was an executive chef in Manhattan for well over a decade before switching his career into media, writing a book and then hosting several food shows before truly pouring his sharp NYC personality into this no-nonsense, punk-rock, international-food-travel doc Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, first airing in 2013.
Check this out (and the great documentary from 2021 about the chef, Roadrunner) if you want to learn how to order the right whiskey with your flank steak and chimichurri – and how to know if the bar is trying to screw you on the price. Working on the show right up until he left us, Bourdain took his crew and audience to the spots where other cooking shows wouldn’t dare. Heck, the very first episode sees him capitalizing on a slight relaxation of control by the Myanmar government to barrel to this sparsely seen island and sample their greatest culinary achievements. It’s a cool show, ‘nuff said.
3 Mary Berry Double Bill
Alright, that might be a bit of stretch, but she’s certainly an authority who isn’t to be messed with! Berry stars in two limited series’ on Netflix, Mary Berry Everydayand Classic Mary Berry. In the former, we learn all the tiny details, tips, and tricks that can push a simple, wholesome meal to another level of perfection. The show is geared towards those cooking for family and friends, who want to pump out a decadent dish without having to shave truffle over a poached ostrich egg or something. In the latter, Berry gives us her unique spins on classic recipes throughout various cultures and historical periods. The recipes are delightfully varied, sometimes rustic and hearty, sometimes absolutely indulgent – always delicious. These are both great to binge if you love staring at mouth-watering meals and learning a bit about their history along on the way.
Time for a complete 180. In contrast to the gentle, comforting, sultry British tone of Mary Berry’s home-cooking half-hours, Nailed It! is a completely nutty, totally unfeasible, glorious trainwreck of a cooking competition. The show is hosted by the bubbly and hilarious comedian Nicole Byer, who also judges the contestants’ creations alongside Jaques Torres and a guest judge. Each episode sees three amateur bakers competing to recreate stunning confectionary treats. The catch: the bakes they’re trying to recreate are extraordinarily complex, elaborate, and probably took two days and a whole team of highly trained food-artists (it’s a real job, don’t look it up) to put together.
The contestants only have a few hours, too, and there’s usually some shenanigans involving Byer annoying / distracting / pranking the poor bakers. It’s wild, and it always ends with a baker revealing their botched attempt at a sponge cake 3D sculpture of Santa Claus with modeling chocolate for hair, and saying ‘nailed it’ while an eye falls out.
2 Chef’s Table
Created by David Gelb, this touching and visually stunning TV anthology travels far and wide to tell the food stories of some of the world’s most accomplished and unique chefs. The fact is, nobody just starts a restaurant; there’s always a story to tell, and Chef’s Table is impressively comprehensive in its approach. We’ll learn a little about each chef’s early life, then some about how they started their careers, then we’ll find out what they’re doing now, and jump around between these three areas as they all contextualize and inform each other.
A lot of us love to watch cooking shows for sexy close-up shots of delicious looking food, and while Chef’s Table does have plenty of that, it also takes us to unexpected and interesting areas of the food world. We learn the quirky details of running Dan Barber’s farm-to-table restaurant, like how his chickens have a lot of paprika in their diet to give their eggs a signature striking red yolk, and we learn what it’s like to write recipes when you’ve lost your sense of smell. This show is full of human stories and is often quiet and contemplative in its presentation. Chef’s Table is a great binge for someone looking to sink into the culinary world – and stare at some sexy close-ups too.
1 Bonus: Food Wars!
Here we go! The mother of all wild cards! Go into your bedroom, make sure you’re alone, and grab some headphones while you’re at it, because things are about to get weird. If you want to watch anime and love food, there’s nothing better than Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma from J.C. Staff studio, which premiered in 2015 and is now in production on its sixth season. This isn’t a reality show, as you may have guessed, but its fictional plot and setting serve as the perfect canvas onto which dozens of food experts behind the scenes can paint their most elaborate dishes.
The plot is simple (and amazing): Scrappy teenager Soma Yukihira aspires to be a great chef like his dad, whose restaurant Soma has been operating since his childhood. Before he can achieve his dreams, the young Soma is sent to a bonkers elite culinary school where the best chefs from all over the world gather to learn and compete. The school has a policy where DISAGREEMENTS ARE SOLVED BY FOOD WAR! If two students are at odds, they show up to a massive freaking stadium and prepare their best dishes for the judges to taste and decide a winner, usually with a theme or ingredient or method in common. Do you see the massive potential yet?
Like a fictional anime version of Iron Chef, every week the street-smart Soma runs into some punk from the world of high cuisine, who busts out a crazy dish from Florence or Paris or Thailand, and the audience gets to learn all about these distinctive styles of cooking while also seeing Soma learn them in real time and incorporate more and more advanced techniques into his own repertoire. It’s absolutely awesome.
Side note: to quickly address the elephant in the room, this show makes the inexplicable (but hilarious) decision to… get pretty stylized when it comes to conveying just how delicious a dish is. Be warned, characters are liable to make some rather suggestive noises when they eat. They also may quiver at the knees, or get briefly transported to a fantasy realm of pure flavor where they bathe under a waterfall of béarnaise sauce (oddly similar to the later Japanese show Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salary Man). Things like that, delicious and weird.
