Maybe you are finding the wait for the Season 4 premiere of “The Bear” — yet to be announced, but likely this June — difficult to handle. Or maybe what you find unbearable is “The Bear” itself — too contrived, too amped up, too too-good-to-be-true.
In either case, there is a worthwhile alternative available on ChaiFlicks, the United States-based streaming service for Jewish and Israeli series and movies. “The Chef” presents the drama inside an ambitious restaurant kitchen without overdoing the psychodrama; it stands back from the flare-ups and bad-boy misbehavior, presenting them with a smart, sardonic, cosmopolitan distance. The characters reveal themselves, but judgment isn’t the main course.
(The show’s first season premiered in 2020, two years before “The Bear.” The fifth of that season’s nine episodes arrives on Thursday.)
Set in a Tel Aviv restaurant called Sophia, “The Chef,” created by Erez Kavel and Orit Dabush, is not about the heated rush toward opening day. Sophia is the former darling, still bustling but no longer a must-visit; a splash of cold reality arrives in the first episode, when a former sous chef, whose new restaurant has been open three months, is called “Tel Aviv’s most interesting chef” by a Haaretz restaurant critic.
That is just one of the troubles weighing on the chef of the title, Dori (Gal Toren). His buyers can’t source the ingredients he needs; his pastry chef, a rising star, wants more attention; his primary lover, the wife of a potential business partner, is getting fed up with him.
Into this familiar scenario comes Nimrod (Guri Alfi), an unemployed 44-year-old coder who has aged out of Tel Aviv’s tech sector and is working as a valet parking attendant. Given a tryout at the lowest rungs of the Sophia kitchen, he catches on, becoming our surrogate eyes and ears. Most important, he catches the eye of Dori, who responds to Nimrod’s feistiness and his willingness to speak his mind.
The early episodes of “The Chef” are built around the slowly growing, prickly relationship between these two men at opposite ends of the kitchen hierarchy. Dori is amused by Nimrod and wants to help him out, but he also blithely takes advantage of Nimrod’s enthusiasm and financial hardship. Nimrod is drawn to Dori’s swagger and talent, but he also sees him for the toxic narcissist he is — Nimrod’s blank gaze as he observes Dori’s relentless philandering is part rebuke, part envy.
Neither of these characters is new or startling; Dori, in particular, is someone we have seen before, with his stew of ego, restlessness and insecurity bordering on paranoia. But they are written with a fair degree of subtlety and given nuanced portrayals by Toren, who brings a bullish grace to Dori, and Alfi, who captures Nimrod’s barbed amiability.
The rapport between the two contributes to an overall air of authenticity; it is dangerous for a non-initiate to venture an opinion on how realistically a show portrays a restaurant, but it is safe to say that “The Chef” has a lived-in immediacy in its scenes of kitchen process and office squabbling. (The front of the house is virtually never seen, at least in the early going.) Kav-el, who directs, and Guy Raz, his cinematographer, exhibit a visual and tonal sensibility that is both casual and cinematic; they hold your interest, though sometimes scenes go on longer, and with less happening, than American television viewers are used to.
They also give the show an ambient sense of humor, cutting but weary, that echoes the attitude that the brutally overworked, moderately rewarded characters need to get through the day. There are moments of inspiration, but “The Chef” isn’t about culinary magic. It’s about maintenance — the hard, sometimes soul-eating work of keeping Sophia in business.
There are aspects of the show that are, we can assume, entirely realistic as depictions of the Tel Aviv restaurant scene but will still rankle some viewers. Dori and Nimrod are surrounded by smart, hard-working women without whom Sophia would not exist, and who get less credit and are subject to varying levels of sexual harassment. It’s a subject the show addresses directly, but still, the women and the actresses who ably portray them — including Rotem Sela as the restaurant’s preternaturally calm manager, and Gitit Fisher as the itchy pastry chef — are not the stars.
There is also, so far, an absence of Arab characters; the show makes note of it when a kitchen worker’s absence is explained with: “No Abed. Curfew.” And there is some cognitive dissonance in the portrayal (filmed in 2020) of an Israeli milieu, no matter how cosseted, in which no mention is made of conflict, or of Arab-Israeli relations at all.
But taken on its own terms, the show hits the spot. When Dori acts badly in front of Nimrod, he smiles and says, with royal-we presumption, “Discretion is a very important quality in our world.” “The Chef” takes an honest look at what is good and bad in Dori’s world, and in the jostling, vibrant worlds of all the other people who give the restaurant life.
The post ‘The Chef’ Review: Kitchen Drama, This Time in Tel Aviv appeared first on New York Times.
