What really matters is who you are

Everything will eventually end in who you are. It is especially true for the art world. Even culinary art, for the best chefs in the world. They may be successful imitating other masters or following traditions, but they always feel and suffer from the sense of missing. What they create are not who they are.

It didn’t feel they were mine. Just felt like less well-executed copies of someone else’s stuff. — Magnus Nillson

Netflix’s original series, Chef’s Table, tells us how the world’s top chefs find and express who they are as a person through cooking.The top chefs’ dishes are telling us more about themselves than about culinary art. Food is merely a medium.

Four episode into the first season of Chef’s Table, I am totally addicted to the chefs’ journeys of self-discovery. Massimo Bottura chose to break the Grandma’s recipe and carved his dish out of his childhood memory of traditional Italian food; Dan Barber stood against the whole U.S. food manufacturing and went on his own quest for the best ingredients and producing them on his own farm; Niki Nakayama was loud in food, carrying her Japanese Kaiseki cuisine while standing against the muted, submissive female figure in her tradition; Francis Mallmann applied primitive cooking technique from Patagonia, asserting his love for freedom and his deep connection with Patagonia.

It has nothing to do with the Michelin stars. They are chefs telling us about themselves and their childhood memories through the food they serve.

The majority don’t know exactly who we are, but few lucky people that show our way to their core of being. The Chef’s Table shows us the few and tells us that, in the end, what really matters is just who you are.