Ugly Delicious

Format and premise

Each episode begins with a simple, broad topic such as pizza, tacos, barbecue, or fried rice, and expands from there. Chang and Meehan start at restaurants they favor, then widen the scope to both high-brow and low-brow versions of the dish in different countries. The pizza episode, for example, starts in a classic New York pizzeria before traveling to Italy, Japan, and New Haven, Connecticut, and also follows Chang as he trains as a Domino's deliveryman.⁶

The show's stated purpose is not cooking instruction. As Helen Rosner, staff writer at The New Yorker, put it in her review, the series "isn't about what food is, it's about what it means, and about the choices people make that change its meaning." The camera rarely lingers on dishes; instead, each episode weaves together segments filmed in restaurants and homes around the world, along with animated interludes, fake commercials, and TV-parody clips.^{5 • 7} Chang told TIME that food served as "a very powerful tool to use as a vehicle to talk about the things that are sort of f-ed up," with each episode using a single food as a lens on immigration, racism, and cultural appropriation.⁸

Season 1

Season 1's eight episodes covered pizza, tacos, home cooking, shrimp and crawfish, barbecue, fried chicken, fried rice, and stuffed foods.² Guests included chef René Redzepi of Noma, food writers Jonathan Gold and Ruth Reichl, comedian Ali Wong, and actor Gillian Jacobs.⁸

Several episodes drew particular critical attention. The crawfish episode contrasts Houston, where a Vietnamese technique of cooking crawfish and dousing it in spiced butter has largely displaced the traditional Creole boil, with New Orleans, where despite similar ingredients the innovation has not taken hold. The same episode includes a segment on Ku Klux Klan activism against Vietnamese shrimpers in the 1970s.⁵ The fried chicken episode examines the racist history of the dish, including how chickens kept by enslaved people became tied to demeaning stereotypes about African Americans, and discusses Hattie B's, a Nashville hot-chicken chain opened in 2012 by a white family that has been criticized for appropriating a dish long served in Nashville's black communities by establishments such as Bolton's and Prince's.⁸ The taco episode features Cristina Martinez, the undocumented Mexican chef behind South Philly Barbacoa, fighting for the rights of undocumented food workers.⁸

Season 2

Season 2, released in March 2020, consists of four episodes: "Kids Menu," "Don't Call It Curry," "Steak," and "As the Meat Turns."⁴ The season was produced by Tremolo Productions in association with Majordomo Media, the company Chang formed in 2018, with episodes directed by Morgan Neville, Dara Horenblas, and Jason Zeldes.^{9 • 10} It ventures into parenting, as Chang prepared to become a first-time father, and its guests included Nick Kroll, Aziz Ansari, Padma Lakshmi, food writers Helen Rosner and Chris Ying, Danny McBride, Bill Simmons, and David Choe.⁹

The curry episode discusses the colonial baggage of the word "curry" and the diversity of Indian cuisine, with Chang traveling to Mumbai after admitting his unfamiliarity with Indian food.^{4 • 11} The final episode, "As the Meat Turns," explores Levantine, Arabian Gulf, and Iranian food, including Oaxacan Angelenos experimenting with Lebanese-Mexican dishes and Lebanese brothers in Dearborn, Michigan, whose bacon-egg-and-cheese flatbread was initially scorned by old-timers in their community and later copied in Beirut.¹²