Jess Carbutt: From the creators of “Chef’s Table,” “Street Food” is a new Netflix series that delves behind the dishes and puts the chefs in the spotlight. The first season is set in Asia, where we meet many charismatic chefs from nine diverse cities, hearing first-hand about their often emotional and arduous culinary journeys, as well as discovering the importance of street food culture within their communities. Particularly fascinating chefs include Bangkok’s Jay Fai, whose inspiring endurance and creative dishes such as her crab meat omelette helped her family survive, and Osaka’s Toyo, whose endless energy and witty personality kept his business and his dream afloat.
Camille Miller: Unhappiness is often the seed of good art. Observing, analyzing and putting together the pieces of other people’s misfortune is one way to revive a jaded, 32-year-old screenwriter’s spiralling career. At least that’s what Rio Yazaki (Fumino Kimura) is counting on in the Netflix original rom-com series “The Many Faces of Ito.” Yazaki, a heartbroken and painfully blasé dramatist, enjoyed fame, success and love before plummeting into writer’s block. When four desperate women fall into her lap at a book launch event, everything changes — and not necessarily for the better.
Paul McInnes: I’ve been watching Mikey Chen on YouTube for about a year now. He has a couple of channels but my go-to for weekend bingeing is called Strictly Dumpling. Chen, a charismatic and genial American, tours the world basically trying out the local food. The greatest videos feature his love of Japanese convenience stores where he buys shed loads of food and sits inside and eats the lot in one sitting. It’s addictive viewing and is what, for me, YouTube is basically all about.
Caroline Perrine: Chris Lilley’s Netflix mockumentary feels like a throwback to a time when political correctness wasn’t a big deal. The show follows six unconnected storylines of grotesquely imagined stereotypical characters, including a fashion designer with objectophilia and an ex-porn star who has become a hoarder. There are segments in this show which you can laugh at and even more you will cringe at, but throughout, you’re like to have a niggling feeling that it’s all just a little bit mean. This show is not for the empathetic among us, nor for those who believe that there can be more to comedy than picking on easy targets.
