BY ELIZABETH EGAN, STAFF WRITER
There are a lot of cooking shows. Most feature professional chefs either talking at the camera or having a guest with them to act as the student. Typically, the student is not the main character. This is not the case with the HBO series “Selena+Chef”.
As the name implies, the show features Selena Gomez along with a chef. Working from her own gorgeous kitchen, chefs from all over the country join her through a screen to teach her how to cook some of their signature dishes.
The show started during the pandemic and demonstrates the potential of interacting with someone who is not physically with you. While multiple cameras are set up in Gomez’s kitchen to give the chef multiple angles to watch her cooking, Selena is learning to cook intricate dishes by watching the chef on a single screen. Through this process, the previously amateur chef learns to cook complicated dishes such as pasta, seafood tostada, French omelets and even ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.
There are many great aspects of this show. First of all it pulls in some fantastic chefs. Ludo Lefebvre, Tanya Holland, Ayesha Curry, Kwame Onwuachi and JJ Johnson are just a few of the many chefs that appear throughout the three seasons. The way the show is set up makes it so that the viewer can feel like they are getting a private cooking lesson as well. The chefs are there to teach Gomez who admits to being an amateur cook, not to put on their own show. Teaching has to be a priority for them because nobody wanted to be the chef that caused Selena Gomez to get food poisoning or burn her house down.
The steps to making each dish are gone through methodically, and whenever a new ingredient is added it appears on the screen so that anyone watching can easily take down the recipe.
I have not gotten to make nearly as many recipes as I would like to. From what I have tried, gnocchi with chicken meatballs and the tomato jam appetizer have been my favorites. Every time Gomez finished a dish, she and whoever else was with her in that episode would try it and almost every time they would say it was their new favorite thing she made. After trying some of the recipes, I understood why. Viewers can find the recipes online and I highly recommend trying some out next time anyone is looking for something to cook.
Another aspect of the show that makes it so enjoyable to watch is that Selena Gomez is a huge celebrity who in the unscripted show, comes off as a very normal and relatable person. She drops things, breaks bottles, struggles to use a can opener and makes the absentminded cooking mistakes anyone who has spent time in a kitchen can relate to. She also opens up the show to include her friends and family. In one episode, she casually picks up her phone to FaceTime Taylor Swift, much to the delight of the daughter of that episode’s chef.
Finally, one of the coolest parts of the show is that every chef (there have been 30 so far) gets to select a charity that Gomez donates $10,000 to as a way to thank the chefs for being on the show. At the end of each episode she asks the chef about the charity they chose and they get to do a little promo for it in order to bring attention to the organization as well as the $10,000.
