I love Chinese food. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY and have eaten the best Chinese food in the world. I have great respect for the good people who fed me all that delicious stuff. I wish I could still get cuisine that good today. And then, along comes Ming Tsai. This is an intelligent, talented, well-educated chef, who presents dishes which have little to do with real Chinese cooking most of the time. He began the series by presenting lazy haute cuisine recipes, most of which were impossible to reproduce in the home. He's evolved to an even lazier program now, which offers only a "master sauce", also impossible to reproduce, served over many impossible to obtain ingredients. Don't get me wrong, in theory, it all seems swell, but in watching the show, you've got to notice even Ming can't get his dishes made. He works sloppily and presents a finished dish obviously put together by some unnamed off-screen sous chef, somewhere. Halfway through, he brings out some quasi-super-chef or another, and they glad-hand and support each others' theories of fusion cooking, which, frankly, for me, the jury is still out on. The best shows are the ones with his likable parents, themselves past restaurant owners. They mug for the camera, embarrass their son and pull the most delicious-looking traditional Chinese fare seemingly out of thin air. The rest of the series is well-produced, but not all that interesting. If I ever get back to Boston, I'll give Ming's Blue Ginger restaurant a try. Until then though, this show just isn't convincing me, and it's a static view of mythic cooking.
Review of Simply Ming
