No matter how many times various food/travel series land in the same location, or even eat at the same famed restaurant, talk to the same world renowned chef, or sample the same regional cuisine, it usually still manages to appeal to the inner foodie/globetrotter in everyone. This is especially surprising given the amount of shows that have flooded the market from Food Network’s heyday to now, with the likes of everyone from the late Anthony Bourdain to Andrew Zimmern to perhaps the unlikeliest food/travel show host in recent memory, Phil Rosenthal, creator of the incredibly successful Ray Romano sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. Rather than return with another sitcom following that series’ end, Rosenthal embarked on a second career in front of the camera, first as host of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having. That series only lasted a season before Netflix swooped in and revived it as Somebody Feed Phil, which just served up its second season on the streaming platform.
There’s a lot to like about Rosenthal’s series. It’s funny and kindhearted; he checks in at the end of every episode with his elderly parents via video call to chat with them about his latest adventure. Like his exploits throughout locations like Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Cape Town, and more, there’s an air of goodwill in everything Rosenthal sees and does. There’s an overwhelming element of joy in every episode — the joy of traveling to new places, the joy of experiencing new things, and the joy in meeting new people who, no surprise, tend to enjoy the same things everyone else on these shows do: good food, good drinks, and good company.
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Early on in the series’ first season on Netflix, Rosenthal exclaimed, while eating, obviously, “People like what they like.” That seems to be the show’s driving ethos: there’s a whole world of cuisine out there and you’re either going to like it or you’re not — or maybe it’ll be just okay; there’s some middle ground, apparently. For Rosenthal, though, there's seemingly nothing he doesn’t like, nothing he won’t try and later exclaim, with wide-eyed pleasur,e how incredible it is. More so than maybe any other show of its kind on TV or streaming at the moment, Somebody Feed Phil is filtered entirely through the lens of its host’s personal experience. That’s a big part of the series’ charm, but it also limits the degree to which the show takes the viewer into a place and the varying experiences of the people who live in that culture.
Somebody Feed Phil is less a deep-dive observation of a locale, its people, and how an area’s cuisine defines the two than it is a surface-level consideration of the latter. It’s the beer flight of food travel shows: a relatively small sampling that’s more or less free from the potentially intriguing highs and lows of overindulgence, or, in this case, cultural immersion. Without the heady, intoxicating effects that may result from a decidedly more inquiring approach, the show can leave you wanting more — more of the sensory experience of being in Buenos Aires or Copenhagen or Cape Town, and more of what it means to be a part of the cultures that make up those places.
But the beer flight approach has its benefits, too. It’s immensely consumable, which works if all you’re looking for is the chance to watch the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond consume various cuisines around the world and generally nod his head in approval, you're in luck. It’s experiential in a way that what’s ultimately appealing about Somebody Feed Phil is Rosenthal and his unbridled, sometimes maddening enthusiasm about digging into his next meal. At one point during his adventure in Copenhagen, Rosenthal enjoys a picnic of schnapps and smørrebrød (small, gorgeous looking open-faced sandwiches) from Aamanns Deli, with the owner and chef Adam Aamann, as well as a food writer from the area. While Aamann recounts his story of bringing smørrebrød back into contemporary culinary fashion, Rosenthal — understandably — gets excited about one of the sandwiches he’s devouring and flails about, pointing at the smørrebrød, telling Aamann, “Sorry, I’m not listening. Pork wins!” It’s the kind of moment that makes unscripted television fun to watch, while also underlining, for better and worse, precisely what this show’s about: the food, and Rosenthal’s consumption/enjoyment of it.
To Rosenthal’s credit, he interrupts his guest to offer a gushing compliment, and does give Aamann a chance to finish his account of the little smørrebrød that could, but by then the chef’s anecdote feels conciliatory in a weird way, as though the show’s saying, “Well, this guy made us some sandwiches, so we might as well let him talk about them.”
It can be difficult to tell what the point of view of Somebody Feed Phil is other than seeing a man’s face light up while eating a bunch of really good food, often in the company of the interesting people who made it. That’s definitely an angle, and one Neftlix clearly feels is enough to justify producing the series. But it’s also worth it to wonder whether more is called for — not more food, but more substance about food and how it shapes and is shaped by the people making and eating it. That question feels particularly pertinent following the death of Anthony Bourdain, who, with Parts Unknown especially, pushed the idea of a food/travel show in that direction. Whether or not Somebody Feed Phil is capable of or even interested in filling that space is a question whose answer remains to be seen, though it seems unlikely considering how this season spent most of its time.
Still, there is a charming simplicity and niceness to Rosenthal’s series that makes it easy to overlook any qualms you might have with the depth of its content. Rosenthal himself is such an immensely likable person and his passion for food so obvious, his pleasure, fueled by his unobjectionable niceness, becomes the viewers’. It’s utterly consumable food TV, and your mileage on that may vary, which is fine; after all, as Rosenthal put it, “People like what they like.”
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Somebody Feed Phil seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Netflix.