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With writers and actors on strike this summer, Netflix decided to diversify. The streaming giant opened a restaurant, Netflix Bites, a few blocks west of its Hollywood headquarters. On the menu: dishes featured in Netflix food shows. The daily special: the presence of the chefs who created the dishes. Well, some of them.
“Dominique Crenn isn’t here, because she’s opening a new restaurant, in Paris,” a Netflix publicist said, frowning, of the “Chef’s Table” star. “Which I didn’t know about.”
“We noodled with the idea of a restaurant for a while,” Greg Lombardo, Netflix’s head of experiences, said at the opening. He wore a navy sport coat, gray jeans, and sneakers, and he clutched a sweating iced coffee that he’d brought with him. (“I didn’t want to bother the kitchen,” he said. “They have bigger fish to fry.”)
Lombardo explained that Netflix executives, having adapted the drive-in movie for the pandemic age (“Stranger Things: The Experience”) and the Regency-era ball for cosplay enthusiasts (“The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience”), pondered the question “ ‘What do people really want?’ I think what you want is a chance to literally taste that amazing dish that you’ve watched this incredible chef prepare,” he said.
He went on, “Look, we’re hopeful that the strike is resolved. We want it to end fairly for everybody. This is a way for us to connect with members where they are, in between content windows, when there’s not new content for them to enjoy. This is a great way to remind them that they love that content.”
At Netflix Bites, content was distributed in a sun-splashed courtyard. Cocktails with such ingredients as Hellfire bitters and “salt air” made the rounds. “There’s a fun jello shot at the bottom of that,” a server said as a guest lifted an amber-colored drink from a tray.
“It’s a lot of moving pieces,” Ann Kleinhenz, an events director who had six weeks to staff and set up the restaurant, said. “Eight different chefs, four different drink masters. Normally, you only have one. You get a lot of feedback.”
How did Netflix compare with her past clients? “Well, I worked with Prince for over ten years,” she said. “But Prince wasn’t difficult, he was just very much in the moment.”
You could say the same of Netflix. “We’ve been a little blessed by the writer’s strike, because the entertainment business isn’t working,” Curtis Stone, an Iron Legend on “Iron Chef,” said. He wore a black apron embroidered with “NETFLIX BITES” and stood near a pizza oven decorated with red tiles that spelled out the company’s name. “Out of a normal restaurant in L.A., fifty per cent of your staff are actors waiting for their next gig,” he said. “We’re not getting the leads from, you know, blockbusters, but it’s a big industry, and it’s transient work.”
The smell of charred oak and fermented dough wafted over. “Should we go check it out?” Stone said. A few steps away, Ann Kim (she was featured on “Chef’s Table: Pizza”) presided over a prep counter, running a pizza cutter across a pie of kimchi and cubed pork. Flames soared behind her.
Was the red Netflix logo on the oven slightly askew? “The hotter the oven gets, the more it starts to melt,” she said. “We just slap it back up.”
Around the corner, a twenty-five-pound hog was splayed across a charcoal smoker driven in from Alabama. “You don’t see or hear a lot of people doing whole-hog barbecue,” Rodney Scott (“Chef’s Table: BBQ”) said. “It’s kind of a dying art.”
More content circulated: serrano-pepper-topped hamachi from Ming Tsai (“Iron Chef”); a frosty slurry of dark rum and xanthan gum. “That looks like a dessert,” Laryl Garcia, a communications executive for Stone, said, then she noticed a hubbub nearby. “There’s a congregation around the pizza.” A man with a swoop of salt-and-pepper hair had sidled up to the pizza oven. “Oh, it’s Ted”—Sarandos, Netflix’s C.E.O. She craned her neck. “Oh, it’s Ted making the pizza.”
Onlookers leaned in as Sarandos slid a shovel-size wooden spatula into the oven and pulled out a blistered pie of Sungold tomatoes. “Don’t drop it,” Kim said. The C.E.O. set it down on a stainless-steel tray, to applause.
“Really beautiful, nice job,” Kim said.
“Good coaching,” Sarandos replied.
“Now we get to eat Ted’s pizza,” Tsai said.
Sarandos moved on to the splayed hog; the entourage followed. “Everyone walked away,” Garcia said, reaching for a slice of the Sungold. “Get in here.”
Kim sliced another kimchi pie. “He’s a pizza geek,” she said of Sarandos. “He said he has a wood-fired oven at his house,” equipped with a warming rack, which is unusual for someone not in the business. “He knows what he’s doing,” she added. ♦
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