Its alright. Not one I set out to watch but one I didn't mind if there was nothing else on.

I think Flick01 said it all, how can I add to that.

I liked Chef.

Very unfunny show...I like Lenny Henry but this was a bad smell in the kitchen. I would have put Porridge on this list.

I am Gareth Blackstock. I am seriously unpleasant. My bark is worse than my bite and my bark is atrocious! Chef! (serious profession) is a show about a cook named Gareth Blackstock, (Lenny Henry) the arrogant, tyrannical and hard driven chef who is the head chef at an English restaurant. He dreams of owning his own restaurant and that dream comes true when he gets the chance to buy his place of employment, Le Chateau Anglais. Gareth (just called Chef by everyone except his wife) is married to Janice (Caroline Lee Johnson) and for two out of the three series they run the restaurant. (In series 3 the arrangement is different) The show is based around their life running the restaurant and Chef's overzealous and highly vocal management of his kitchen staff. His cooking skills and reputation are beyond question and much of the show's humor revolves around his failings in every other area of life: his disregard for customers, verbal abuse of the kitchen help and neglecting Janice. Blackstock is dedicated to cooking and everything else comes second. (Let me put things in perspective for you Chef says to one of the kitchen staff, On the evolutionary scale of cooking, I am Einstein and you are a mud dwelling, uni cellular speck of jelly with a predilection for consuming its own excrement.) Although Chef is the best cook in England he is stressed and high strung and frequently loses his temper. He is obsessed with making perfect meals but feels that he is hampered by incompetent help. (Are you going to make table seven's gravy or should we just put it in an envelope and mail it to them?) The majority of Chef's verbal abuse is aimed at Everton, a Jamaican born young man who came to work for free just to learn the trade and be in the kitchen of the great Gareth Blackstock. Everton makes his share of mistakes; losing a band aid in someone's food, serving up dishwater as soup, and releasing 50 pounds of live crayfish in the kitchen. But Everton is an expert in Caribbean cooking and every so often Chef has to humble himself and admit that Everton has redeeming qualities. The main thrust of the comedy is that Chef is so sure of himself that he gets himself into awkward situations and then has to get himself out. For example, Janice arranges for Gareth to be interviewed on an Oprah type show and once on the air he spends most of the time criticizing Janice's cooking. Chef finds it difficult to make friends or engage in small talk and rarely treats his wife with the same respect that he shows for food. As the show evolved a softer side began to surface and you get the feeling that underneath the verbal tornado, Blackstock really is a decent guy. He even manages to strike up a friendship with Everton. As series 2 came to a close his business acumen doesn't equal his ambitions and he is forced to sell the restaurant. His obsession with food coupled with his rude and sarcastic nature puts his marriage under strain and eventually Janice leaves him. (This wine doesn't have a bouquet, it has a smell he says to the wine steward. A bouquet has flowery and fruity scents, it promises delights to come. This smells like the interior of a Datsun minivan. It doesn't promise, it threatens.) The kitchen staff changes from series to series and towards the end they play a more important role than in the beginning of the series. Some of Chef's verbal bite is toned down in series 3 and in my view once the formula of the show was changed, it never recovered the acerbic wit that made me turn up the volume and sit glued to the edge of the chair as I waited for Blackstock's next verbal explosion. Taken in total however, Chef is a first class show. The first two series were shot on film and when series 3 was shot on video a great deal of the food preparation scenes were eliminated and the much of the original flavor of the first two series was gone. Lenny Henry was outstanding in the lead role and he intentionally made no reference to the fact that he was a black man, a deliberate ploy that made its point more subtly than many Look, we have a minority playing the lead shows. It is a wordy show with no sight gags or slapstick humor therefore it appeals to the intellectual side of the funny bone. Though short lived (20 episodes) and with a weak final series, Chef is, in my opinion, one of the better shows to come from England in the 1990s.

I've only seen two episodes of Chef!, but both were very memorable (especially the one about the Stilton cheese); this show follows the exploits of an outrageous Chef and his temper. Fun to watch.