Chrissy Teigen and David Chang are no strangers to food television. They grew up watching Martha Stewart’s elaborate dinner parties, Great Chefs on PBS, and the first wave of Food Network legends. They’ve both been featured on shows like Top Chef, Snack Off, and Ugly Delicious. So when the time came to start their newest project, Chrissy & Dave Dine Out, they leaned on their breadth of culinary TV knowledge to guide the concept.
“Today’s food TV is heavily edited to the point where it’s not really realistic for people cooking at home,” Chang tells us. So during the multi-year development process, the vision shifted in the other direction. They moved out of a studio set to shoot in some of Los Angeles’ most lauded restaurants. They brought on comedian, actor, and writer Joel Kim Booster, a self-described “personality hire,” to serve as co-host. “It was a vastly different show than what it is today,” Chang says. “I couldn’t be happier with the evolution.”
When you watch the pair getting their hands dirty in the kitchen and discussing deep secrets, it’s hard to imagine the series any other way. Each episode mimics the excitement and barely-controlled chaos of a dinner party amongst friends. Granted, not everybody’s dinner parties happen at Michelin-starred restaurants or have stars like Regina Hall and Kumail Nanjiani on the guest list. Yet its energy still feels decidedly real.
In each episode of Chrissy & Dave Dine Out, Teigen and Booster hold court at the table, navigating conversations as they shift between wildly different topics with ease. Chang, on the other hand, spends most of each episode with the chef in the back of house. When he’s not talking about food and providing an inside look on what it takes to run a kitchen, Chang is bringing dishes out and chiming in on controversial topics at the table.
The show’s stars never shy away from controversy, either. Both Chang and Teigen have had their fair share of scrutiny for hot takes and misbehavior over the span of their careers. Even when the pair visited Delish Kitchen Studios ahead of the show’s release, they didn’t hold back.
Teigen tells us that TikTok has “absolutely” ruined the food industry. “It’s just people are doing things just to get people riled up,” she says. “When I see a girl being like, ‘Hey guys, let’s make carbonara’ and then they start dumping shit all over the counter. It’s just to get people to type, ‘what the f*ck is this?’ And that makes me mad.”
Chang also recalls the opinion that received the biggest backlash of his career—and it was about Costco’s rotisserie chicken. “It was the most un-American thing I’ve ever said in my life,” he jokes. “Every time I go to Costco, I still buy one of those things. I’m just saying, is it possible that it’s not as good as it could be? It could be made better.”
Teigen admits that she’ll ask for a much-hated scooped bagel, but when she orders via Postmates from a specific spot in LA, they always cancel her order.
Yet the risk of public fallout doesn’t stop them from speaking their mind on Chrissy & Dave Dine Out. In fact, they had to advocate heavily for the producers to keep some of the more scandalous conversations in the show.
“I’ll say this: we were a lot raunchier than Disney and Freeform—mommy and daddy—ended up putting in the final cut,” Booster says. “Whether it was the food or the alcohol or the company or the ambiance, people really opened up.”
While Booster himself wasn’t on the front lines of the fight, Chang admitted to going to bat with producers to include a saucy conversation about blowjobs in the premiere episode. Other topics that were spared from the cutting room floor include Teigen puking at the White House, Randall Park getting drunk on a game show set, and Molly McNearney and Jimmy Kimmel joking about using mozzarella as lube.
“Everyone wants to get juicy,” Teigen says. “Nobody wants to steer away from anything. I mean, that’s what makes life so great—differing opinions and juicy ones and dirty ones.”
One opinion in particular sparked a surprisingly heated conversation: Chang and chef Chris Bianco describe burrata as the “Coldplay of cheeses.” And despite arguments to the contrary, Chang swears the moniker is a positive one.
“That’s a god damn compliment. Who wouldn’t want to be Chris Martin, who wouldn’t want to be Coldplay?” he tells us. “Be a billionaire, sell millions and millions of records, have your music played in elevators all over the world?”
Beyond burrata and its connotations of being palatable yet misunderstood, Teigen argues that American cheese is the Billie Eilish of cheeses: “Innovative. Cool. More than digestible, like actually delicious.”
“Sam Smith is like sharp cheddar,” she adds. “It’s like in your face.”
“The marketing people for Kraft Singles should take on the marketing for Coldplay,” Chang says.
Even with its scandalous soundbites and star-studded cast, Chrissy & Dave Dine Out manages to keep the food at the forefront. And, more impressively, the show features the chefs behind each dish as stars in their own right. Each episode presents an inside look at a chef’s distinct culinary point of view. So when the plates eventually reach the dinner table, we’re encouraged to see beyond the ingredients and celebrate the care and craftsmanship behind every bite.
A deceptively simple antipasto plate at Pizzeria Bianco comes with a history lesson about an heirloom Italian pepper. Each stage of a tasting menu at Michelin-starred spot Providence feels like a chapter of a carefully crafted story. It’s a subtle reminder that food is far more than what ends up on your plate—and it makes the eating experience that much better.
The choice to feature the restaurants so prominently in the series was motivated by more than just the visual appeal. “We went to the chefs, and especially the way our restaurants were at when we were filming [in 2020], we wanted to shine a light at the physical locations,” Chang says. That decision proved to be a pivotal one, and now the chefs serve as the heart of the show.
“It’s one thing to like have somebody cook great food, but they’re really special, wonderful, kind people that genuinely have such a passion,” Teigen says. “Seeing them and celebrating the show now is like heaven.”
Chrissy & Dave Dine Out premieres on Freeform on January 24 and Hulu starting January 25.