WGBH series is for the serious 'Foodie'

In a dynamic documentary style, ``Gourmet's Diary Of A Foodie" pastes together a whirlwind tour of China from Beijing to Shanghai and rural villages in between. Food on television is dominated by eye candy, silly prattle, and 30-minute meals, and some say offers nothing for real cooks. So this new series, produced by WGBH-TV, may fill the void for a more demanding audience. ``The show is meant to appeal to serious foodies," says co-executive producer Michael Selditch. ``We went out the door with that crowd in mind and tried to bring back stories that hadn't been done before."

As such, the viewer goes down the old alleyways of Beijing, where chef Li Qun demonstrates fruitwood-roasted Peking duck. In the village of Xi Tang, which is on the water and famous for its snacks, we get a close look at zongzi dumplings, lean and fatty meats with sticky rice, wrapped in aromatic reed leaves. In Shanghai, we are whisked into the kitchen of chef Jereme Leung , who specializes in what he calls new-Shanghai cuisine for the emerging middle class (a riff on the traditional drunken chicken served in a martini glass with a granité on top), and in Daxing, outside of Beijing, we go to the house of Dr. Du, the village doctor, where lunch is being prepared in side a rustic kitchen in a giant iron wok over a wood fire.

Gourmet's editor-in-chief , Ruth Reichl , thinks of the show as a ``magazine on the air. " `` It's so graphically rich in the same way that the magazine is," she says by phone from New York. Behind the camera is Zero Point Zero Productions, the New York-based team responsible for ``Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations" and other popular shows. The filming style is fast and unpredictable. With plenty of close - ups, stylish cropping, and moody natural lighting, everything is slick. ``We were trying to achieve a look that could match the elegant photography in Gourmet magazine," says Selditch.

The show really moves. Each 30-minute episode (there are 20 this season) has a theme, with local food journalists serving as translators and reporting on what they know best. Lydia Tenaglia, co-executive producer and director of ``Diary of a Foodie," was already connected to an international network of food people from her work on Bourdain's shows. ``We ended up talking to a lot of the same people and going deeper into stories that we had begun to explore on other series," she says.

About three quarters of the way through each episode, the cameras turn to Gourmet's test kitchen in New York, where an editor -- Reichl, Zanne Early Stewart, Ian Knauer, or John ``Doc" Willoughby -- prepares something playful that relates to the theme of the show. In the first episode Reichl gives a brief talk on basic Chinese ingredients, explaining ordinary things such as soy sauce, oyster sauce, and bean paste. Then she shows a simple noodle dish with garlic, ground pork, and hot bean paste. In an Italian episode, she demonstrates how to make fricco, baked cheese crisps with grated Parmesan.

With food television's recent focus on returning to the kitchen, the time seems particularly ripe for ``Diary" and its pursuit of food culture and history, and where what we eat comes from. Executive producer Laurie Donnelly says that she has had the idea for this show for a while, but had been waiting for the right moment and the right partners. Gourmet, says Reichl, turned down television proposals for three or four years until WGBH came along with this idea. ``We realized that they wanted to do what we wanted to do," she says. ``Plus with Julia Child, they basically invented food television."

This season the show will cover food stories in Japan, Australia, Brazil, England, Ireland, France, Italy, Peru, Spain , and all over the United States. After China comes an episode with Spanish-born chef Jose Andres concocting mixtures with sugar and olive oil in his test kitchens and serving up the results at Cafe Atlantico, his Washington restaurant. That episode also visits food-science guru Harold McGee as he grills peaches in his Palo Alto backyard, and swoops into Barcelona for an olive oil tasting.

Later on, there will be an anatomy of a meal episode focusing on Lydia Shire of Locke-Ober in Boston. In her home kitchen, Shire deep-fries lobster skewers in spicy homemade lard, and grills prime rib of beef before roasting with lots of butter. From Shire's kitchen, the film crew heads to a lobster wholesaler in Portland, Maine , to see where the crustaceans come from, then they visit Dianne St. Clair's tiny herd of Jersey cows in Orwell, Vt. , to learn about making butter, and finally to Lobel's of New York, a classic butcher shop, for a lesson in dry-aged beef.

Reichl says that she went into the project trying to make something that she would really want to see. ``There were no focus groups or anything like that," she says. ``It's not about food celebrities or anything commercial. It's about quality. Twenty of us at Gourmet sat down and decided what we wanted to do. What you see are the people and the places and the techniques that we were curious about."