David Chang wanted to make sure Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner paid homage to Anthony Bourdain

The Daily Beast

"I mean, the first time I ever did TV was with Tony (on PBS’ Mind of a Chef)," Chang tells The Daily Beast of his new Netflix food travel series. "Every time we ever did anything that was TV-oriented, it was always with the understanding or even permission that Tony thought it was OK to do. So to do something like this right after he passed was not easy to do. It’s something that we spoke about a lot. And we wanted to make sure that we weren’t trying to do anything but pay respect and pay homage. Because the fact is that while there were travel series before Tony, anyone that does food or food travel via culture, it owes its DNA to Tony. Because Tony set the bar and paved the way for every single show out there. How do you do a TV show and not realize that it’s happening because Tony and (his production team) ZPZ paved the way for this to happen? Knowing that, we wanted to find different threads and tell a different story. That’s a hard target to reach. I hope people feel that we were more successful than not."