Mind of a Chef

Great Series, Bad DVD Formatting
Great TV show, but -1 star for the video aspect ratio. It's 2013 and they are still releasing DVD's that are encoded for 4:3 TV's. Ridiculous.

Note that even though this TV show was filmed in 16:9 widescreen, and the DVD is listed as "Widescreen", the actual video format is 4:3. The individual episodes and bonus scenes are 16:9 letterboxed to a final 4:3 aspect ratio. There are horizontal black bars encoded into the video (see uploaded screenshot), so if you watch this DVD on a widescreen TV, you will see horizontal bars encoded into the video and vertical black bars because the content is 4:3. Hopefully your TV or DVD player has a "zoom" feature.

Here are the technical details of the DVD's:

ISBN: 978-1-60883-830-1
SKU: 841887018333

- 2 Discs (Both Dual-Layer)
- Disc 1: 7.90GB
- Disc 2: 7.25GB
- English (Only) Subtitles
- NTSC Region 1
- Menu's are 16:9 widescreen
* Episodes and Bonus Scenes are 16:9...

Simply Brilliant
Entertaining. Intelligent. Irrelevent in the correct way. Totally unpretentious , which is refreshing in the televised food world. I learned a lot, and the guest chefs are not the usual gang of ok chef/top tv personalties.
We get Sean Brock not Bobby Flay, Wyle DuFrense (spelled wrong and should nickname him shawshank) instead of Tom Colicchio, etc... real innovative chefs and real insight. Genius. Best Food Show since original Iron Chef. Mr Chang, you are why I left snooty fine dining. No obligitory hot chick chef either, but love to see an Elka Gilmore or the intense woman chef from crustacean in LA. Having Bourdain narrate is ok, he is still cool, like Jimmy Page or Tom Waits.

Great series
I don't consider myself much of a foodie but I grew to enjoy David Chang's approach to cooking after seeing one of the shows on PBS. He does a good job of explaining terms and concepts. I find the show entertaining. After seeing the most of the series on cable, I wanted to be able to share it with my foodie brother & niece.

There is an issue with the DVD format but as far as content- it is excellent. I really enjoyed the series.

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