Dinner Club is one of the best Euro TV series available for streaming right now, so check out Season 1 before Season 2 arrives next week!
I love Dinner Club, and I’m gonna talk about it. And write about it. Cuz it’s a fantastic reality TV series that combines two of my favorite things (and maybe yours, too) — food and travel — and serves them up in episodes that take viewers to some of the most beautiful places in Italy, where locals prepare traditional rustic dishes for the Dinner Club folks.
Hosting the series is Carlo Cracco (Masterchef Italia, Hell’s Kitchen Italia), the renowned chef and Michelin-starred restaurateur, who travels with each of the Dinner Club participants to an area of Italy to experience some of its local delicacies. Accompanying Cracco in Season 1 are actors Diego Abatantuono (Mediterraneo), Fabio De Luigi (The Worst Week of My Life), Pierfrancesco Favino (Angels & Demons), Sabrina Ferilli (The Great Beauty), Luciana Littizzetto (Foodie Love), and Valerio Mastandrea (The Vertical Line).
In the first season, these foodie tours take Cracco and his fellow travelers (and us) off the beaten path to places along the Po River, the Apulia and Basilicata regions and the Cilento region in southern Italy, the coastal area of Maremma in western central Italy, and Sicily and Sardinia, the first and second largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea.
Each episode revolves around one area and one actor, whose journey with Cracco is a trip of a lifetime — filled with awe-inspiring sights, novel experiences and adventures, and good eats, some of which the two learn to prepare from quirky locals. Along the way, they choose certain ones of the foods and dishes they’ve enjoyed to bring back to the Dinner Club. But there’s a twist: Diego, Fabio, Luciana, Pierfrancesco, Sabrina, and Valerio will have to cook them for everyone, with some help from Chef Carlo.
So much of what happens in the show is hilarious, from scenes of the travelers on the road, to those of the group bantering back at the Dinner Club house. Both are interspersed throughout each episode, and this nonlinear format adds another layer of flavor, if you will, to the series (and to one’s enjoyment of it).
I binged Season 1 over two nights, and I recommend that you eat before you watch Dinner Club, lest you find yourself going through your fridge and pantry to make snack after snack while you watch, like I did.
Today is the 11th of February, which gives you six days to catch up on the first season of Dinner Club before the arrival of Season 2 — which I am anxiously awaiting, because it features actors Antonio Albanese (Mom or Dad?), Paola Cortellesi (Petra), Marco Giallini (Rocco Schiavone)!!! and Luca Zingaretti (Detective Montalbano)!!!
The new six-episode season follows the same format as the first, with the actors and Cracco traveling to and eating their way through the mountainous area of La Sila in Calabria in southern Italy, the historical region of Romagna in north-central Italy, the province of South Tyrol between the borders of Austria and Switzerland in northern Italy, and Sicily, before returning to the Dinner Club house to chat, laugh, cook for, and break bread with their fellow dinner clubbers, including Sabrina Ferilli and Luciana Littizzetto from Season 1. (I can’t wait!)
Dinner Club: Season 2, an Amazon Original series, premieres Friday, February 17, exclusively on Prime Video in most territories where the streaming service is available (not in Asia except India).
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