Eating and Liking on Netflix? Kinda/Sorta
I bet that headline made ya look.
A few years ago, I got a random email out of nowhere asking if I’d show a wine expert named Jermaine Stone around Savannah for a new series pairing street food with wine, city by city. I said sure, auditioned over Zoom, and a few weeks later a fifteen-person production crew rolled into town. We spent 4 sweltering days on that shoot. We had a Lowcountry Boil in Berwick, we enjoyed a wonderful afternoon lunch with the late Nick Mueller. For the show’s finale? They set up a table right in the middle of Chippewa Square. Jermaine and I spent a few hours in the square enjoying food and sipping wines that had been paired with it.
All the while cameras caught every word.
For the food that final day, they asked for a food truck doing ‘street food’ Always looking for an opportunity to flex some of the Hostess City’s diversity, I suggested they call Chazito’s, the Puerto Rican food truck out of Pooler. If you’ve spent any time following Savannah-area food, you already know who he is. Chaz has built a serious following in this region, the kind that comes from years of showing up and doing the work, and he’s picked up national attention along the way, including a spot on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. He rolled his truck right up to Chippewa Square that day and fed us incredibly well while Jermaine and I talked Savannah.
The show, Street Somm, turned out great. But it landed on a streaming platform most people had never heard of, let alone had access to. So it aired, it came and went, and I figured that was that. Fifteen minutes of lowercase-f fame, tucked away somewhere the masses weren’t looking.
Then this week, (talk about out of the blue) Chaz tagged me in a post: Street Somm is now on Netflix. Actual Netflix. Chaz texted me how excited he was, in his words, to finally be “making it to Netflix.” That right there made my whole week. Chaz has put in the work for years, one truck, one plate, one loyal customer at a time, and watching him get a moment like that, however unexpected, made this whole thing worth revisiting.
The series itself featured episodes from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and Savannah. Quite an honor to be on that list. I watched them when they aired back then, but I plan to enjoy them again this month before football season hits.
So if you’ve got Netflix, go find Street Somm and check out the Savannah episode. Go see Chaz do his thing on a much bigger stage than he probably ever expected. It’s a good one, and it’s right there in front of you now.
Meantime, if you’d like to hear a little more of the behind the scenes from that week, I recorded a short trip down memory lane for our podcast. It’s posted up above.