The new Netflix romantic comedy “Always Be My Maybe” follows a celebrity chef (played by comedian Ali Wong) as she returns home to San Francisco to open a modern Vietnamese restaurant — and come to terms with her past.

Naturally, the film features a ton of restaurant scenes, so Wong called upon Los Angeles kaiseki chef Niki Nakayama to serve as the film’s culinary consultant. Read my take on the film over at Datebook. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

The Chronicle: Have you seen the film? What do you think?

Niki Nakayama: I’ve seen it. I thought it was really funny. I read the script, so I already knew what was going to happen. But I thought it was really funny.

Q: What is it like to be a food consultant on a film, especially one with so much restaurant and home-cooking content?

A: This is the first time that I’ve done it. Ali had reached out to me and asked me if I would help make (her) food more beautiful and “kaiseki it out.” I didn’t want to represent her food too much since I’m not intimately familiar with Vietnamese cuisine and didn’t want to claim expertise in something I don’t know. So I came up with ideas, helped arrange and plate it up. I did a lot of research. They had me set up all the food for her restaurants, except for the last one (named Judy’s Way). But she asked me to think of the concept for Maximal (the upscale restaurant in the film), which got me really excited because there are so many things as a chef you wish you could do but can’t because of time and other reasons.

Q: Maximal feels like a specific send-up of pricey, “disruptive” restaurants, and the scene with the venison dish — where the characters put on headphones to hear the deer’s bleats while they eat it — is one of the funniest in the film.

A: It was inspired by that whole concept of dinner as theater. When done really well, that can be an extremely fantastic experience; in the wrong hands it can come off as something really bad. When proposing dishes for it, like, I know it’s bad to make fun of other chefs on some level, but we have to laugh at ourselves anyway. When I submitted headphones to them that had the sound of the deer, I think they really took to that. I was glad that Ali thought it was funny.

When I saw an all-black dish on Pinterest, I thought it was beautiful and really visually stunning to see as a picture, but how would you feel as a diner to actually experience that?

There’s also a dish that’s a salad of sauces. All the salads have been pureed into different sauces on the plate. The dressing on the side was the only thing served whole: garlic cloves and all. So the dressing is solid, but everything else is a sauce. That was my inside joke: How ridiculous can you let something be?

Q: Yeah, I have to admit that I don’t immediately think of kaiseki as a cuisine that’s particularly comedic, but do you indulge in inside jokes sometimes?

A: At n/naka, we’re trying to connect food to traditional Japanese things, alter them and find new ways to put them together. Some people who understand Japanese food very well might get why we did certain things, like, “Oh, I get it!” It can get pretty referential — people who know Japanese food like we do might pick up on it.

Q: Knives + Mercy is the fictitious restaurant where Ali Wong’s chef character is at the peak of her career — so how did you decide to represent her culinary style?

A: Basically, they gave me the scene for each of the restaurants, and I created fives dishes for each of the scenes. I plated them up here, took pictures, sent them over. Then their catering company actually made them based on those.

With Knives + Mercy, I was kind of like, how would you chichi up traditional food? Well, the only way we could think is a far more elaborate presentation, the way you would kind of turn something that’s expected into something that’s a little unexpected. One dish was a take on the Vietnamese spring roll with shrimp, but instead I used spot prawn, laid beautifully on a plate, with a spring roll wrapper covering it like a blanket.

Q: And what about Saintly Fare, the San Francisco restaurant?

A: Her food is Vietnamese, so I had to put together a lot of the dishes that were on some level traditional Vietnamese food, but reimagine them for her audience. So banh mi, but served as hors d’oeuvres, with the bread made of Chinese doughnuts, cut up in sandwich bites and skewered. It’s banh mi, but a new kind — it’s hors d’oeuvre-y. Then a lobster garlic noodle dish served on a whole lobster body —

Q: Oh, that’s so trendy now! I see it at all of the street festivals these days.

A: Yes (laughs.) And a soy sauce braised pork. In my research, it was cool to find out that this is something found in every Asian cuisine with some level of Chinese influence — it’s just the herbs and aromatics that change from culture to culture.

Q: In the film, Ali Wong’s character is challenged by her partner, who is fed up with how she dresses up her food and “elevates” it. What’s your take on that?

A: I feel like it’s really important to have a basis of tradition and authenticity. For us, as much as we like to aspire to be traditional, it’s unrealistic for us. Both (my wife and sous chef) Carole and I were born and raised here — we ate food here, in America. Our experience of traditional Japanese isn’t inherent to us or a part of us growing up. But when we reinterpret Japanese flavors, we’re being authentic to ourselves.

Ali’s character definitely wanted to present in a way that was a little bit not on the lines of authenticity. She wanted to do food that was a bit more shallow in her concept, but what could be mainstream, I suppose.

I think every chef strives for something of an original voice; you need to have a strong background of knowledge, a relationship with it that’s really tight. From there, you can change it. If you’re just altering it for the sake of altering it, I think you’re doing that cuisine a disservice.

With her character, I think they were really wanting to poke fun at the whole concept of how food can be today. And at the end of the day, what really warms people’s hearts is what’s real.