The cities of Houston and New Orleans, separated by just a few hundred miles along the Gulf of Mexico, are jagged geographical twins. Both bore dense, bloody years of colonial warfare. Both have rich Cajun and Creole histories, anchoring culinary traditions born of freshwater swamps and salty ocean. After the Indochinese Assistance and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, both cities became home to sizable Vietnamese communities. Since then, in Houston, the traditional Creole method for making crawfish (boiling the bugs in a heavily spiced water broth) has been eclipsed by the Vietnamese technique of cooking the crawfish alone, then dousing them in a spiced butter sauce. The new method is arguably far better: brightening the sweet crustacean flavors, and deepening the resonance of the spices as their fat-soluble flavor compounds blossom in the butter. Viet-Cajun crawfish are everywhere in Houston, a messy, ubiquitous totem of the city’s intermingled cultures. In New Orleans, curiously, despite all the same elements being in place, this brilliant evolution doesn’t exist at all.

“Crawfish here is just a staple food on its own,” the Vietnamese-American owner of a seafood restaurant in New Orleans explains. “It shouldn’t be changed. It should be eaten the same way it’s always been made.” She’s behind the counter at her restaurant, talking to David Chang, the chef-impresario behind Momofuku and the host of “Ugly Delicious,” an eight-part documentary series that débuted on Netflix, on Friday. Chang has shown up at her door looking for an answer to the Houston-New Orleans crawfish conundrum, some reasonable justification for one city’s embrace of change and another’s resistance to it. All he can find, for the episode’s hour, are replies like hers: nods to the city’s history and legacy, shrugging variations on “this is how it’s always been done.” When Chang asks someone from the century-old French Quarter restaurant Galatoire’s why Viet-Cajun hasn’t caught on, he offers the only convincing explanation: “No one has the balls to do it.”

“Ugly Delicious,” which is directed by the filmmaker Morgan Neville (who won an Academy Award for his 2013 documentary, “20 Feet From Stardom”), has all the elements of a high-end food show: a globe-spanning location budget, a cavalcade of celebrity guest stars (chefs, comedians, food writers, actors, artists, novelists), and an expansive and appreciative appetite for meals at ends high and low. It’s lavishly produced, rigorously researched, and almost confrontationally weird, each episode (built around a single topic—pizza, fried rice, barbecue, home cooking, etc.) weaving together various segments filmed in restaurants and homes around the world. But this isn’t your standard premium-cable food porn. The camera rarely lingers on the food, or even the acts of cooking or eating; dishes and ingredients fly by without explanation. A viewer won’t walk away with a life-changing cooking method or a new must-visit restaurant. The show isn’t about what food is, it’s about what it means, and about the choices people make that change its meaning.

The fried-rice episode, for instance, is about fried rice, a little bit, but it’s actually about the juggling act of assimilation and how Chinese cooking is devalued in the culinary canon. The fried-chicken episode features plenty of fried chicken, but it’s mostly about black culinary culture’s erasure at the hands of white chefs, and food as a tool of oppression, and the enduring appeal of fast food. The taco episode is a little bit about tacos, but mostly it’s about borders and the porousness of immigrant cultural identity (and also how extremely cool Noma Mexico was). Populating each episode are fascinating cultural setpieces (Chang and a researcher feed Doritos to an assembled group of people who claim to have adverse reactions to the MSG in Chinese food) and little one-off segments that range from informative (an animated sing-song breakdown of the difference between shrimp and crawfish) to inane (an infomercial compilation of classic rock songs reworked to be about pizza, sung by strikingly on-point dupes of their original performers). The over-all effect is like watching someone with a short attention span recap his hundred most recently opened browser tabs, an obsessive path spiralling down rabbit holes and darting off on tangents. This pastiche of formats and styles in service of a single topic is notably reminiscent of Lucky Peach, the magazine launched, in 2011, by Chang and Peter Meehan, which folded, under nebulous circumstances, while “Ugly Delicious” was in post-production. (Meehan has a large role in the show; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that “Ugly Delicious,” which takes its name from a hashtag Chang often uses on Instagram, began life as “Lucky Peach: TV Edition,” and was rebranded after the magazine’s close.)

Chang’s appeal as a celebrity chef has always been his raw candor. He likes to chew through thorny issues in public, working out the kinks of problems culinary and personal in magazine columns, radio interviews, and even reviews of his own restaurants. Often, it seems, this all happens through a lens of brutal self-criticism. Despite his position of moral authority throughout “Ugly Delicious,” Chang foregrounds some of his own prejudices and inadequacies: trying foods he doesn’t like, being corrected on facts he gets wrong, getting unflatteringly angry at people who don’t deserve his wrath. We meet his mom, who makes fun of him and calls him the Baby King. The artist David Choe insults him at every opportunity (and does it spectacularly; Choe needs his own show). Chang embraces culinary synthesis across all cultures, but reacts almost violently to the idea of anyone except for him adulterating Korean food, about which he feels deeply possessive—he recalls, more than once, childhood friends’ horror at the smells emerging from his mother’s kitchen, and his intense resentment that the same foods that made him feel ostracized are now considered cool. Other shortcomings on display are maybe less intentional: the show’s fluent analysis of race, class, and power does not extend—even briefly—to gender.

What makes “Ugly Delicious” compelling, ultimately, is Chang’s commitment to rejecting purity and piety within food culture. “I view authenticity like a totalitarian state,” Chang declares, in the show’s first episode, adding, “It’s not that I hate authenticity, it’s that I hate that people want this singular thing that is authentic.” In food culture, particularly American food culture, the concept of authenticity is wielded like a hammer: This pizza, made with San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella di bufala and a yeast-risen dough, blistered in an ultra-hot wood-fired oven for less than a minute, is authentic; that pizza, ordered on the Domino’s Pizza Now™ mobile app, dressed with toppings that arrive at a franchise location pre-sliced in a vacuum-sealed bag, passed through an industrial conveyor-belt oven, is not. The problem with such rigid categorizations, according to “Ugly Delicious,” is, for one thing, creative stagnation. Chang, after all, made his career on an exuberant disregard for convention. His restaurants—with their Japanese names, Taiwanese pork buns, Korean rice cakes, Continental flourishes, and intellectual-bro Americana twists—remix and subvert everything from ancient culinary traditions to standard restaurant-service expectations.

The more insidious problem with valorizing authenticity, though, is that, by anchoring a place’s culinary identity in an idealized history, a culture closes itself off to the values and traditions of those who have arrived more recently. This notion gives “Ugly Delicious” larger resonances with the rage and uncertainty of the Trump era. In the crawfish episode, a segment dedicated to K.K.K. activism against Vietnamese shrimpers in the nineteen-seventies is followed by a conversation with a present-day Vietnamese-American shrimp fisher who proudly calls himself a redneck, happy to talk on camera about his disdain for immigrants and fear of radical Islam. Sitting down with the white proprietor of a Nashville hot-chicken chain, Chang forces himself, with obvious steeling of will, to ask astonishingly direct questions about the moral burden of a white man profiting from black culture. The great cooks, in Chang’s view, are those who don’t just deploy an ingredient or a technique but feel it, deeply, adopting the food and its history as a fundamental part of who they are. It’s an idiosyncratic approach that’s perhaps as murky as authenticity, but also far more flexible. Watching a Tokyo chef make a perfect margherita pizza, Chang observes that here he sees a man making food “more Italian in its idea, its thesis, than some people in Italy are making.” The chef explains himself, later on, in Japanese: “What Naples has given me is pizza, which I make in the image of myself.”