This week’s episode of CNN’s “The Detour with David Chang” (10 p.m. Oct. 10) got its start when Chang, a chef and restaurateur, omitted Pittsburgh from a list he created of “The Five Best NFL Cities for Sandwiches.”
When this news was shared with Plum native Pat McAfee on his show, McAfee’s response was not positive.
“He completely roasted me,” Chang said in a phone interview this month.
Chang had visited Pittsburgh once before, but it had been years.
“Clearly, Pittsburgh’s been in my blind spot,” Chang says in this week’s episode that features actress Gillian Jacobs (“Community”), who grew up in Mt. Lebanon and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s acting program. Jacobs accompanies Chang as she shows off her hometown.
Chang said Jacobs appeared on a previous food show he shot in L.A., Netflix’s “Ugly Delicious,” and he also knows Jacobs through her partner, screenwriter Chris Storer, who created food-centric Emmy winner “The Bear.”
Chang met Jacobs in Point State Park to begin three days of filming in March. In the episode, she tries to teach him Pittsburghese with assistance from locals they encounter at the Point who are clad in Penguins jerseys.
“I can’t help myself, I’m a tortured Washington Capitals fan, and the Pittsburgh Penguins owned us for years, and I had to make a comment. I thought for sure it would rile them up, but no, they were very, very cool about the whole thing,” Chang said of his interactions with locals that led to the conversations included in the episode. “That moment was funny because they were just random people and Gillian was talking about all the crazy slang that Yinzers use.”
After the fans at the Point offer menu tips, Jacobs and Chang head to Primanti Bros.
“One of the guys told me I had to get the sausage and peppers (sandwich), and I was like, ‘Sure, of course, I’ll get that sandwich,’ not thinking I’d ever see him again — and we get (to Primanti’s) and they were eating there,” Chang recalled. “That was a really funny moment and I was like, this is exactly how the show is going to go down.”
While a stop at Primanti’s may feel like a prerequisite for any food show visit to Pittsburgh, after that, “The Detour” lives up to its title. This show feels more spontaneous, more seat-of-the-pants and less produced than most food travelogues.
While dining at the now-shuttered Stunt Pig in Squirrel Hill, co-owner Cody Maze mentions he knows Jacobs’ mother is a fan of Dave & Andy’s Homemade Ice Cream in Oakland.
“A friend works at Dave & Andy’s, and her mom’s in the ice cream store all the time,” Maze tells Chang in the episode. “She’s very sweet.”
“That’s gonna make me cry,” Jacobs says before they discuss the ice cream shop’s brief closure and subsequent 2024 rebirth.
“I saw the edit (of the episode), and it seems like that was all played and staged, but that was not,” Chang said.
After their meal, they head over to Dave & Andy’s.
“It was a lot of real moments of learning about somebody growing up in a place,” Chang said.
But spontaneity is a big ask for a TV production that relies on pre-planning to make for a smooth shoot.
“I would say that nobody enjoys it,” Chang said of the production crew’s reaction to the show’s spontaneous detours. “You got to get permission, get all these signatures of people who are in the background. It just changes everything.”
Other first-season “Detour” episodes took Chang to South Florida with comedian Eric Andre and to Texas with comedian Cristela Alonzo.
The Pittsburgh episode includes a stop at Apteka in Bloomfield, and Chang and Jacobs also shop for Pittsburgh sports team jerseys.
“Ninety-five percent of everybody has some kind of sports paraphernalia on,” Jacobs tells Chang in the episode. “I was the one not in the jersey. This was my life as a kid.”
Jacobs emerges from the store wearing a Paul Skenes Pirates jersey.
“It took coming home with you to make me a real Pittsburgher,” Jacobs says.
While detours in planned filming add to the show’s spontaneity, sometimes the crew can’t get spur-of-the-moment permission to film in some establishments.
“The Detour” includes a stop at Sheetz but not at Wawa as Jacobs and Chang drive from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.
“We went to Wawa too, but they wouldn’t give us permission (to film),” Chang said. “From the get-go, I told production and (executive producer/director) Morgan (Neville), I don’t want to be disrespectful to the hundreds of hours of work that went into (planning) this (episode), but this is just a placeholder because we’re going to go off script.”
Chang said he learned a lot about Pittsburgh from his visit with Jacobs, and he was impressed by its layout, topography and the prominence of meds and eds in the city’s life.
“You had these dynastic families that have helped shape America, but they were part of Pittsburgh,” Chang said. “It helped shape an infrastructure and that is pretty awesome. It just was a cool town. The food was really good, and people were really nice.”
“Legitimately, if you called my wife and you ask her, ‘Which city has David talked about the most?’, she would say Pittsburgh,” Chang said. “I send her (Pittsburgh) properties on Zillow. She thinks I’m joking but (Pittsburgh) feels like what a lot of cities are trying to engineer now. Pittsburgh has a community — just like it does with its fan base for sports teams — for the restaurant industry. The neighborhoods and people that support it really support restaurants, and I think that’s just the coolest thing.”