The whole first season is the Michelin chef coming home to deal with family and grief, and taking over his brother’s Italian Beef joint after his brother’s suicide. In the first season, the fine dining stuff is all flashbacks, while they deal with the aftermath of creditors and other unresolved issues in the type of restaurant that sells more than half of its food through a walk up window.

In the later seasons, he tries to execute on his vision of a fine dining restaurant he can call his own, but much of the fine dining content is still told in flashbacks.

It’s a lot of things, but pretentious isn’t a word I’d use to describe it.