Who is Phil Rosenthal? There’s no hesitation from Los Angeles-based writer, producer and presenter: “The luckiest person you’re ever going to talk to! That’s how I’d describe myself!” he laughs.
The 62-year-old father-of-two is talking to me via Zoom on his phone while he walks his labrador, Murray, in the California sunshine.
Rosenthal, who created the hit sitcom Everyone Loves Raymond, has just completed a sixth season of his hit Netflix food and travel show Somebody Feed Phil. “I want to do it for the rest of my life,” he says.
In each episode he visits a city, sharing the best eats and meeting new people. In many ways its easy to say he’s living the dream.
Not that this real-life fantasy came easy. After he’d decided to stop making the sitcom, despite its huge success, he couldn’t get another show commissioned.
“The business had changed drastically during the nine years we made Raymond, and that kind of show wasn’t welcome anymore. They wanted shows that were more like Friends. I struggled for years.”
With no one biting, he changed tack. “I thought, if I’m going to bang my head on this showbusiness wall, what if I pick the spot on the wall that I really like.” He bangs his phone against the crown of his head to demonstrate.
The new target was food and travel — not a popular choice with his management team:
“When you go into your agent’s office, and you tell them, ‘I’d now like to stop trying sitcoms. I’d like to do food and travel,’ they act like you have soiled their office,” he laughs.
Their hesitation was warranted. It took ten years of hard graft to get anyone to take his show, during which he also tried to pitch other sitcom ideas. PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) finally took it, commissioning him to make six episodes of a show called I’ll Have
What Phil’s Having.
With characteristic self-deprecating humour, he recalls how he sold it to them: “I’d said I was exactly like Anthony Bourdain — if he was afraid of everything.”
Rosenthal is a huge fan of the celebrity chef who died in 2018. “I would watch him and think he’s amazing. I’m never doing that! I’m not going to get shot at in Beirut. This is not me.
"And I thought maybe there are other people like me who love him and want to travel and do things but maybe with a little more safety involved. My whole message is ‘Look at me — if this putz can go outside maybe you can too!’”
Joking aside, his aim was to encourage his fellow Americans to step outside their comfort zone. “There’s no more mind-expanding thing we can do than travel.”
It had taken the young Rosenthal years to get his chance to explore the world. There was no great food nor travel in his childhood. His German-Jewish parents, Helen and Max Rosenthal, were not explorers.
Rosenthal says a move from New York City to the suburbs of Rockland County in New York State was (understandably) “all the adventure they needed after the Holocaust”. His wanderlust was ignited in part by the series of Time Life Books’ The Great Cities his parents had bought, 25 volumes highlighting “incredible places: Athens, Venice, Paris, Istanbul, San Francisco… magical places that seemed better than where I was living”.
Max and Helen did take nine-year-old Phil and his brother Richard to Atlanta for a family barmitzvah and later to Florida, where they spent a day in Disney’s Magic Kingdom. He was hooked.
Florence was the first city he fell in love with, thanks to a trip there with a friend, Rob Weiner, in the early 1980s. The pair were struggling to get into theatre, working at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — Rosenthal as a guard — to pay the rent.
Courier company DHL were offering free seats for passengers to accompany cargo, which flew as their excess baggage.
The pair scored flights to Frankfurt with a return two weeks later and while there travelled to Paris and Florence. He tasted all kinds of foods — croissants, baguettes and snails in Paris and fresh pasta in Florence. It was a revelation: “I could not believe how great it was. It was like the movie The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and suddenly the movie is in colour!”
The food he’d eaten growing up included Ashkenazi staples but he mostly describes it as cheap. “We did not have a lot of money. Food had to be fast, and it had to be inexpensive.”
His father had simple tastes.
“He had two favourite foods: he loved eggs, which he ate every single day of his life — he lived to 96. And tongue sandwich — that was his favourite food, and corned beef [salt beef] with nothing on it. He didn’t like anything that might be spicy or condiments of any kind — he just liked salty plain food.”
Although the first series did well, PBS did not recommission the show, which it said was too expensive. Then along came Netflix, and Rosenthal was off again on new adventures all over the world. From London to Bangkok and Marrakesh to Montreal visiting restaurants, food trucks, markets and cafes, charming people wherever he went. He’s sunshine on the screen.
On (and no doubt off) camera his joy in almost every morsel he tastes shines through, making you yearn for whatever Phil’s having. Add to that some of the best food videograpy on screen — countless close-ups of drool-worthy dishes — and you will end every episode head down in your fridge or nosh drawer.
“We’re actually using Anthony Bourdain’s production company — the one that did his shows. So you have all the beauty of his shows except for one element — me. I’m not as beautiful.”
Although they may not have been responsible for their son’s love of food and travel, Rosenthal believes Helen and Max have played a key part in the success of the show. Each episode of the first four seasons ends with a video call home to them and a Jewish joke from his father.
They’d debuted in a documentary Rosenthal made about how he took Everyone Loves Raymond to Russia as Everyone Loves Kostya. “Just off the top of my head, in the moment when I was with a Russian family, I said let’s Skype my parents. They happened to be awake and that scene of us talking to them about Russia and them trying to operate the computer was the best in the movie.”
He likens the video calls to sending postcards but also found the scenes valuable for giving a structure to the shows. “I learned from making sitcoms you want funny characters that recur in your show and that’s my parents.”
Helen passed away in 2019 and Max appeared in two seasons without her before he died at the age of 96. “They were always the best part of the show and I’m thrilled that Netflix allowed me to do an extra episode this coming season, which is just called Helen and Max.”
The half-hour show is all about his parents, including their greatest hits from the previous Netflix shows as well as their memorable screen debut in Exporting Raymond and stories from friends and family. “I think it’s the best episode we’ve ever done.”
He has also produced a cookbook to accompany the show — Somebody Feed Phil The Book — in which he shares the recipes most requested by viewers from the previous seasons as well as dialogue from his video calls home and background information from 22 destinations.
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Jay Rayner and Phil Rosenthal eat chips in Herne Hill (Netflix)
These include London — where the fressing included fish and chips with Jay Rayner, feasting with Yotam Ottolenghi at ROVI; drinking martinis at Duke’s Hotel with Great British Bake Off star Liam Charles and a graze around Borough Market.
Tel Aviv is another destination — where the treats included pickled herring from Sherry Ansky; a tour of Akko with Uri Jeremias (of Uri Buri) and lunch cooked by Philadelphia-based chef and author Michael Solomonov in the Galilee.
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Phil with the acclaimed Uri Buri Chef in Israel (Netflix)
Has he ever tasted anything he doesn’t like? “Always — there’s always something I don’t like. I don’t put it in the show unless it’s so funny. That is how it has to be. I never want to ruin anyone’s business.”
He admits it’s not always easy to hide his reaction. “I think the audience can tell, because I’m blessed or cursed with this face, I cannot play poker. I can’t lie. But you can tell when something is above and beyond... that I really, really love it! Otherwise, I’ll just say ‘very nice’ — you know, great. I don’t want to say anything negative.”
That may be the key to Rosenthal’s success — he’s a genuinely nice guy, having the time of his life.
“I’m just using food and my stupid sense of humour to get you to understand the beauty of travel and how much better your life will be if you travel, not to mention how much better the world will be.”
Whether there’s a season seven has yet to be seen. “We’re one of only 10 shows in Netflix’s history that have got to season six or beyond, so it could end at any moment. I’m lucky to have got this far.”
Somebody Feed Phil The Book is published by Simon Element, Simon & Schuster on October 18 and on the same day the new series of Somebody Feed Phil returns to Netflix
