UniverXO Dabiz Season 1 Review – Should I stay or should I go?

Episode Guide

A Free and Broken Verse
All I Want Is to Cook
All This Hard Work, and for What?
A Day Like Any Other
The Restaurant of My Dreams

Running a business is hard work. It’s backbreaking and excruciating, incredibly time-consuming and at times completely unbearable. It can feel like you’re spinning a multitude of plates, trying desperately to stop any from smashing on the ground, all whilst maintaining the façade that everything’s fine and it’s business as usual. This is something that encapsulates the entirety of Netflix’s latest food docu-series, UniverXO Dabiz.

Split across 5 episodes, the show follows Dabiz Munoz, a Spanish chef who’s internationally recognised for his cooking and famous restaurants. One of the bigger that Dabiz currently tackles however, is starting to become a burden and that stems from DiverXO.

Having worked on this enterprise for the last 16 years, Dabiz is starting to feel the burn and seemingly lost the same passion he once had for the project. Dabiz’s journey is full of ups and downs and as he alludes to in episode 1: “the biggest DiverXO gets, the more it makes me hate everything about gastronomy”.

The five episodes aren’t all moaning about DiverXO, although that does feel like the consistent motif that holds everything together here. Ultimately, the show handles one big question that Dabiz needs to answer – Should I stay or should I go? We do get a conclusive answer to this in episode 5, but along the way Dabiz takes on a culinary journey of his own to try and get his mojo back.

There’s a constant motif of butterflies here, which is explained by Dabiz’s partner, Cristina, where Dabiz wants to feel that same passionate and excitement he once had for cooking. In order to experience that again, Dabiz sets his sights further afield to try and experience broader cooking horizons. The first couple of episodes see Dabiz travelling to the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Japan, trying out various dishes and brainstorming ideas for his own restaurants. The journey to Japan is encapsulated by an unintentionally hilarious scene where Dabiz talks about fish semen in a dish before gobbling it up and audibly moaning. And yes, it is as awkward to watch as I’ve explained here!

The second half of the show however, moves away from the jet-setting adventures and focuses more on Dabiz’s mental state, along with the pressure of running his restaurants. Now that Dabiz is a father, and knowing that DiverXO occupies about 85% of his working day, he wants more time with the family and to pursue other culinary passions. So what does that mean for DiverXO?

Along the way, the show combines fly on the wall footage as Dabiz goes about his journey, with footage inside his restaurants as he gives feedback on dishes and gets back to cooking himself. This is combined with intimate chats with his therapist about the challenges he faces, both mentally and physically.

In a way, this show is less about food and more about Dabiz’s mindset and whether the business survives or not under his watch. It’s definitely an interesting creative choice to make, and those going into this may yearn for more cooking and culinary drama than we get.

However, there is an interesting examination of what it takes to be great, along with whether the sacrifices to achieve greatness are worth persevering, which helps this stand out. Viewing it from that perspective, this is much more psychologically driven than it perhaps has any right to be. It won’t be for everyone, and Dabiz can come across as unintentionally piteous at times, but if you can take to the style, you should find enough to whet the appetite.

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