When Phil Rosenthal, host of the Netflix food and travel show “Somebody Feed Phil” and creator of the enduring sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” began selling out live shows last year, no one was more surprised than Ray Romano.
Mr. Romano, the sitcom’s star, showed up at the Paramount concert hall on Long Island, expecting to stir up excitement among fans and help out during the Q&A. No one had a question for him, he said; they just wanted to tell Phil about their favorite places to eat in Lisbon or Nashville.
“How did this happen?” the actor asked me over the phone last week. “I’ve been doing stand-up for 30 years. He goes to Poland and eats meatloaf and sells out theaters around the world?”
There is no shortage of armchair-travel television: It pours from Hulu, Amazon Prime, National Geographic and Food Network, not to mention the fire hose that is social media. But somehow, Mr. Rosenthal has broken through and become a global star.
Season 8 of his show dropped on June 18, making it the longest-running unscripted show on Netflix. In August he’ll start a North American tour, and a second cookbook, “Phil’s Favorites” — the first was a New York Times best seller — will come out in November.
The live shows Mr. Rosenthal did last year sold out not only in New York City and Los Angeles, but also in Glasgow and Brussels, Dublin and Melbourne, Australia. There’s no cooking demo, no tight five minutes of stand-up. Just him.
What’s the appeal? “I know it’s not my looks,” he said this month at a sneak preview of the show’s new season at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
Tall and skinny, quick and twinkly, he comes across like everyone’s favorite uncle — the silly one, who makes quarters disappear up his nose. Or great-uncle, considering he’s 65.
After watching an episode set in the Basque Country of Spain, the crowd at the Y shrieked with joy as Mr. Rosenthal clawed his way onstage through a malfunctioning curtain. He called on an 11-year-old named Nathan, who asked about his favorite food.
“Roast chicken,” he replied. “Do you know where I can get a good one around here?” Nathan froze. We all held our breaths for a beat, then two. Then: “Blink if you can hear me, Nathan.” Everyone laughed, and Nathan and Phil got to talking about chicken nuggets.
Two superfans, Andrew Santis and his mother, Zoaila, had come from Flushing, Queens, to see Mr. Rosenthal in person. “It feels like we have spent so much time with him,” said Ms. Santis, who immigrated to New York from Guatemala 40 years ago. “You can tell that he really loves the food and the people wherever he goes.”
In interviews, chefs, comics and fans agreed that the enthusiasm and affability they see onscreen is genuine.
“Underneath the jokes, there’s a true deep love of food in all of its guises,” said Dan Barber, the chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County, N.Y., where cuisine and agriculture are taken very seriously. “Very few people can do the white tablecloth thing and Katz’s Deli at the same time.”
Mr. Rosenthal is a sunny counterpart to his most famous predecessor, Anthony Bourdain, who carried a whiff of darkness on all his adventures. Mr. Bourdain explored Vietnam’s colonial legacy and traveled down the Congo River, but you never saw him doing a happy dance after biting into a herring or an arepa.
After Mr. Bourdain died in 2018, Mr. Rosenthal was lucky (and canny) enough to hire his production company, Zero Point Zero. That explains the high-quality visuals and research that go into “Somebody Feed Phil.” Like Mr. Bourdain’s shows, it’s respectful of culture and food and the people who produce it — but silly about almost everything else.
Mr. Rosenthal makes fun of his brother, Richard, the showrunner; banters with the prime minister of Finland; and is always game to put on a Cirque du Soleil costume or chase a chicken. At the end of each episode, he invites every cook, cheesemaker, fisherman and whoever else worked on the show to dinner, usually followed by chocolate egg creams — one of very few things he knows how to make. (The recipes in his cookbooks are contributed by chefs.)
In August, he plans to open a diner in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles with the chef Nancy Silverton. It’s named Max and Helen’s, after his parents, who died in 2021 and 2019. Mr. Rosenthal lives nearby with his wife of 35 years, the actress Monica Horan; they have two grown children, Lily and Ben.
Mr. Rosenthal is a famously cheerful guy, but not so much on a recent morning. When I met him for breakfast at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, he was recovering from a sleepless night worrying about the diner’s menu. He and Ms. Silverton had arrived at a perfect patty melt, he said, so she suggested that they wouldn’t need to serve a burger.
“Can you imagine a diner without a burger?” he said, voice rising, eyes widening. “It was insane!”
Ms. Silverton explained in an interview that in her professional opinion, the kitchen was too small to produce both. But she gave in.
As Mr. Rosenthal tells it, his love of food was born not at home, but in diners.
For “Everybody Loves Raymond,” he transferred many details of his Jewish American background to the Italian American character Ray Barone — including his mother’s terrible cooking, which was played for laughs.
But the background is more complicated than that. Both of his parents spent their childhoods in Nazi Germany. Max’s family fled to the United States in 1938, immediately after Kristallnacht; Helen’s stayed, until she and her mother were sent to Gurs, a concentration camp in southwestern France. As refugees, they were en route to the United States in 1941 when their ship was diverted to Cuba, where they waited two years before being allowed into the country.
That was enough adventure for one lifetime, it seemed: When Mr. Rosenthal was growing up in New City, a middle-class suburb north of New York City, he said, his parents weren’t worried about expanding their horizons or their palates.
He recalls that the food his mother cooked was so bland that he first tasted garlic as an undergraduate at Hofstra University. His father cared about only one dish: scrambled eggs. (True story: “Are my eggs fluffy?” is carved on his tombstone.) But treats like cheeseburgers and egg creams, Mr. Rosenthal said, made him curious about what other delights might be out there in the world.
As an aspiring actor in New York City in the 1980s, he scrimped for months to pay for dinners at fancy restaurants like Lutèce and the Quilted Giraffe. Later, he moved to Los Angeles, then offstage and into writing, and eventually into the kind of success that allowed him to eat anywhere in the world.
After “Raymond” ended in 2005, Mr. Rosenthal tried for a decade to get another sitcom off the ground, but to his surprise, “nobody wanted it,” he said. So he began traveling more and spending time with food experts like Ms. Silverton, the chef Thomas Keller and the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, who died in 2018.
Mr. Rosenthal said Mr. Gold, whose groundbreaking work celebrated taco trucks and noodle joints as fiercely as white-tablecloth restaurants, gave him the words that still illuminate the greater purpose of a show like “Somebody Feed Phil.”
By showing the world what other people eat, Mr. Rosenthal said, “he said he was trying to make all of us a little less afraid of our neighbors.”
In 2014, he persuaded PBS to produce the show, then moved it to Netflix in 2018.
Mr. Romano, like his character on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” refused for years to travel overseas. Mr. Rosenthal forced the issue by writing a series of episodes set in Italy.
“I didn’t feel like I needed to challenge myself,” Mr. Romano said. “But from the first bite of pizza, it was a new world.”
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Julia Moskin is a Times reporter who covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking.
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