‘Somebody Feed Phil’ Star Phil Rosenthal on Dieting, Netflix Show

“I’m cutting back on the bread and sugar,” Phil Rosenthal says with a pained look.

The “Somebody Feed Phil” creator has just wrapped up the eighth season of his Netflix series, which will debut on June 18. The filming process was an epic jaunt through the best pastries, meats, and cheeses of Amsterdam, Tbilisi, Manila, Boston and other far-flung, food-obsessed destinations. Shortly after he returned from his journeys, Rosenthal made the mistake of getting his annual physical.

“If you saw my cholesterol levels right now, you’d go, ‘How is he alive?’” Rosenthal says. “There’s always a period of correction, but this time the fasting is doctor’s orders.”

It’s a Sunday morning in February, and we’re at Old John’s Diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Rosenthal’s made the trek to the Big Apple to attend “Saturday Night Live’s” 50th anniversary celebration. But he wants to use his New York trip to do some reconnaissance on a different brand of counter cultural institution in preparation for the opening of his own diner in Los Angeles with celebrity chef Nancy Silverton. It’s a long gestating project (“permitting is a nightmare,” Rosenthal offers) that’s left him with some very firm ideas about how breakfast joints should operate.

“Our mission is simple. We want to elevate comfort food,” he tells me. “We want the best eggs, the best home fries, the best toast and a great cup of coffee. Lattes, cappuccinos? We’re not gonna have that. We’re gonna have the red pot and the blue pot. That’s it. If you want the fancy stuff, there’s seven places, including Starbucks, down the block where you can go.”

At Old John’s, after painstaking deliberation Rosenthal’s opts for a spinach and mushroom omelette –hold the toast — and a side of smoked salmon. Beyond the food offerings, he’s impressed the restaurant has a one-page menu instead of Cheesecake Factory-sized tomes. “They got it down to just the essentials,” he says. “That’s tough.”

Rosenthal’s experiences in the entertainment industry, where he got rich co-creating “Everybody Loves Raymond” and famous traveling the world in search of the perfect bite with “Somebody Feed Phil,” have made him trust his gut. And his gut tells him that the best ideas are often the least adorned.

“You can sell something to the network with a high concept. Not gonna last very long,” Rosenthal says. “‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ has a guy who lives across the street from his parents. That’s it. Nobody’s going, ‘What a sexy idea!’ But ‘All in the Family,’ ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ ‘The Office’ were all pretty low concept, too. It was the writing, acting and relatability of the stories that made them last. If ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ had been about a family from Mars, it would have made us a slave to that concept. We would have run out of ideas after a season and a half.”

“Somebody Feed Phil” started life on PBS, where it was cancelled after one season for budgetary reasons, before the show was picked up by Netflix in 2018. It’s now the longest-running, non-scripted original series in the streamer’s history, and it all started with a simple premise.

“I’m exactly like Anthony Bourdain if he was afraid of everything,” Rosenthal says. “I’m a guy who wants to explore the way Bourdain did, but I also want to get a comfortable night’s sleep in a hotel with a bed and a pillow and shower.”

Bourdain gave off a punk rock vibe. Rosenthal comes across like your next door neighbor, one you’re as likely to see watering the front lawn as eating ants in Tokyo (they taste like lemon drops, by the way). Rosenthal has also made his travels a family affair. His brother, Richard Rosenthal, is an executive producer who is often coaxed from his perch off-camera to taste the food. Rosenthal also enlists his wife, Monica Horan, and their daughter, Lily, to tag along on his excursions.

“This show is the culmination of everything I’ve strived for my whole life,” Rosenthal says. “It’s everything I love and value — friends, family, food, travel and laughs. We have a limited time on Earth. Those five things are what I’d like to remember.”

Much of Rosenthal’s career was spent on network television, where success was measured in Nielsen ratings and ad dollars. Entering the world of algorithms and viewing hours at Netflix was an adjustment.

“They do share some data, so we have an idea of how popular we are. But we all know that data can be skewed,” Rosenthal says. “They always talk about what is the cost per viewer. But when they say that’s what a show is worth, it doesn’t make sense to me because that’s just a number they made up.”

Rosenthal says Netflix makes a decision whether to greenlight more episodes after that latest season has been available to subscribers for a month. That leaves him in a perpetual state of unease about whether or not he’s going to need to keep his passport up to date. But there are advantages to working for a streamer.

“Once we get the order, we can go wherever and do whatever we want,” he says. “They do give notes, but they are pretty much take it or leave it. That’s not like network notes, where they have advertisers they must appease. In general, they want shorter episodes because their data says people don’t have long attention spans. So I fight against that, because I like to spend more time on a scene. It helps you get to know someone better.”

After eight seasons and dozens of episodes, viewers feel like they know Rosenthal intimately at this point. He’s a globe-trotting mensch. Slightly neurotic, but also willing to be cajoled out of his comfort zone to try local delicacies. It’s not an act, though Rosenthal admits he’s more dialed down in real life.

“It is the best version of me, because I’m at my happiest,” he says. “The world’s problems aren’t getting to me when I’m sitting in a gorgeous place eating the best food with a nice person.”

Whether he’s in a high-end, Michelin-bedecked eatery or a pub or food cart, Rosenthal is equally as interested in the chefs themselves, using their stories to remind audiences of a shared humanity that transcends language differences or borders. One thing that Rosenthal doesn’t do is call out restaurants that fall short. It would kill the vibe.

“I only have time for the positive,” he says. “If I don’t like some eggs or a sandwich, why do I need to tell everybody? It’s only going to hurt someone’s business. It’s just my opinion. There’s enough bad stuff in life.”

Rosenthal’s hopeful that Netflix will give him another season or two. There’s still so many places he’d like to visit or even revisit.

“We’ve done New York and Paris and they’ve both changed so much, but I feel like we shouldn’t go back to any place until we’ve hit all of them,” Rosenthal says. “How can we go back somewhere when we haven’t even been to Greece?”

Having labored behind-the-scenes for much of his career, Rosenthal is still thrown by how much being on the show has raised his profile.

“The reach of the series is extraordinary and that’s the power of Netflix,” Rosenthal says. “We were shooting in the Philippines and staying in this hotel. There were all these people waiting downstairs for me in the lobby, looking at me like I’m Justin Bieber.”

The question most fans want to know is how, after watching Rosenthal chow down on pizza, ice cream and patty melts, he stays so thin.

“What they don’t see is the two hours I spend at the gym,” Rosenthal says. “The cameras don’t follow me to the elliptical.”