In "Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook," Nora Lum takes over the family Cantonese restaurant legacy with no kitchen skills. The Apple TV series lands November 6.
Nora Lum has an Oscar-circuit résumé and a famously quick mouth, and in the trailer for Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook she opens with a confession: “I can’t cook. Like, at all.” The eight-episode docuseries premieres globally on Apple TV on Friday, November 6, and the trailer dropped October 1.
The premise is simple and a little bit terrifying. Lum’s family ran Lum’s, the Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, New York that Apple calls iconic. She inherited the legacy. She did not inherit the technique. So she sets off on a cross-country road trip to learn how to cook well enough to bring the place back for a new generation.
A recipe for a diaspora story
Plenty of celebrity food shows are really travel shows with a bigger budget for lunch. This one has a different engine. The restaurant is the family’s, the stakes are inherited, and the person who has to meet them is the grandchild who never learned the basics. Anyone who grew up in an immigrant household will recognize the setup: the dish everyone in the family makes by instinct, and the one relative who always got shooed out of the kitchen.
The series says it wants to explore contemporary Asian American cuisine, and that phrase matters. Lum isn’t going back to Flushing to preserve a menu under glass. She’s looking at what Cantonese food, and the restaurants that serve it, become when the next generation gets its hands on them. The show frames that as reimagining Lum’s legacy, not just reheating it.
The itinerary backs that up. She takes a crash course at the Culinary Institute of America. She heads to Texas for barbecue with Jimmy O. Yang, which is an Asian American food conversation you don’t usually get at a smoker. She learns from Roy Choi and Martin Yan, two chefs who have shaped how Asian cooking shows up on American screens and plates. And in Hawai‘i she digs into the tiki culture that inspired her grandma’s restaurant, a reminder that “Chinese restaurant” has never been one fixed aesthetic.
Why the comedian is the right narrator
It’s a fair question why this story belongs to Awkwafina and not a chef. The honest answer is that the premise needs someone who can fail in public. A trained cook returning to the family stove is a homecoming. A novice, one who is also a recognizable face and says up front she’s starting from zero, is a story with tension. Lum’s comic instincts, her willingness to be the least qualified person in a professional kitchen, turn the learning curve into the plot.
That also lets the show carry weight without announcing it. The identity questions here, about inheritance, expectation and what you owe the people who fed you, tend to land better when the person asking them is laughing at herself first. She is also an executive producer, alongside David Brindley, Itay Reiss and Caroline Davies, so this isn’t just a famous face being walked through a cooking montage.
The toughest table in the house
The structure builds toward one night. After a stint working the floor at a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, Lum faces a high-stakes opening night, and the most intimidating guest on the list is her grandma. Apple describes her as the toughest VIP diner of all. Anyone who has ever cooked for an elder who knows exactly how the dish should taste will feel that one in their stomach.
The series is produced for Apple TV by Twofour, which previously made The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy for the service. That show, an Emmy-nominated travel series, is a useful comparison: a beloved comic out of his comfort zone, curious and a bit anxious, with the travel doing the heavy lifting. Here the road leads home, to a family kitchen and a family name.
Apple TV costs $14.99 per month, with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers. Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook arrives November 6. Clear a weekend, and maybe call your grandma first.
Via Apple TV Press
