Awkwafina Can't Cook, So Apple TV Sent Her on a Road Trip to Learn
Apple TV's docuseries Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook follows Nora Lum as she tries to revive her family's Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, and it premieres worldwide on 6 November.
Awkwafina has a family restaurant to live up to and, by her own account, no cooking skills. "I can't cook. Like, at all," she says in Apple TV's announcement for Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook, an eight-episode docuseries that premieres worldwide on Friday 6 November.
Her family ran Lum's, a Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, New York. The series follows Nora Lum (Awkwafina's real name) on a cross-country road trip as she tries to build up enough kitchen skills to bring Lum's back for a new generation, taking in contemporary Asian American food as she goes.
Apple's guest list is a good one. Lum starts with a crash course at the Culinary Institute of America and heads to Texas for barbecue with Jimmy O. Yang. Roy Choi and Martin Yan both turn up to teach her. In Hawaiʻi she looks into the tiki culture that inspired her grandma's restaurant, and in Los Angeles' Chinatown she has to serve customers for real. It all builds to an opening night, with her grandma as the diner she most needs to win over.
Twofour makes the series for Apple TV, the same pairing behind The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy, and Lum is one of the executive producers. The trailer went up on Apple TV's YouTube channel on 1 October.
Martin Yan is the name that made us sit up. Taking a cooking lesson from him after telling the cameras you can't cook sounds properly nerve-racking, and we'd happily watch a whole episode of just that.
