In her pristine Los Angeles kitchen, Nora Lum—the actor, comedian, and rapper better known as Awkwafina—is standing over a stove with two burners and losing the fight with both. Ramen boils on one; Spam violently sizzles over the other. Surveying the spectacle over FaceTime, her nonagenarian grandmother Powah cackles and tells her (lovingly) that it looks like shit.
This scene opens Lum’s new show, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook.
“Food is so important to being Asian,” she announces to the camera. “You can’t talk about being Asian without food being the thread that pulls it all together.” But what if, like the 38-year-old Lum, you can’t even steam an egg?
Family history complicates the answer further. Raised in Forest Hills, NY, the actor has considerable Queens cred (after all, her Comedy Central show was called Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens), but she is also descended from local restaurant royalty.
In 1952 her great-grandfather Jimmy Lum opened the family’s Chinese restaurant in Flushing, one of the first in the neighborhood at the time. “If you lived in New York, not just Queens, at a certain era, almost 10 out of 10 times, you remember Lum’s,” she says. (When I ask some of the food-world old heads I know about it, they respond immediately with memories of the pupu platter, the lobster egg rolls, and the glitzy, neon-lit decor.)
Nora Lum aka Awkwafina, at Bistro Na's in Los Angeles.Photograph by Pat Martin
Lum, who is half Korean, previously explored her mother’s roots on an episode of No Taste Like Home With Antoni Porowski, but she knows little firsthand about her father’s family restaurant, which closed before she was born. “When they talk about it, it’s like they’re talking about a long-lost family member,” she says.
The Apple TV docuseries follows Lum as she meets and cooks with Asian American chefs and restaurateurs. Many of them are like her, restaurant kids who left and eventually found their way back on their own terms. “A lot of their families did not want them to go into the industry. They’re subverting the stereotype in a way,” she says of chefs like Cory Ng and Zhan Chen of NYC's Potluck Club, who help her resurrect Lum’s as a one-night pop-up.
“I always dreamed of [being] the intrepid restaurant worker,” Lum says. But her family’s attitude toward cooking was less romantic. “Whether it was dishes or cooking, no one trusted me with it. I convinced myself that I’m just not a cook.”
Zigzagging the country changed that, from blowing up a duck at Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco to manning the wok at the Culinary Institute of America in New York to touring Texas barbecue joints with her friend and fellow comedian Jimmy O. Yang. They stopped by Curry Boys BBQ in San Antonio, where traditional Texas brisket is served atop a bowl of green Thai curry, followed by Eaker Barbecue in Fredericksburg for bulgogi sausage. “Seeing Asian people in this environment that’s so Texas, where the two cultures are very different,” broadened her perception of how chefs layer their influences in a way that wasn’t a compromise.
The pleasure of the show is watching Lum encounter new experiences. At a whole-hog barbecue in a Hawaii-set episode, chef Mark Noguchi tells her they’re going to use an imu, an underground pit oven. She lights up, not missing a beat. “Like the bird?”
Her ignorance is played for laughs but is also the source of the show’s unusual tenderness. Lum is game for almost anything, even when she has no idea what is happening. “It’s like one of those school nightmares where you hadn’t completed the class and then you’re just walking in for the test,” she says.
Things go wrong, and Lum is put through the wringer. The show doesn’t spare her discomfort, but what surprised her most was how gentle cooking for chefs turned out to be. “I’ll cook for a chef any day,” she says. “With my family, I’ll order out.”
Lately she’s perfecting her Bolognese and careful not to oversell the show’s resolution. “As much as it was a journey of food and collective Asian culture, it was also self-discovery,” she says, catching herself. “Probably in a narcissistic way—there’s still a question mark as to what it all means.”