Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is an eight-episode food documentary series in which Awkwafina, who cannot cook, travels across the United States to reconnect with her family’s Chinese restaurant legacy.
Awkwafina, who cannot cook at all, sets herself the goal of reopening her family’s restaurant. Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is an eight-part series about actress and comedian Nora Lum traveling across the United States to learn how to cook and carry on the legacy of the Chinese restaurant her family left behind in a way that fits today.
The journey begins at Lum’s, a Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, New York. The restaurant, once operated by Lum’s family, is introduced as the first restaurant in the growing Chinatown, yet Lum herself cannot manage kitchen work despite having grown up in the family business. The series’ central conflict lies in the gap between her background as a descendant of a restaurant family and the reality that she is a cooking novice.
The journey does not stop at simply learning recipes. Together with chefs, restaurant operators, and family members, Lum visits the world of contemporary Asian American food, attempting to connect familiar family memories with actual kitchen skills. In other words, the story centers on what choices she will make between restoring tradition as it was and reinterpreting it for a new generation.
The official trailer brings together “the revival of the family restaurant” and “cooking lessons that are just beginning” as a single goal. Although it takes the form of a food journey, the series’ real challenge is whether Lum can learn enough to take charge of a kitchen herself and carry on the name of Lum’s in a new way, rather than simply tasting the cuisine of each region.