NEW YORK (AP) — Awkwafina was feeling under the weather recently and decided she was going to make soup. And that startled her because she hasn't always been the kind of person who made soup.
“If I had
told myself like a year or so ago that I would be looking at ingredients to make a soup, that would be like insane,” she says, laughing. “Like, a soup? ‘Hell, no, it’s just a hot liquid.’”
The actor-comedian-rapper's 180-degree shift is largely thanks to her latest project: Putting together a menu and finding a location and staff to open her own restaurant.
The eight-episode Apple TV series “Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook” premiering Friday follows her journey, from learning to make stir-fry at the Culinary Institute of America to waitressing in downtown L.A. Along the way, she turned herself into a pretty good cook.
“I have these friends that are cooking up all kinds of stuff all the time. And I always felt like I was never going to be really a member of that club,” she says.
“But it’s so accessible. It really is a world that you can step into anytime. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t do it or you’re not good enough.”
It turns out that the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning Awkwafina, born Nora Lum, comes from restaurant royalty.
Her family ran Lum’s, an iconic Cantonese restaurant in the New York borough of Queens that closed in the 1990s after four decades.
Awkwafina's plan to reopen the restaurant — as a pop-up for one night — sent her across America to find dishes to honor her past: To Texas to do her own twist on Lum's barbecue spare ribs, and to Hawaii for a pupu platter.
Martin Yan, the first breakthrough Chinese TV chef, teaches her how to make chicken chow mein, and she learns to make Peking duck in San Francisco, first carefully plucking out the feathers by hand. “I love giving ducks Brazilians,” she jokes on the show.
The mission was to do something that would make her family proud, especially for her father and grandmother, who helped raise her when her mother died young.
“I feel connected to my ancestors because I’m repeating dishes in a process that they did,” she says. Making food, she adds, “is an act of love in every way.”
Executive producer David Brindley says Awkwafina and the filmmakers didn't intend to end with a pop-up. The series was initially pitched as an exploration of Asian American food but, things grew more personal and meaningful.
“It sets it apart, I think, from lots of other food travel shows because it’s got an authenticity at the heart of it,” he says.
Awkwafina waitressed at the Golden Dragon banquet hall in Los Angeles, learnt to make Korean-style dumplings from chef Roy Choi and collaborated on a logo and font for the menu. She chose a pizzeria in Manhattan as the site for the pop-up, which fed 50 guests.
Awkwafina leaned on a lot of Asian American food specialists during the series and was struck by how many are reentering an industry their parents didn't want them to work in.
“Their parents came here and worked in kitchens, started restaurants and takeout places so that their kids could become lawyers and doctors,” she says. “And so to see people go back to their roots, it’s almost like rebellious.”
Pulling it all together was stressful — especially nailing the show-stopping duck dish with pineapple salsa cooked in a pizza oven at the end — and Awkwafina saw a new side of herself.
“I had never seen myself ever be flustered, be serious, rushing around,” she says. “That was really weird to see. It was a version of myself that I’d never noticed before.”
Viewers watch a woman who started the series struggle to make ramen with Spam be able to master complex meals by the end, even suggesting a dish be more tangy or that a sauce should be added to the shrimp.
So complete is the transformation that Awkwafina is in the process of reopening Lum's for the long-term, not just as a pop-up.
“Without the show, I don’t think I would have been able to do that confidently,” she says. “I would not have been able to just dive into that.”
Brindley says viewers will delight in seeing the host go from zero to hero — starting with knowing very little about food and ending up in command, opening a restaurant.
“What the show does is say to the viewers that it’s never too late to try something new, try something different, and you, too, can master that. That might be food, it might well be something else,” he says. “That is, I think, really inspiring.”
