Awkwafina Learns to Cook to Revive Her Family’s Queens Restaurant

Awkwafina has played scene-stealing roles, voiced animated characters and made history at the Golden Globes. Her newest project begins with a more vulnerable admission: she does not know how to cook.

“Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook,” an eight-episode Apple TV docuseries that premiered globally on Friday, 6 November, follows the actor and comedian, whose real name is Nora Lum, as she tries to reconnect with the family restaurant story that shaped her childhood. Her relatives ran Lum’s, a Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, Queens. The series asks what it would take to revive that legacy for a new generation.

That question becomes a cross-country culinary education. Lum studies at the Culinary Institute of America, explores Texas barbecue with actor Jimmy O. Yang, and learns from chefs and restaurateurs including Roy Choi and Martin Yan. In Hawai‘i, she looks at the tiki influences that inspired her grandmother’s restaurant. Later, she works through the practical pressures of serving guests in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

The appealing part is not simply watching a celebrity struggle with a new skill. Food becomes a way to explore migration, memory and the changing shape of Asian American restaurants. The series also turns restaurant work, often treated as background scenery on screen, into a craft built on repetition, timing and cooperation.

Apple says the journey builds toward an opening night for Lum’s reimagined restaurant, with her grandmother among the most important guests. Viewers should understand that the show documents a television project rather than announcing a permanent new Queens restaurant.

For Beaux readers, it is a warm reminder that family knowledge is not always inherited automatically. Sometimes it has to be sought out, practiced and shared again. The first episode is available now on Apple TV, with the service requiring a subscription after any eligible trial.