(courtesy AppleTV)
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The eight-episode series follows Nora Lum, aka Awkwafina, on a cross-country culinary road trip as she attempts to revive her family’s beloved Chinese restaurant.Her family ran Lum’s, the iconic Cantonese restaurant in Flushing, New York. Nora inherited the family legacy. The cooking skills? Those still need work. Nora admits, “I can’t cook. Like, at all.” With help from acclaimed chefs, celebrated restaurateurs and her family, she sets out to build her kitchen skills, explore contemporary Asian American cuisine and reimagine Lum’s legacy for a new generation.
Along the way, Nora takes a crash course at the Culinary Institute of America, hits the road for Texas barbecue with Jimmy O. Yang, and learns from culinary icons Roy Choi and Martin Yan. In Hawai‘i, she explores the tiki culture that inspired her grandma’s restaurant, before taking on the challenges of serving at a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. It all builds toward one high-stakes opening night and the toughest VIP diner of all: her grandma.
Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is produced for Apple TV by Twofour and is executive produced by Nora Lum, David Brindley, Itay Reiss and Caroline Davies. This is the second collaboration between Twofour and Apple TV, following the celebrated, Emmy Award-nominated travel series The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy, starring Emmy Award winner Eugene Levy. (courtesy AppleTV)
I have long loved Awkafina as a pitch-perfect actor who is very funny but who is also capable of delivering some truly affecting moments when the scene demands that of her.
She seems like a cool person too but let’s be fair – how well do you really, or should you really, know an actor?
To be fair, it’s highly unlikely that Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is going to shed much light in that regard since these types of shows are, and pardon the well-informed cynicism here, just as scripted in their own way as their fiction-heavy counterparts, but it might give us some sense of knowing the woman behind the parts and that’s no small thing.
And even if it doesn’t, it looks like the sort of show that will be fun to watch simply to see someone trying to revive something that matters to them, which should be all kinds of triumphs and successes if Hollywood was allowed to do its inspirationally unfettered thing, but is, like most things good old mortals do, scarred with missteps and hilarious mistakes.
Either way, it looks like it could be entertaining and maybe even a little heartwarming too, which is no bad thing.
Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook premieres on AppleTV on 6 November 2026.