Nora Lum grew up with a family restaurant attached to her surname and, by her own account, no ability to cook. “I can’t cook. Like, at all,” she says in the trailer for her new series, and the admission is the whole premise: the one member of the family famous enough to bring the restaurant back is the one who never learned the kitchen.

Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is an eight-episode Apple TV food-travel docuseries in which Awkwafina, the actor and comedian who won a Golden Globe for The Farewell, tries to revive Lum’s, the Cantonese restaurant her family ran in Flushing, Queens. Apple describes it as a cross-country culinary road trip: with help from chefs, restaurateurs and her own relatives, she builds kitchen skills from scratch, explores contemporary Asian American cooking and works toward reimagining Lum’s for a new generation. The British production company Twofour makes the series for Apple TV, and Awkwafina is an executive producer alongside David Brindley, Itay Reiss and Caroline Davies.

A restaurant older than the stage name

Lum’s predates Awkwafina’s career by decades. Her great-grandfather, Jimmy Lum, emigrated from Xinhui in China’s Guangdong province in 1937 and opened the restaurant in Flushing, where it was one of the neighborhood’s first Chinese restaurants. Flushing later grew into one of the largest Chinese communities in New York, which makes a family business part of the neighborhood’s origin story. Apple’s own pitch calls Nora “the descendant of restaurant royalty”, and the series treats Lum’s as a name to be revived rather than a kitchen still running.

Awkwafina was raised by her father and her paternal grandparents in Queens after her mother died when she was four, and she has talked publicly about her family’s Cantonese restaurant before, including on stage at The Infatuation’s EEEEEATSCON food festival in 2019. When Apple ordered the series she put it plainly: “I’ve never been trusted around a kitchen, so I thank everyone involved for opening that part of my house up to me. Food has been a huge part of my family’s history.” The premise suggests the real subject is that gap: a granddaughter who inherited the name, the stories and the pride, but not the hands-on work that built them.

From the Culinary Institute of America to Texas barbecue

The episode summaries lay out the route. The series opens with a crash course at the Culinary Institute of America that gives Nora enough footing to attempt a family recipe. In the second episode Jimmy O. Yang, her co-star in Crazy Rich Asians, joins her on the road in Texas to learn barbecue. A publicity still from that stop shows Awkwafina holding up a long cut of raw meat at a butcher’s block while Yang watches beside a chef in an apron and a camouflage cap.

Two teachers carry more weight than the rest. Martin Yan, whose Yan Can Cook made Chinese cooking a fixture of American public television, and Roy Choi, the Los Angeles chef behind the Kogi taco trucks and co-host of The Chef Show with Jon Favreau, take over an episode built around Michelin-starred Peking duck. Apple’s summary says Nora comes out of it having made “a life-changing decision”, without saying which one. On paper, Yan stands for the Chinese American kitchen that places like Lum’s came from, and Choi for the generation that rebuilt Asian American food around trucks, mash-ups and Los Angeles street culture. The casting maps the two directions a revived Lum’s could take.

Hawai’i, Chinatown and a grandmother at the last table

The later episodes move from learning to building. In Hawai’i, Nora looks into the tiki culture that inspired her grandmother’s restaurant, a link to the mid-century era when many Chinese American restaurants paired Cantonese dishes with Polynesian decor and rum drinks. In Los Angeles’ Chinatown she takes on serving at a restaurant, the front-of-house work an opening depends on. She then designs her menu, drawing on what Apple only calls “an unlikely fast-food empire”, and faces a run-through in which the menu “comes under fire” and a major problem threatens everything.

The finale has her test the concept on investors, critics and, in Apple’s words, “the toughest VIP diner of all: her grandma.” Apple’s materials call it one high-stakes opening night, which gives a cooking show something most of its peers lack: a single deadline and a single verdict that matters more than the others.

The Reluctant Traveler formula, moved into a kitchen

This is the second series Twofour has made for Apple TV, after The Reluctant Traveler With Eugene Levy, the Emmy-nominated travel show built around a host who openly prefers to stay home. The Unlikely Cook appears to borrow the same engine: a famous, self-deprecating host placed in the situation she would normally avoid, with experts doing the teaching and her discomfort doing the storytelling. The difference is the stake. Levy’s trips end when the episode does; Awkwafina’s road trip is built toward one opening night, with a family name attached to the result.

Why the grandmother matters in Awkwafina’s work

Grandmothers run through Awkwafina’s screen career. The Farewell, the Lulu Wang film that made her the first person of Asian descent to win a Golden Globe in a lead actress film category, follows a young woman visiting her ill grandmother in China. Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, the Comedy Central series she co-created, wrote and executive produced, fictionalized her own life in Queens with a grandmother close to its center. She has also told interviewers that her real grandmother got up during a screening of The Farewell, at what Awkwafina called the most pivotal part, to go and cook.

What no episode can settle is whether a restaurant revived by someone who learned to cook on camera is a continuation of Lum’s or a tribute to it. The series hands that judgment to the family member who knew the original best, and leaves open whether one dinner is enough to decide it.

Premiere, episodes and where to watch

Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook premieres globally on Friday, November 6, on Apple TV, with eight episodes of around half an hour each. Apple first announced the project in November 2025 under the working title The Unlikely Cook with Awkwafina and released the trailer on October 1. Jimmy O. Yang, Roy Choi and Martin Yan appear alongside Awkwafina, and the series is a documentary, not a scripted comedy: the restaurant, the family and the cooking lessons are real.

The premiere comes less than three months after Awkwafina shared on Instagram, in August, that her grandmother had died. “Dear grandma, making you laugh was my favorite thing to do. I will miss you everyday and carry you with me wherever I go,” she wrote. Apple’s materials for the series do not say whether the grandmother at the finale’s table is the same one.

Tags: Apple TV, Awkwafina, Jimmy O. Yang, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook, Martin Yan, Roy Choi