# Awkwafina revisits family restaurant’s legacy in new food series

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/i-felt-bad-for-my-exes-awkwafina-on-making-deeply-personal-tv-with-her-grandma/
- Published: 2026-10-30T13:00:54+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-30T13:22:31+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/oct/30/i-felt-bad-for-my-exes-awkwafina-on-making-deeply-personal-tv-with-her-grandma
- Topics: Celebrity, Culture, Entertainment, Film, Food, TV

## Key points

- Awkwafina explores her family’s restaurant legacy in a new series.
- She learns from Asian American chefs across the US.
- Her grandmother plays a central role in the personal project.

## Summary

Awkwafina’s new Apple TV series follows her as she travels across the US to learn from Asian American chefs and explore whether she can revive her family’s long-closed Cantonese restaurant. The project connects her public career with a family history that began when her great-grandfather opened Lum’s in Queens, and gives her a way to honour the restaurant’s importance to her relatives.

The restaurant opened in the 1950s and closed in 1982, before Awkwafina was born; her family remembers it almost as a lost family member. The series also features her paternal grandmother, who raised her after her mother died when she was four, and who joined earlier projects too. Awkwafina describes cooking as a skill she developed through a lifelong love of eating, while her grandmother brought fresh ideas and enthusiasm to the show’s menu.

---
Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.