Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Oct 30

Awkwafina Launches Apple TV Series to Revive Family’s 1982-Closed Cantonese Restaurant

Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Oct 30

Awkwafina Launches Apple TV Series to Revive Family’s 1982-Closed Cantonese Restaurant

Q: How did Awkwafina’s family restaurant help shape Chinese-American food—and why does she dream of bringing Lum’s back?

Awkwafina says Lum’s helped shape Chinese-American food by being an early, influential Chinese restaurant in Flushing that adapted Cantonese-style cooking for local diners and made dishes such as orange chicken and barbecue ribs widely familiar. Opened by her great-grandfather Jimmy Lum in the 1950s, it became a neighborhood landmark in Queens and part of the broader tradition that turned once-niche Chinese dishes into mainstream American comfort food. People who remember the restaurant also recall signature items like pupu platters and lobster egg rolls, showing how Lum’s sat at the center of a distinctly Chinese-American dining culture. For Nora Lum, bringing Lum’s back is about more than nostalgia or branding. She has described the restaurant as a lost part of her family history, one tied to both pride and pain. The business gave her family a livelihood, but it also came with hardship: after a failed venture, they faced bankruptcy and lost their home. Reviving Lum’s, she says, would be a way to honor her relatives’ sacrifices and restore a legacy that shaped her identity long before she was born. That idea also drives her Apple TV docuseries, *Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook*, in which she travels the country learning from Asian American chefs and exploring how immigrant and family food traditions evolve. In that sense, reopening Lum’s would symbolize both personal repair and a new chapter for a restaurant that helped define a classic strand of Chinese-American cuisine.

3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Oct 30

Apple TV begins streaming “Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook” on Friday, following Nora Lum, 38, as she travels across the US learning from Asian American chefs while exploring whether to revive her family’s restaurant, Lum’s.
Lum frames the series as a tribute to her immigrant family and especially her grandmother, saying the restaurant—opened in 1950s Flushing by her great-grandfather Jimmy and closed in 1982—remains central to the family’s identity.
The show is also her most personal project yet, mixing family appearances with her own on-camera anxiety and inexperience in the kitchen, even as she says filming pushed her to start cooking for herself.
Behind the revival idea is a harder family history: her grandmother’s later restaurant failed, leading to bankruptcy and the loss of the family home, which Lum says makes reopening Lum’s feel like a possible full-circle act of giving back.