‘No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski’ Is a Profound Delight

I have to admit that I’ve never been a fan of Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski. His introduction to the world on that show felt anti-climactic—like a male model with a vague connection to food lucked out and got cast on an easy gig that didn’t demand much of him beyond silly antics and teaching sad sacks how to cook a chicken cutlet. When he released his first cookbook, his editor/co-author was a regular at the coffee shop I was working at. She’d always come in and gush about how sweet and authentic he was. You know what feels super inauthentic? People talking about how authentic you are.

Anyway, I’ve never really cared. So when his new show No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski was released this week on Disney and Hulu, I rolled my eyes and prepared for what I assumed would be a “look at me” stunt.

Say what you want about me, but I always admit when I’m wrong.

No Taste Like Home is like Who Do You Think You Are meets No Reservations. It’s about Antoni Porowski only in that it bears his name as host and guide and that his story as “a son of immigrants” (in his case, Polish) and chef inspires the concept of taking celebrities to their ancestral countries to track their family history through the lens of food and generational recipes. Six episodes, six celebrities: Florence Pugh, Awkwafina, James Marsden, Justin Theroux, Issa Rae, and Henry Golding. Each celebrity guest introduces Porowski to a member of their family, who shares with him a cherished family recipe. Then, someone does genealogy research, and Porowski takes his guests to the home countries of their familial ancestors, where they trace their lineage and eat food on the way.

At first, I thought the food connection was going to be tenuous; but it’s not. It starts with Florence Pugh, who comes from a family of cooks and food-lovers, and who wants to understand where that passion comes from. Turns out it’s totally in her blood—her English ancestors, on both sides, were pub owners and cooks. Awkwafina’s second episode seemed less about the food at first. Her father used to own a Chinese restaurant in New York, but she and her grandmother are quick to tell Porowski that she is no chef. But when she goes to Korea to visit the village her long-deceased mother came from, she learns how to make a seaweed soup her mother used to make for her when she was a child. It’s not just some random soup she chose so that they’d have a food connection for the show; it’s a traditional seaweed soup made in Korea for new mothers when they give birth, and then made every year by their children on their birthdays to honor their mothers. The reason she wanted to go to Korea in the first place was to feel connected to and to honor her mother. She took one sip and burst into tears.

Each episode contains this kind of surprising profundity without feeling heavy-handed or saccharine. And by the way, Antoni himself is delightful. That lady from the coffee shop was right, he really is authentically sweet when he’s not competing for screen time with four other huge personalities. Let the record reflect: I eat crow.