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FINE, I’LL ADMIT IT. I was sharpening my talons, I was preparing myself to completely detest the Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski’s new show; streaming on JioHotstar. I was ready to tear into it. But, I’m tripping up while typing this: Porowski’s No Taste Like Home is a good show. Fine, it’s a damn good show.
But really, do you blame me? I mean, if I’m going to let my truth shine for a minute, even in this show, he bristles. As Hollywood catnip Timothée Chalamet’s speech at the 31st Screen Actors’ Guild Awards proved, super attractive people can’t pull off being earnest and bare-faced. It’s just cringe. Porowski suffers from this same curse. Even on the Queer Eye, he’d pull a surprise face that was a mixture of Bambi eyes and the gaping abyss for everything. But, in No Taste Like Home, his male model-esque quality does prove to be advantageous as he’s able to be the beautiful bridge between us (the viewers) and the stars in focus. And his extreme excitement allows the stars to come across as real (whatever that means).
Over six episodes, No Taste Like Home brings together Who Do You Think You Are, a show where celebrities trace their family trees, with a well-shot travel programme, and centres it on food and family recipes. And well, Porowski gets to be our ombudsman to these deep dives into the pasts of these famous people because he’s Polish and “a son of immigrants”. We tag along with him and Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two), Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians), James Marsden (Westworld), Justin Theroux (The Leftovers), Issa Rae (Insecure) and Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians).
You would think that our grandmothers choosing one ingredient over another similar one would be a personal quirk. You wouldn’t think it was something embedded through recipes passed on from one person to the next. But, Porowski manages to draw out a thread between these celebrities' past and present. Pugh’s maternal family’s speciality is Shepherd’s Pie not because her grandmother and her mother make smashing versions but because their family were historically sheep-herders and ran a bar called the Red Bear in Yorkshire. And her father’s side were cooks too; using it as a skill to work themselves across class – her dad Clinton runs a pub now. It all fits.
Then, there’s the episode with Awkwafina who travels to her long-deceased mother’s homeland of South Korea. We begin with shopping for her Chinese grandmother’s Jjajangmyeon, a recipe that also binds her with her mother and grandmother. But the perfectly Asian grandmother shows up with the ingredients pre-cut and prepped. Her father owns a Chinese restaurant in Queens, New York. But over in Korea, she meets her mother’s best friends from school and sees childhood photos of her mother, shares a Korean-mother tradition of learning to make kimchi with one of her mother’s best friends as a stand-in and learns to make seaweed soup. This soothing delicacy is made in Korea for new mothers when they give birth, and then made every year by their children on their birthdays to honour their mothers. Everything is emotional without being melodramatic; and food fuels each of these movements even though she bursts into tears on first sipping the seaweed soup.
Each one of these episodes hides a nugget of this kind of sweetness without tipping over too much. It doesn’t feel scripted or heavy-handed at all; the milestones are marked out but the responses along the way feel genuine. Even the players who share their own generational relationship with the celebrities’ histories add heft and meaning to the series. And here, Porowski’s Bambi eyes are actually joyful and empathetic in No Taste Like Home. It isn’t part of my family’s recipe to eat humble pie. But, hey, Antoni Porowski – you aren’t so bad. And No Taste Like Home is a very good show on food, families and feelings.
