At its heart Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook is about heritage, community, and small-business immigrant entrepreneurship. “After the pandemic so many mom-and-pop shops were closing and Chinatowns were declining,” says Lum. “The show is about exploring that phenomenon but then also seeing who in my generation is keeping it going.”
Our first lunch stop is Miss Korea, on 32nd Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the stretch where Koreatown first emerged in the late 1970s. Then home to a Korean-language bookstore and a smattering of restaurants, it’s since evolved into an around-the-clock entertainment hub for anyone looking to pick up K-pop memorabilia, sing karaoke, and eat everything from Korean corn dogs at Jongro Rice Hotdog to a Michelin-starred tasting menu at Joo Ok. For Lum it’s a nostalgic stretch of the city. “I went to MK, Maru, Circle,” she says in reference to nightlife spots frequented by Korean American party kids coming of age in 1990s and 2000s New York. “Oh man, I’ve been so messy on this one block.”
We cross the street to BCD Tofu House for crispy seafood pancakes, spicy marinated crab slicked with red pepper seasoning, and Lum’s favorite: the signature soondubu, a tofu stew bubbling in a clay pot. Since opening in 2008, the Los Angeles export has increasingly drawn long lines—a testament to the growing popularity of Korean food across the US. “Twenty years ago customers were 70 to 80 percent Korean,” general manager Alex Kim tells us. “Now it’s a lot more non-Korean.”
Lum notes that, for a long time in the US, immigrants selling their traditional cuisines were often met with gratitude within the culture yet distrust outside of it. Adaptation followed: the invention of chop suey, for example, and wok-fired cooking of non-Chinese vegetables like broccoli. Her great-grandfather experienced this himself with Lum’s, and local appreciation for the restaurant’s Americanized Chinese classics like egg rolls and shrimp with lobster sauce has remained long after it closed. “I learned to think about it less as my family’s attempt at just making money but rather, ‘Hey, this is the cuisine that we ate growing up,’ ” she says. “It’s a fascinating story of belonging and acculturation.”
