The first time Eddie Huang's Florida childhood was memorialized on television, the results were mixed. ABC's "Fresh Off the Boat," based on his memoir of growing up Taiwanese-American in Orlando, Florida, was a critical and commercial success.
Huang wrote and said unkind things about the show, however, and left his role as its off-camera narrator after one season.
Now he gets a do-over. He has his own television show, the food-and-travel series "Huang's World" Thursday night at 8 p.m. on Vineland, and to promote it, a preview episode shot in Orlando has been online for a week.
It's definitely R-rated — language, drug use, violence to farm animals — and it never mentions the ABC show. (All the lawyers can exhale.) But in spirit, they're not far apart.
Huang's public pose is based on ego, attitude and hip-hop-flavoured rebelliousness, but when he makes his annual trip home for Chinese New Year in "Huang's World," he's largely the picture of filial piety.
His father, Louis, who's not exactly portrayed as a model parent in the memoir, is an amiable and supportive dad onscreen. His mother, Jessica, is sharp and funny, like the character Constance Wu has popularized in "Fresh Off the Boat." Huang dives into the new year preparations, smoking one duck while his mom fries another.
Is this the real Huang family dynamic?
Who knows. It looks convincing, which is all that matters, and its fits with the larger persona Huang is trying to project. Smart, thoughtful and a shrewd fashioner of his own image as a food and cultural authority, he keeps his rebellion within firm limits.
He and his brother may get high after the holiday feast, but when he makes a visit to a truly transgressive place — the backwoods den of guns and strippers known as the Sausage Factory — he closes the scene by lecturing the proprietor about exploiting vulnerable people.
When Huang gets serious, his topics are the immigrant experience, the central role of food in immigrant communities and his own refusal to submit to cultural stereotyping.
But he presents himself, consciously or not, as a classic Asian-American striver, even if he tends to dress like a gangster on a spa retreat, and only the strictest Asian parent could fail to be proud of his success.
His father is a role model, or so Huang would have us believe in a visit to the original Cattleman's steak house — now a Hooters — that began the family's mini-empire of Orlando-area restaurants.
The first official episode of "Huang's World," on Thursday, makes it clear that another role model is Anthony Bourdain, in his "No Reservations" period.
Visiting Jamaica, Huang follows every diagram in the Bourdain playbook: doses of history, slow-motion shots out of car windows, a serendipitous discovery ("I smelled something delicious"), suspiciously knowledgeable comments about local ingredients and cooking techniques, the unnecessary superlative ("one of the best-textured eggplants I've ever seen"), some macabre regionalism (a goat is separated from its head on camera), a cosmic closing voice-over.
The only difference, really, is the hostly persona — manic rather than laid-back, declaiming rather than languidly commenting, muscle T's and baggy shorts rather than jeans and white button-downs.
And one other thing: the reflexive mockery of whites, as in an opening gag sequence in which Huang rescues a distressed swimmer and declares that it's another white person who ate too much jerk chicken.
Or when he says "never feed the white people" and turns the camera on his own crew members, who laugh along. He makes his sociological points well enough without resorting to these awkward and defensive jabs, unless the point he's trying to make — perhaps for marketing purposes — is that he hasn't grown up.
Source: Huang's World mixes food, travel and some attitude
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In just a few short years of Cutthroat Kitchen episodes, host Alton Brown has traveled to camp, celebrated the big game in roaring fashion and hosted a holiday feast worthy of Santa Claus himself — all things we do in our day-to-day lives in the new millennium. Now, for the first time ever, Alton is hitting the rewind button and going back to the 1900s in evilicious style in the upcoming Time Warp Tournament, premiering Wednesday, June 1 at 9|8c.
Get to know the 16 competing chefs, and tune in to the premiere of the Cutthroat Kitchen: Time Warp Tournament on Wednesday, June 1 at 9|8c.
Pic/Shadab Khan
French beans foogath. Pic courtesy/ Alan Richardson
Chefs spend their days absorbed in their own kitchen — rarely getting the opportunity to experience food beyond the day-to-day operations in their own restaurant. When they do get a break to travel, many of them find inspiration in food that becomes fodder for dishes that later appear on their restaurant menus. We asked a few chefs to tell us which cities have inspired some of their favorite new dishes.
Hong KongFor Ralph Scamardella, chef-partner in New York's Tao Downtown, inspiration came from an encounter with a chef who was reluctant to share his secrets. "My first experience with this dish was during a great dinner I had in Hong Kong. I'd asked the chef for the recipe, but he wouldn't give it to me," Scamardella recalls. "It was only after I bribed the whole kitchen with a round of beers that he showed me how to make the dish. I captured the demo on my camera phone so I could bring it back to my chefs in the States." The dish is the Crispy Snapper in the Sand, a whole snapper coated with tempura powder and then deep-fried until crispy. The fish is accompanied by more pieces of fried snapper, and mixed vegetables topped with minced garlic, which makes up the "sand." The dish has been on the menu at the restaurant since 2013.
Tel AvivFor Alon Shaya, co-owner and executive chef of Shaya, a restaurant in New Orleans focused on Israeli cuisine, inspiration came from a restaurant in Tel Aviv. "My grandmother was Bulgarian. She made the best kebabs in the world. Seasoned with cumin, paprika, garlic and parsley, they were one of my favorite things to eat growing up. I was excited to put them on the menu at Shaya when we opened," he says. "Not long after, I went to a Bulgarian restaurant in Tel Aviv called Shishko and had some that really reminded me of the way my grandmother made them. I met the owner, Tal, told him how much they reminded me of my childhood and asked him about his technique. When I got back to Shaya, I continued to test the recipe until I found the perfect balance. Now I'm proud to say they are almost as go od as my grandmother's."
