The food expert and host shared the story during a panel at Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit
Credit: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic; Noam Galai/Getty for Travel + Leisure
NEED TO KNOW
- Antoni Porowski discussed balancing emotional moments with entertainment while filming ‘No Taste Like Home’ with Awkwafina at Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit
- Awkwafina visited Korea for the first time since childhood to explore her heritage and confront personal grief on the Nat Geo show
- Porowski’s series also featured celebrities like Florence Pugh and James Marsden reconnecting with their ancestral roots through food
Antoni Porowski opened up about a heart-wrenching moment making his Nat Geo show, No Taste Like Home.
On a panel during Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Summit on Thursday, the Queer Eye alum sat down with five other panelists, including several travel experts, to discuss ‘the power of being uncomfortable.’
In the six-part series No Taste Like Home, Porowski travels with six celebrities to their ancestral homelands — where many still have family — to help them reconnect with their culture through food.
For the second episode, he took actress and comedian Awkwafina to Korea, a country she hadn’t been back to since she was four years old, when she visited for her mother’s funeral.
Porowski said during the panel that the grief surrounding the visit made it “intensely emotional,” remarking that there was “definitely some more handholding going on at that point.”
He explained this episode was different from the show’s more upbeat ones because, “when someone’s dealing with a real life psychological thing like anxiety, which I understand very intimately, I think you have to give a little more information and just kind of, you know, hold their hand, quite literally sometimes, a little more.”
Being half Chinese-American and half Korean, the Crazy Rich Asians actress said in the episode she has never felt a part of either group. Porowski, whose parents emigrated from Poland and Belgium, noted that it’s something “so many immigrants and children of immigrants can understand. And it’s something that you have to approach with a lot of sensitivity.”
Porowski joked that balancing the sensitive, personal moments of celebrities’ lives while creating a show that resonates with audiences and keeps them watching is “tricky AF.”
“I wanted to make sure that [Awkwafina] had ample opportunities to speak to people, you know, of her own culture who could offer her sort of like that expertise in those moments,” he said.
“That episode specifically was definitely aa lot of shifts and sort of like checking in with her to make sure that she was okay because she’d really wanted to do this, but she was also deeply anxious,” he continued.
Awkwafina was just one of the familiar faces featured in Porowski’s series. He also traveled to England with Florence Pugh and Germany with James Marsden, among others.
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