Awkwafina learns to cook to revive her family's Queens restaurant

Awkwafina, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actor, comedian and rapper born Nora Lum, has taken on a project that changed her relationship with food. In the eight-episode Apple TV series "Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook," premiering Friday, she builds a menu, finds a location and staff, and prepares to open her own restaurant.

Her family ran Lum's, an iconic Cantonese restaurant in Queens that closed in the 1990s after four decades. To honor it, she planned a one-night pop-up and travelled the country for dishes. She went to Texas for her version of Lum's barbecue spare ribs and to Hawaii for a pupu platter. Chef Martin Yan taught her chicken chow mein, and in San Francisco she learned to make Peking duck. She also studied stir-fry at the Culinary Institute of America, waitressed at the Golden Dragon banquet hall in Los Angeles, and learned Korean-style dumplings from chef Roy Choi.

The pop-up, held at a Manhattan pizzeria, fed 50 guests. Awkwafina says the pressure showed her a flustered, serious side of herself she had never seen. She wanted to make her father and grandmother, who helped raise her after her mother died young, proud.

Executive producer David Brindley says the series began as an exploration of Asian American food but became more personal. Awkwafina says she is now reopening Lum's for the long term and could not have done so confidently without the show.