Where to try the food on ‘No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski'
In National Geographic's series No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski, six Hollywood stars follow the Queer Eye star on a journey through food and time as they travel through their ancestral homelands in search of family history. Starting with just one homemade family recipe, Porowski helps stars Awkwafina, Justin Theroux, Issa Rae, James Marsden, Florence Pugh, and Henry Golding connect with their pasts by eating foods that fed their ancestral lineages and exploring the places they once called home.
(Related: Antoni Porowski wants you to learn about your ancestors—through their recipes.)
Jajangmeyon, Korea
Jajangmyeon
Photograph by Julia Gartland
With its roots in Northern China, jajangmyeon is among Korea's most popular dishes, available at thousands of restaurants across the world alongside dozens of instant and frozen versions at grocery stores. The dish, recognizable by its signature glossy, midnight hue, is a variation of the Chinese dish zhajiangmian that migrant workers from Shandong brought to Korea in the late 19th century.
Jajangmyeon is a rich yet hearty dish, typically made with wheat noodles, ground or diced meat and/or seafood, vegetables (like zucchini or cabbage), and aromatics including ginger and garlic, and chunjang, the sweet-savory caramelized black bean paste that gives the dish its distinctive black shade.
The dish is so well-known and beloved that it plays a starring role in the unofficial Korean holiday, Black Day, on April 14, when single people celebrate or commiserate their singledom with friends over a bowl of jajangmyeon.
Where to try it in Korea: Almost anywhere. This dish is so ubiquitously known and loved that there are tens of thousands of places to find it in Seoul alone, but the Chinese restaurant Ehwawon (이화원) in Yeonhui-dong has been perfecting its silky version for three generations.
(Related: Everything you need to know about bibimbap, Korea's famous rice dish.)
Tortellini en Brodo, Italy
Tortellini en brodo
Photograph by Food magic, Shutterstock
Traditionally found in cities like Bologna and Modena in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region, tortellini en brodo is a regional specialty, highlighting the quality and history of its ingredients. This dish should not be confused with tortelli (this dish's larger namesake), tortelloni (also larger but with different fillings and preparation), or ravioli (different shape, different fillings).
Tortellini is pint-sized, barely an inch big, and folded into chubby rings stuffed with a mixture of meat, like prosciutto or mortadella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and nutmeg. Once filled and folded, the tortellini is simmered in a golden broth made traditionally with capon, a castrated male chicken, or a mixture of chicken and beef bones and served to float in the savory soup.
Where to try it in Italy: Some of the best examples of regional cuisine, including tortellini en brodo, can be found at Trattoria di via Serra or All'Osteria Bottega in Bologna. Both restaurants are mentioned in the Michelin Guide's Bologna Restaurants, with Trattoria di via Serra receiving a coveted Bib Gourmand award.
(Related: Chef Angela Hartnett's guide to eating in Emilia-Romagna.)
Soupe kanja, Senegal
Soupe kanja
Photograph by John Wendle, National Geographic
This okra and seafood stew is one of Western Africa's most popular dishes and is usually found in many of the countries along the Atlantic coast from Senegal to Guinea. Born from the region's rich fishing traditions, this stew uses a multitude of fish, fresh and dried shellfish, okra, peppers, and other aromatics simmered in candy-apple red palm oil. Once simmered and reduced, this thick stew is often served family-style over rice.
Though this dish might be unfamiliar at first for many diners outside Africa and the African diasporas, you've likely eaten or heard of its later incarnation. If you've ever visited New Orleans or the Creole regions of the world, soupe kanja is the progenitor for one of this cuisine's most iconic dishes: gumbo.
Where to try it in Senegal: In Dakar, the family-owned Chez Loutcha is a popular and colorful local haunt that serves Senegalese staples alongside Cape Verdian and other menu items.
(Related: Drumbeats and heartstrings: tuning in to the rhythms of Senegal.)
Chicken with mushrooms and bamboo, Borneo
Ayam pansuh or chicken cooked in bamboo)
Photograph by Stella Putri PS, Shutterstock
Chicken with mushrooms and bamboo possibly gets its influence from multiple sources. The first, manuk pansuh—or chicken cooked in a bamboo stalk with tapioca or cassava leaves—is a staple of Sarawak cuisine and is often prepared during festivals by the Iban and the Bidayuh peoples. The meat is typically seasoned with aromatics like torch ginger, galangal, and lemongrass before being stuffed into the bamboo.
The second influence comes by way of Malaysia's significant Chinese population, which has existed across Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago as early as the 13th century. Various versions of a dish featuring chicken with mushrooms and bamboo shoots can be found in both China and Malaysia and are made with ingredients that would be easy to source in the mountainous regions of both countries.
Where to try it in Borneo: Serving Sarawak cuisine for more than a decade, Lepau Restaurant in Kuching showcases dishes from numerous indigenous communities, including Iban, Kelabit, Ulu, Bidayuh, and beyond, offering diners a rich entry point into this region's most celebrated foods.
(Related: We are what we eat: Diving for dinner with the sea gypsies.)
Shepherd's Pie, UK
Shepherd's pie
Photograph by Julia Gartland
Like many recipes from the 18th and 19th centuries, shepherd's pie was a way for families with little money or access to expensive ingredients, like prime cuts of meat, to stretch what they had to feed the household. First referred to as cottage pie in the late 18th century, this dish has changed very little from its original recipe and still features many of the same ingredients.
Ingredients for this British dish include ground beef or lamb/mutton (a fairly accessible ingredient for the sheep farming region in this dish's early days) and diced vegetables in a rich gravy. One of shepherd's pie's distinct identifiers is its pillowy mashed potato topping, which is spooned atop the hearty meat mixture and baked to crisp, golden brown perfection.
Where to try it in the UK: The Ivy restaurant has posted its iconic version of shepherd's pie online for people who are unable to make the trip to the restaurant, located in London.
(Related: Where you can find the best British pubs that serve food.)
Chicken Fried Steak, Texas
Chicken fried steak
Photograph by Zerb Mellish, New York Times/Redux
This simple and beloved Southern American diner classic has changed very little from its European ancestors. Similar to Austria's wiener schnitzel, chicken-fried steak is just that, typically a thin cut of beef, often a tenderized cube steak, dredged in flour and eggs before frying. The breading and frying technique gives the dish its signature name, though technically, pan-frying instead of deep-frying would make this dish 'country-fried'.
German and Austrian immigrants who migrated to Texas in the 19th century and later became cattle farmers are believed to have brought chicken-fried steak to the United States. It's one of the tastes of home these communities carried with them to America, says rancher Jim Kearney. 'Food is the last thing to go,' says Kearney. 'That's what people hold onto as a symbol of their former life or wherever they came from.'
Where to try it in Texas: Dallas' original farm-to-table Celebration Restaurant has perfected its grass-fed, chicken-fried steak for more than 50 years. Make sure to order it with the house specialty spicy jalapeno gravy.
"No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski" is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Samantha Bakall is a Portland, Oregon-based freelance writer specializing in equity-based storytelling and the AAPI diaspora in the Pacific Northwest. Follow her on Instagram
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Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
