Queer Eye food and wine expert Antoni Porowski is delving deep into the history of cuisine with his new Nat Geo series.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
Porowski, our sister publication Out’s cover star, takes celebrity guests James Marsden, Awkwafina, Florence Pugh, Justin Theroux, Henry Golding, and Issa Rae back to the culinary roots of their ancestors as host of No Taste Like Home.
“They actually visit where their forebears lived as well — a childhood dish of Marsden’s leads from a Texas ranch to a German castle and back to an American biergarten, for example — with Porowski serving as a guide through cuisine, genealogy, human migration, space, and time,” Out reports. And Rae learns that she’s descended from Senegalese royalty.
“I’ve always loved travel,” Porowski said in his Out interview. “Queer Eye … afforded me the life beyond my wildest dreams, and I get to connect with other people and just tell human stories using food as a vehicle.”
“I kind of wanted to do that in a bit more of a global way because … to quote my therapist, diversity exposure is probably one of the most important things that we can all benefit from,” he added.
“If you really get to know someone personally … I guarantee it’s gonna make you so much harder to pass any preconceived notions or judgments or have any negative feelings or any type of negative stereotypes that may come about,” he explained. “And that’s why I think that the specificity of this kind of storytelling is so important.”
He has seen that play out for LGBTQ+ people through Queer Eye, with families often greeting him in airports to note that they watch the show together. “It’s an opportunity, again, to learn about us as individuals,” he said.
No Taste Like Home is out now on Nat Geo and is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.