CAAM is proud to present a new food series about Asian food in America, hosted by Danielle Chiang (co-founder of LUCKYRICE) and co-produced with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) and Bruce Seidel / Hot Lemon Productions. The 6-episode series begins airing on PBS this month – please check local listings for the schedule in your area. The series features many of the country’s most renowned chefs and culinary personalities, such as Top Chef winner Kristen Kish, YouTube sensation Maangchi, and ramen renegade chef Ivan Orkin. Check local stations for exact dates and times. Lucky Chow is a co-production of LUCKYRICE and Center for Asian American Media.
“So much has changed since we launched LUCKYRICE 6 years ago, and today Asian food is not only everywhere, it’s also innovating as a cuisine. Through Lucky Chow, we travel across the country to meet the chefs and personalities behind this movement.“ said LUCKYRICE Founder Danielle Chang. The 6-episode series follows LUCKYRICE culinary festival founder Danielle Chang as she travels across America exploring the Asian food landscape.
CAAM is proud to present Big Taste: Sake and Lucky Chow with the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, an evening event that includes sake tasting and screening of Lucky Chow with series host Danielle Chang on Thursday, May 7, 2015.
EPISODES
RAMEN MANIA
Japan’s famous noodle dish has swept America by storm, with diners waiting hours to slurp a bowl of noodles, and we travel across the country to reveal this mania. The episode kicks off with a ramen tutorial from Sun Noodles, who custom makes noodles for most of America’s ramen chefs, including Ivan Orkin, the renegade New Yorker-turned-Japanese ramen chef who we visit later in the episode. Next, we visit seafood purveyor-turned-ramen chef Yuji Haraguchi as he creates a “New York” version of his broth-less ramen dish mazemen (with interpretations of classic NY deli food such as “bacon and eggs” or “bagels with lox”) using sustainable and typically discarded seafood from the nearby Whole Foods Market. Tummies full, we check out as the new Ivan Ramen restaurant to discusses ramen culture in NY vs Tokyo. The episode then travels to Berkeley, CA, as we tour the local greenmarket with 3 former Chez Panisse chefs who traveled to Japan to learn about its ramen culture and have returned to the US to create The Ramen Shop which serves a locally sourced, seasonal, and sustainable Meyer Lemon Shoyu Ramen that takes from Japan’s infamous ramen culture but creates something wholly local and personal.
KOREATOWN USA
The two largest Korean populations in the US are in New York and Los Angeles, and we visit both to check out what distinguishes each. Whereas NY’s Koreatown butts against the Empire State Building, and is essential one-block long, LA’s Koreatown merges with the city’s Latino community and is practically a city on to itself. Both are 24-hour hubs of food and drinking culture. At dinner with Lisa Ling and her husband Paul Song, the chef /owner of Parks BBQ breaks down the basics of Korean cooking. Back in NY, we tour Manhattan’s K-town with author of Koreatown USA, Matt Rodbard, and stop in at Pocha 32, for some watermelon soju and budaejjigae. Later in the episode, at Saveur Magazine’s test kitchen (which happens to be located in K-town), Top Chef Winner Kristen Kish, a Seoul-born Korean adoptee, is receiving her first-ever Korean cooking lesson with us. Her teacher is Maangchi, the Korean housewife who is now a Youtube sensation and one of the web’s most beloved cooking instructors, and together we learn how to make kimchi.
CHINATOWN NYC, RE-IMAGINED
Perhaps more than any other Asian cuisine, Chinese food in America has evolved over the generations. We visit— and challenge— the borders of Manhattan’s Chinatown, through the lens of two third-generation young Chinese American restaurateurs who have changed how Americans define Chinese cuisine. Wilson Tang, of Nom Wah Tea Parlor, has inherited his family’s dim sum parlor (America’s oldest) to preserve its legacy while opening up a fine-dining Chinese restaurant with Chef Jonathan Wu on Chinatown’s expanding Lower East Side Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Speaking of cultural collisions, we also get a Peking Duck tutorial from Ed Schoenfeld, a self-proclaimed Chinese food expert who grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, yet has opened one of the most critically acclaimed Chinese restaurants today in New York alongside chef Joe Ng. The episode closes at Hakkasan, a mega-brand for Chinese food which was birthed in London by Alan Yau and now spawns nightclubs in Las Vegas as well as restaurants from Beverly Hills to Dubai to Shanghai. They’ve created a “global” brand for “Chinatown” that transcends boundaries.
NORTHERN THAI CUISINE, FROM LAS VEGAS TO LOS ANGELES
A food trend that epitomizes America’s insatiable palate for Asian food is grounded in its obsession with Northern Thai cuisine. Remarkably, the most well-known face of this trend is that of Andy Ricker, a Portland, OR-carpenter-turned chef, who has brought “authentic”, archival Thai food to America. In this episode, we travel to Las Vegas, where Andy Ricker prepares a welcome dinner for participating LUCKYRICE Festival chefs at the much-loved Lotus of Siam, off the strip in Las Vegas, with chef/owner Saipin Chutima at the helm. The duo work together to create their collective version of a Northern Laab, a typical Issan dish that is spicy, tasty drinking food in Chiang Mai. Jet Tila, who is at the table, rhapsodizes about the days when his family opened America’s first Thai grocery store in Hollywood, CA, and brought ingredients like lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves to the American palate. Later, we check out this legendary market, and pay a tribute at a local LA Thai temple, to usher us luck as Jet Tila travels to NYC to participate in LUCKYRICE’s annual James Beard House dinner, which this year focuses on Thai New Year (Songkram) prepared by Chef Jet along with a bevy of other Thai chefs including Pichet Ong and Hong Thaimee.
THE BAY AREA’S PACIFIC RIM CUISINE, as personified by Google
The Bay Area is perhaps the most Asian of any population outside of Asia. We visit the world headquarters for Google, which was founded in Silicon Valley in the South Bay city of Mountain View. Where “peach” orchards ran abundant just a generation ago, “Apple” (Computers) are now dominating and disrupting how the world functions. We meet with Olivia Wu, who designed the original Asian restaurant concepts “on campus”, including the home-style “Jia”, which remains one of the most popular restaurants on campus. We go behind the scenes with Baadal, Google’s first “sit-down” restaurant, which happens to be Indian, as we participate in the assembly line process that churns out 2,000 servings of the Indian fried rice dish, “Biryani” on “Biryani Fridays”. Driving away from Google, we visit some of their purveyors, who epitomize the ethos of the Bay Area food culture – which is local, seasonal and sustainable. We visit two retired Japanese semiconductor executives, who have constructed an indoor, vertical farm called Ecopia – which not only services some of the top restaurants in the Bay Area, but also uses a mere 3% of water vs traditional farming techniques, as they seek to redefine farming culture in the midst of global warming. After a career in Silicon Valley running Fortune 500 companies, they are returning to their original immigrant roots as farmers, right here before Silicon Valley was birthed. We end the episode at Hodo Soy Beanery, which started out making artisanal tofu products for a handful and has now proliferated into the mainstream just as Asian food products and palates have gone mainstream.
FILIPINO CUISINE
Filipinos comprise the second largest Asian American population nationwide (and the largest in California), but whose cuisine is relatively unknown. We explore this phenomenon with PJ Quesada, whose grew up working in his grandparents’ Filipino food factory and is now founder of the Filipino Food Movement, as we feast at his buddy Tim Luym’s global-Filipino restaurant, Attic. In Los Angeles, we visit Kristine de la Cruz, who is introducing Filipino flavors like ube with her unusual bakery, Crème Caramel. Back in NY, we meet Nicole Ponseca, an advertising executive who left her Madison Ave life, and her husband Chef Miguel Trinadad, to give voice to Filipino culture through food; their restaurants, Maharlika and Jeepney, are now on every foodies’ “must-try” lists and we sit down to “Kamayan” with Chef Susur Lee. Food is a powerful way for Asian cultures to give voice to tradition, and we see a new generation that is embracing this loud and clear.
ABOUT LUCKYRICE
From our home base in downtown Manhattan, the LUCKYRICE Festival spotlights Asian culture through annual food festivals that take place annually in 6 cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas and Chicago. We work with a hundreds of chefs across the country, and the LUCKYRICE Culinary Council, which includes José Andrés, Daniel Boulud, Floyd Cardoz, David Chang, Susur Lee, Anita Lo, Masaharu Morimoto, Pichet Ong, Zakary Pelaccio, Charles Phan, Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, Angelo Sosa, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Sang Yoon. Please visit www.luckyrice.com for more information.
Find out more about Lucky Chow.
