No Taste Like Home With Antoni Porowski Shows Celebrities’ Family History Through Food

You can learn a lot about someone from what they eat. Of course there’s the obvious — the foods that they like and dislike — but diving deeper into the history of someone’s diet can uncover even more insights, ranging from core memories to the way culture has shaped their food preferences.

It’s this power of culinary history that Queer Eye star Antoni Porowksi leverages to learn more about some of your favorite celebrities in his upcoming show No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski. The new series from National Geographic isn’t a talk show or centered around interviews, but you’ll still walk away with a better understanding of who its guests are. 

In this culinary travel series, Porowski spends each episode taking one celebrity — the star-studded lineup includes Florence Pugh, Awkwafina, Justin Theroux, James Marsden, Issa Rae, and Henry Golding — on a journey to experience and learn about what their ancestors ate. 

This isn’t the first time a host has used food to prompt powerful people to open up. Both Sean Evans and Amelia Dimoldenberg talk to celebrities while snacking on chicken in their respective YouTube series, Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date. But Porowski’s new project is a dramatic departure from these formats, instead using genealogy and family history to help his guests learn more about themselves, and take audiences along for the ride.

Giving someone a guided tour of what the earlier generations of their family ate is not a quick and easy task, and Porowski brings each of his guests to multiple locations. During his time with James Marsden, they start by eating the actor's childhood favorite, chicken-fried steak in Texas, only to later end up sipping a German beer and hiking through the Bavarian mountains. The Montreal-born Queer Eye star and Awkwafina take a journey from eating jajangmyeon (a Korean-Chinese noodle dish with a black bean sauce) in New York City to preparing kimchi in a backyard in South Korea.

It can be difficult to make high-profile people feel safe sharing their personal lives with the public, and letting an audience watch as they learn new information about their own history is even more vulnerable. Porowksi says he worked to create an environment where guests would feel comfortable, telling Food & Wine “the way that I leaned in is that I just got personal. I shared my own stories. I asked them questions about themselves and just leaned in. You have to kind of develop a sense of mutual trust and know that there are no gotcha moments here.”

The host’s own passion for food and desire to create a positive experience comes across authentically through No Taste Like Home. As Porowski leads each of his companions through different farm tours, chefs tastings, and more, he explains that “the only goal of this is for you to have a really wonderful experience you can pass on to hopefully your kids, or other members of your family, depending on your life situation. And then hopefully for a lot of people to watch and just be exposed to these beautiful stories and to hopefully… get curious about themselves.”

The journey that National Geographic and Porowksi curate for each guest is unique, and focuses on experiential moments that allow them to feel or taste the same moments as their ancestors. Issa Rae picks and cooks with the moringa leaves that her great great grandmother may have used as a healer. Florence Pugh learns how to turn herring into kippers, the smoked fish that her great great great grandfather likely sold while working as a fishmonger.

Throughout each trip around the world you can see what inspires each star the most, and really makes them excited. Porowski recalls one moment when he and Pugh tasted a Yorkshire pudding together and were both immediately enraptured, saying “We just both started laughing hysterically out of joy. And it's very rare that I have someone who shares that deep passion for food as I do. And to have it be a perfect stranger. And from that moment, at least for me, it was like, ‘oh, we're friends.’”

The authenticity that you feel from No Taste Like Home is grounded in the careful planning of National Geographic. Each episode is extensively researched before filming, with genealogists even going to locations months before filming to verify oral histories in places like Borneo and Senegal.

That devotion to accuracy and detail extends to the experience that each celebrity has while filming — Porowski notes that featured guests “often meet a genealogist or an expert [and have] a couple of hours free reign to ask whatever it was that they really wanted to ask, specifically about food or family members or whatever it was.”

There are few things more disarming than learning something about yourself that you didn’t already know. Imagine doing that in front of a camera, and the stakes are even higher. But by creating a welcoming atmosphere that encourages questions, and creates the opportunity to ask them, Porowski and National Geographic are allowing celebrities to show a new, more authentic, side of themselves.

No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski will premiere with two episodes — at 9 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Eastern — on February 23 on National Geographic.