Lisa Ling is sitting at a table loaded with Cantonese and Taiwanese delicacies, platters of glazed char siu (roast pork), succulent spare ribs, a medley of seafood, a bowl of pigs feet. The feast is set in Locke, California, outside Sacramento, although it could be just about anywhere in the United States.
That’s the point of Ling’s new show "Take Out with Lisa Ling" on HBO Max, which premiered last week. Asian food is an intrinsic part of the American experience. In cities big and small, in every corner of the country, locals can eat steaming bowls of Vietnamese pho and line up at a Taiwanese bubble tea shop and eat Korean barbecue off the tabletop grill. It’s hard to fathom how different the landscape was 20 years ago, when Yesoon Lee — who, as co-owner of the acclaimed Washington, D.C., restaurant Mandu, has been called the godmother of Korean food — had to work in a Chinese airport restaurant, because there was no other outlet for her cooking.
Viewers can learn more about that in Episode 6, which centers on Fairfax County, Virginia; Ling observes that it's home to the third-largest Korean population in the U.S. She also introduces the audience to Korean karaoke, drinking games and to a couple whose dry-cleaning business keeps them so busy they don't have time to cook. But food producers are the underlying engine of the new series, which highlights the untold stories and inner workings of various Asian communities, from New Jersey’s Journal Square to southern Louisiana, eschewing Chinatowns in favor of less obvious enclaves. Each show features multiple voices from a community in which Ling embeds.
