No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski review

No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski is a National Geographic documentary. It’s about food and ancestry. The six episodes go all around the world looking for foods and ancestral roots.

No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski is lot like Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., except it begins with a hunt for a particular food and then encompasses ancestry and family history as the foods are explored. It also reminded me of Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico because of the way it tied food, tradition, history, and culture into the story.

Each episode began with the guest talking about some particular food that had been important in their family. Then Antoni and the guest would head out in search of where the food originated.

The guests and their food hunt included Florence Pugh in England, Awkwafina in South Korea, Justin Theroux in Italy, James Marsden in Germany, Issa Rae in Senegal, and Henry Golding in Malaysia. Since this was a National Geographic special, a big difference between what Finding Your Roots does and what this series does is travel. They go to the ancestral homes of the various guests, sample the food, and try to find exactly where the family’s traditional food came from.

Sometimes it was a very specific location, and always tied to the local culture and history.

The number of researchers working on this series must have been huge. They found more than genealogy. They found buildings and places. They found relatives. They found chefs in each place to explain how the food was made.

I don’t know if it was because of Antoni Porowski’s history as one of the Queer Eye guys, but I often found myself wiping away tears at the emotional reactions of the guests as they learned about their food traditions and ancestors.

If you love food shows or Finding Your Roots, I think you’ll enjoy this series. It’s streaming on Hulu.