Key Takeaways
- Eddie Huang and his wife Natashia revive Huang’s World with Complex, pairing his culinary expertise and filmmaking eye with her audience-friendly curiosity.
- The 12-minute episodes explore New York restaurants including Bistrot Ha, Smithereens, the Russian Tea Room, Eel Bar, and Altro Paradiso.
- Now a mellower family man, Huang trades the original show’s reckless gonzo energy for a more intimate, cinematic approach while retaining his unvarnished candor.
Often, our partner knows something about us long before we realize it. That was the case with superstar chef and media multi-hyphenate Eddie Huang, whose wife, Natashia Huang, knew he would revive his Taiwanese restaurant Baohaus and popular TV show Huang’s World long before he did.
“Anytime we ran into people, they were always like, ‘Bro, I missed that show. I miss Baohaus.’ And I was just a cranky old man like, ‘Whatever, get the fuck out of here. I don't want to think about it,’” Huang recalls. Despite his insistence, Natashia always knew he would come back to these projects that meant so much to him. But beyond the passion of online fans and strangers on the street, her own interest was already piqued.
“I didn't experience it the first go around in real time with everyone else, so there was just so much curiosity there for me,” she says.
It took a few years, but Huang has brought back both Baohaus, his iconic East Village Taiwanese eatery and Huang’s World, this time in partnership with COMPLEX and with a Family Style spin. Eddie insisted he wouldn’t bring back Huang’s World without Natashia’s along for the ride, but the producers had an even bigger role in mind.
“[Complex said], ‘We actually want her on the show. The whole brand is family style, and you guys have such a great dynamic on the pod. We would like for you guys to do it together,’” Eddie recalls. With that settled, the deal came together in just 10 days.
First released as a web series in 2014 by Vice’s food vertical Munchies and expanded into an hourlong Viceland series in 2016, Huang’s World brought unfiltered energy to the heavily produced and sanitized world of food television. Eddie’s inquisitiveness led to fascinating moments, including a pointed conversation with an avowed white supremacist, an introspective look at his own Taiwanese heritage, and an exploration of religion in Istanbul.
But his gonzo approach didn’t always gel with the objectives of Vice executives, at a time when the infamous media company was focused on aggressive multi-platform expansion.
“I remember there was a producer at one point that was like, ‘This should just be the food Indiana Jones and Eddie's Indiana Jones,’” he remembers. “And I was like, ‘I'm going to kill you. I'll absolutely kill you.’”
Huang’s World: Family Style will eventually feature Eddie and Natashia traveling the world, exploring food and its connection to identity, pop culture, politics, and more. But for its first season in nearly a decade, Huang’s World is staying close to home, exploring the sprawling culinary universe within New York City. Restaurants like Bistrot Ha, Smithereens, the Russian Tea Room, and Eel Bar are featured, with an emphasis on the new class of chefs who are “not so granularly focused on food.”
“Their inspirations and their curiosities are coming from other places and then landing and manifesting in food, and I think that's making the dining experience significantly more interesting,” Eddie says.
There are many differences in this iteration of Huang’s World, but among the most noticeable is a shift from 44 minute episodes to 12. That may seem dramatic, but it’s allowed Eddie, Natashia, and their team to focus on concise storytelling, while still having enough room for Eddie’s more auteur-driven approach.
In a media climate obsessed with catering to ever-shrinking attention spans, Eddie is making the most of his run time. “I leaned into the 12-minute format and I just allowed conversations, people, and even the dining rooms to breathe,” he says.
Natashia’s presence, tighter run times, a new home—but among the most obvious is Eddie’s headspace.
“We're not going on the Bang Bus this time,” he says, referencing the beloved porn vehicle. “Those were the types of things we were doing. I think in a China episode, I blacked out on nitrous once. I was a wild boy, and I had no family. At points, I didn't even want to be alive, so that's what that show was,” Eddie says. “This is not that anymore. I'm much more happy being a family man, and I don't want to lead younger people astray.”
(Ever the hip-hop fan, he sums up his newfound attitude with a Malice couplet from Clipse’s “Popular Demand”: “If I misled any kid that's fatherless / That burden's on my soul as long I exist.”)
Even in the Baohaus episode, which Eddie calls a “throwback” to the show’s raucous energy, it’s clear we’re watching a man with a vastly different life philosophy. Yes, he’s celebrating National Big Boob Day, but he’s doing it by buying Natashia “[his] best bouquet yet,” in her words. We watch Eddie lovingly oversee his kitchen staff, and get so excited talking about specialty ingredients with other chefs he compares it to jazz musicians in a particularly synced up jam.
The more mature Eddie is complimented perfectly by Natashia, a natural on camera playing an important role that the earlier Huang’s World lacked.
“I act as the audience stand in because I’m able to interview Eddie. I wasn’t really in the entertainment business prior to this, so I'm not coming in with anything other than just curiosity,” she says. “Sometimes he's talking to a chef and they're getting into this inside baseball culinary and I'm like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, what is that knife that you're talking about and why is that significant?’”
In the episode set at Soho Italian hotspot Altro Paradiso, it’s Natashia who leads a conversation on femininity, motherhood, and ambition. The pair had practice turning their dynamic into engaging content with their Canal Street Dreams podcast, and found a similarly effortless rhythm in this new spin on Huang’s World.
“It really felt like basketball,” Eddie says of their on-screen chemistry.
In the time since the original run concluded, he’s honed his skills as a filmmaker, directing the coming-of-age basketball drama Boogie and the media documentary Vice Is Broke. Now, Eddie talks about camera rigs, cinematography, and the influence of Frederick Wiseman documentaries like Ballet with the same eagerness he uses for a great pork belly bao or the Knicks.
“It’s much more first-person POV, and it's very new wave, and you get to actually feel like you're there. I think other food shows really protect what's going on. They clean it up. It's almost like you go to a restaurant where you don't see the work and everything's cleaned,” Eddie says. “This show, you're like, ‘Oh wait, I'm seeing this thing being made. I feel like I'm part of it.’”
Natashia highlights Eddie’s ability to pull double duty, playing the engaging co-host while constantly thinking about how to make the visual product better.
“When he's not on camera, he's on comms, headphones in, he's [watching] the screen. Even mid-scene, he'd be like, ‘Get B-roll. Shoot cover,’” she says. “There was never a minute, even when he was on camera, where he wasn't directing.”
Eddie shares a story where he was so focused on getting the shot right he told the server to wait so he could relocate their DP.
“I kind of felt like Jalen Brunson,” he laughs.
Beneath the sharper, cinematic style, and the two-hander approach, Huang’s World still runs on Eddie’s charisma, candor, and boundless curiosity. Fortunately, the person who knows him best always felt he had more to explore.
“I always feel like there is a way to come back to it, especially when you take a break and you've experienced a new chapter in your life, and he'd grown up so much from then,” Natashia explains. “He had shown me old episodes at a certain point, and I just felt he had more to say.”
