Eddie Huang Turns Huang’s World Into Dinner With Friends
With Baohaus back on St. Marks Place and a debut novel on shelves, the chef and writer brings his food show home to New York for Season 5
Eddie Huang reopened Baohaus at 97 St. Marks Place in March, and his first novel, Come Undone, came out from One World in June. On 10 November, Huang’s World returns on Complex‘s Family Style Youtube channel for Season 5, its first new season in eight years.
He planned them separately, and he says all three come from the same place. “I had been on this whirlwind rise from 2009 to 2018 but I just wasn’t happy,” he tells us. “There were some real cataclysmic personal struggles in 2018 that began the day Tony Bourdain passed and I had to sit down and examine my life.”
That examination led back to his childhood, spent “in a home that seemed fine from the outside with a tremendous amount of violence and distrust inside,” he says. He had a gut feeling his entire life that the way his parents led him was wrong. “It’s very difficult to stand up alone in a family and point the finger at the people who brought you into this world,” he says, “especially when so much of my work has revolved around family and immigration to this country.”
He met his wife, Natashia, in 2021. She had a serious health scare that year, and it inspired the third act of Come Undone. “In that moment I told myself that I would always say what needed to be said or done the moment I realized I needed to because life truly is too short to stand by idly and suffer things you feel are incorrect,” he says.
Huang and Natashia moved the family back to New York, and he rebuilt his career around the work he had set aside. “I missed Baohaus, I missed writing books and I missed Huang’s World,” he says.
Fiction allows you to stay even more loyal to the truth of your emotions.
Eddie Huang
Come Undone follows Hubie, a traveling food-show host who ends every relationship at three months. “Hubie is a version of myself that I’ve bottled like a vintage wine and deployed him in the pages of Come Undone,” he says. The fiction is in what happens to Hubie and who he meets. “If you change one thing about anything, it’s fiction and playing with that idea and turning the dial was very creatively satisfying,” he adds. “It’s cheeky.”
Baohaus belongs on St. Marks, where Huang has long eaten late-night Asian food on a block he calls “ground zero for wacky Asian food concepts.” He chose a spot toward Avenue A, close to “Tompkins, the baths and the convergence of the downtown punk, skate, graffiti, hip hop scene that has always inspired what we do,” he says. Although he’s also lived in Los Angeles and Taiwan, “this is my home,” Huang says of New York. “I’ve just never felt like I belonged anywhere else. I make sense to people here and can be myself.”
The Chairman bao and the beef noodle soup are back on the menu, which changes often. “Our menu is always changing. It drives the cooks crazy and sometimes our customers but I’ve always committed my work to change and evolution,” Huang says. “I think when you try to control and define and freeze something in time, you are actually killing it.”
With a farmers’ market a short walk away, Huang wants to cook Taiwanese Chinese food “at a high level and a fair price with the best ingredients,” a model he has seen chefs in China and Taiwan pull off. His cooks have settled in and mastered the traditional recipes. “I want to push,” he says.
Huang also wants to make a rom com. He has adapted Come Undone into a feature, which he says Jonathan Levine is producing, and he is developing a micro comedy with his friend Jesse Lee, founder of Basic.Space. “I do think there is an opportunity to resurrect ’70s- or ’00s-style indie film making where it’s simply friends with a camera moving together,” he says. “It’ll be chaotic, it’ll be hard, I’ll possibly self fund, but I do think that energy is what produces the most personal work and that’s what I’m into.”
Huang’s World came back through an unusual deal. Huang took ownership of the show through bankruptcy court from a company he once worked for, which owed him royalties it was unable to pay. He licensed the library to Complex for a production budget, and he owns the new seasons, which he licenses to Complex as well. “I don’t think there’s an agent or manager that could have figured that out,” Huang says.
The earlier seasons chased epic trips and clever conversation. “It was a very young man’s show,” Huang says. “I think we do a lot more with a lot less on the new season of Huang’s World.”
Last year Huang finally let himself rewatch Bourdain. His favorite episodes are the low-key ones, Bourdain drinking beers, eating simple food and talking about life. “No Reservations felt like a confidential vlog between you and Tony,” he says. “That’s why we all loved him. You could meet him for 5 minutes and feel like he showed you who he was.”
Season 5 follows Huang, Natashia and their friends around the city. “It’s dinner with friends at some of New York’s most exciting and curious restaurants,” he says. “Execs forever have tried to pull off this idea of a show that’s the dream dinner party and I do think we finally figured that out on Huang’s World Season 5.”
What are your thoughts?