As 'Relish' Explores More Stories and Cultures Through Food in a New Season, It Receives a James Beard Award

Relish is available to stream via the PBS app. The sixth season premieres June 23. 
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When Chef Yia Vang was first asked to take part in the Twin Cities PBS food show Relish, he thought “host” simply meant welcoming the crew into his house to film a single episode in which he and his mother made Hmong-style steamed buns. Now, as he continues into a sixth season of affably leading the entire series, Relish has won a prestigious James Beard Award.

“Winning an award like this, at least to me, feels like there’s an acknowledgement that we’re telling stories in an authentic way and that we’re sharing things that are important and that matter,” says Amy Melin, the executive producer of Relish.

The stories that Relish shares are always told through – and over – food. Vang visits chefs, entrepreneurs, and cooks around the Twin Cities at their restaurants, businesses, and homes to learn about their family, their culture, and their customs. He learns to harvest manoomin – wild rice – from a boat the way that Indigenous people have for centuries, before joining “The Sioux Chef” Sean Sherman to cook it and other local native ingredients into fried rice. He encourages sister business owners to share memories of their upbringing as they prepare their mother’s Afghan chutney while the matriarch herself confidently offers adjustments. He tries lutefisk for the first time after seeing how it’s made – and learning that Nigerians have also adopted the dried cod that is the main ingredient in lutefisk into their culinary traditions.

The surprising link between Nigerian and Scandinavian food was an “aha moment” of the kind he loves to experience while making Relish, Vang says. The show’s photographer, Uche Iroegbu, is Nigerian, and started reminiscing about eating dried fish while the team visited the lutefisk manufactory, which started importing whole dried cod specifically at the request of the Nigerian community in the Twin Cities. “This is exactly why I love this show,” says Vang. “That to me was such a depiction of what this show really is: thousands of miles, and thousands of traditions, and here we are in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

Vang himself has traveled thousands of miles to come to Minnesota. He was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Hmong parents who eventually were accepted into the United States and settled in central Wisconsin. The largest community in the United States of Hmong people – a stateless ethnic group originally from Southeast Asia and China – is found in the Upper Midwest around the Twin Cities. Vang has become an ambassador for Hmong culture, naming his acclaimed recent restaurant Vinai after the refugee camp in which he was born in an attempt to reclaim it.

“My father would always say to me, ‘Son, you will go and learn the ways of this [American] world. My hope and prayer is that you can learn those ways, how they do things, and you can bring it back. And you can share that with our people,’” Vang says. “He said, ‘That’s why you need to go to school. That’s why I want you to go to college. Not for riches and glory. But you can learn their ways, and you can be that ambassador. You can be that person in between.’”

The experience of proselytizing on behalf of his own culture – both the joy and the struggle – motivates Vang to share the stories of other peoples and communities via Relish.

“All these immigrant refugee communities have always been doing their things. They’ve been always hustling, they’ve always been working, they’ve always been in the background,” he says. “They do it with a passion to build a future for their children, their children’s children. And the TV people, the writers, the reporters, they’re actually just watching. They’re not the ones coming in creating a story. No, no, no, no. They get to glean from a story that’s been going on.”

Vang’s ardent curiosity and advocacy are what drew Melin and fellow producer Brittany Shrimpton to him, despite his lack of experience on camera. “The way he talked about food and the connections was so genuine, and it was exactly what Brittany and I had put down as our mission for this series,” Melin says. 

“When you can see someone is naturally curious about something and wants to learn, and you’re talking to someone who is naturally passionate about their culture, their history, the connections that they’re forming between food and people – that’s what I think captured us so vividly,” says Shrimpton.

It also helps that Vang is a boisterous presence who has many friends in the Twin Cities restaurant world, which is quietly in the vanguard of America’s culinary scene thanks to restaurants like Vang’s, Sherman’s Owamni, and Myriel and Bûcheron, both of which also just won James Beard Awards – not to mention the diverse mom-and-pop shops found throughout the metropolitan area. (Vang himself has been both a nominee and semifinalist for a Beard Award as a chef.)

“I think there is something special about the food community here in the Twin Cities,” says Melin. “They are so supportive of one another, and we can’t go on a shoot without them saying, ‘Oh, have you talked to so-and-so and so-and-so?’ Everyone wants to uplift everybody else.”

Shrimpton hopes that Relish can show viewers that community, and bring them into it. “Hopefully people will get to know their neighbors just a little bit more when they watch these stories, hopefully they’ll get to know more about the people that live in the community, they’re not maybe as afraid to try something new,” she says.

With his characteristic humor, Vang jokes that, “in the words of Aladdin to Jasmine, ‘I can show you the world,’” if you dine with him in the Twin Cities.

From the stories behind Somali snacks to Filipino noodles to king cake, Relish tries to do just that.