‘Queer Eye’ foodie Antoni Porowski talks avocados, ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’, and learning to love his heritage
- The Canadian member of the hit Netflix show, whose cookbook Antoni in the Kitchen was published last month, was a picky eater as a child
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As a kid, Queer Eye foodie Antoni Porowski had a love-hate relationship with Polish fare.
It was standard in his Polish Canadian family, but he was a picky eater. He didn’t like caraway seeds. He truly didn’t like beetroots.
And once he and his dad decamped south to the US, from Montreal to West Virginia, the 12-year-old boy with the funny name grew tired of showing up at school with cabbage rolls and kielbasa when everyone else munched on crustless sandwiches and Oscar Mayer Lunchables, which is all he wanted, too.
“I kind of weirdly grew ashamed of my heritage and my name and my cultural identity,” the 35-year-old Porowski said.
It wasn’t until he moved back to Montreal at 17 that he reconnected with the food of the motherland through a magical little Polish restaurant called Stash Cafe, run at the time by his Auntie Ewa.
“My father worked at this restaurant as a waiter. So did my sisters, all of my cousins. I started working there, just hanging out with the grandmas in the kitchen making the pierogis, and I kind of fell in love with the cuisine of where I’m from.”