Actor and comedian Awkwafina (Nora Lum) recently walked Condé Nast Traveler through Manhattan's Koreatown, and her itinerary doubles as a ready-made eating plan for anyone visiting New York. The anchor point is 32nd Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, where the neighbourhood took shape in the late 1970s around a Korean bookstore and a handful of restaurants. Today it's a 24-hour district of karaoke bars, K-pop shops and food, and Lum — who grew up hitting its clubs in the '90s and 2000s — calls it a place where you can totally belong.

Her first stop is Miss Korea, a 24-hour barbecue house where the spread runs from assorted banchan side dishes to chargrilled short ribs. Across the street sits BCD Tofu House, a Los Angeles export that opened in 2008 and now draws queues for its bubbling clay-pot soondubu stew, crispy seafood pancakes and spicy marinated crab. General manager Alex Kim notes the crowd has flipped in two decades: customers were once 70 to 80 percent Korean; now most aren't — a sign of how mainstream Korean food has become in the US.

Beyond the sit-down meals, Lum grabs kimbap at Woorijip, a fast-casual favourite for snacking and soju, and stops at food hall Food Gallery 32 for bungeoppang — the fish-shaped filled pastry she calls the reason she comes to this block. It's one of the few spots in Manhattan where you'll find it. At the higher end, the strip also holds Joo Ok, a Michelin-starred tasting-menu restaurant, plus Korean corn dogs at Jongro Rice Hotdog.

The tour ties into Lum's new Apple TV series, Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook, streaming from November 6. Across eight episodes she explores Asian American food heritage — cooking with Martin Yan in San Francisco's Chinatown, road-tripping Texas barbecue with Jimmy O. Yang, and reviving her great-grandfather's old Lum's restaurant as a pop-up in Little Italy. A recurring theme is the fragility of these enclaves: after the pandemic, Chinatown mom-and-pop shops struggled, and Lum highlights places like Phoenix Palace in Manhattan's Chinatown, which hosts local elders at affordable rates and sources porcelain from Wing on Wo & Co., a shop open since 1925.

For travellers, the show's stop-list extends well past New York: Curry Boys BBQ in San Antonio (oak-smoked brisket with green curry), the 64-year-old Golden Dragon dim sum banquet hall in LA's Chinatown, Mister Jiu's in San Francisco, and Kō Hana Distillers on Oahu for farm-to-bottle sugarcane rum. But the easiest starting point is one block of 32nd Street — eat barbecue at midnight, stew at noon, and pastry in between.