Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Family Restaurant’ on HBO Max, Andrew Zimmern’s Culinary Tour of Family-Owned Restaurants Across America

The best restaurants aren’t the global hotspots, nor the corporate chains–they’re small joints run by families. That’s the focus of Family Restaurant, a new series on HBO Max hosted by chef and longtime television food personality Andrew Zimmern. Each week, Zimmern visits one family-owned restaurant and gets to know the people behind the food.

FAMILY RESTAURANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We get an establishing shot of the quaint main street of Newtown, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, before stepping inside Vecchia Osteria, the beloved restaurant run by the Palino family. It’s all very slow and gentle, which is nice–and rare in food programming these days.

The Gist: Each episode of Family Restaurant focuses on a different family-owned restaurant, so the only constant in each episode is Andrew Zimmern, a steady hand at the helm as we jump around to new locales. In the first episode, the spotlight is on Vecchia Osteria, and their menu full of mouth-watering dishes served up by the Palino family.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, if that show cut back on the energy drinks and had HBO production values. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Triple-D, but this is a slower, quieter and more thoughtful version of the formula.)

Our Take: If you follow a lot of food media like I do, then you might have spent a good portion of the last couple months reading about the closure of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant often considered the “world’s best.” There’s been breathless headlines about The End of Fine Dining and What It All Means and a sense that a seismic shift is coming in the restaurant industry.

If you’re a real gourmand, though? You might spare a passing thought for the passing of a $500-a-head den of molecular gastronomy, but in your heart you know the best meals come from small, family-owned restaurants that dot the landscape across America.

Those kind of places are the focus of Family Restaurant, a new HBO (by way of Magnolia) food show led by longtime television personality Andrew Zimmern. Each episode is a standalone, promising to profile a single family-owned restaurant in a nice, brisk sub-half-hour runtime. In the series’ first episode, Zimmern visits Vecchia Osteria, an Italian restaurant in the Philadelphia suburbs run by the Palinos, a large and close-knit family headed by immigrants from Naples.

It’s slow television, and I mean that in the best possible way. Unlike a lot of other food shows on television today, Family Restaurant isn’t an assault on the senses–there’s none of the frenetic editing or bombastic styling we’ve come to expect from culinary content. If anything, it recalls back to what food TV was twenty or thirty years ago, before the genre went and got itself in a dang hurry.

Zimmern, for his part, is delightful as always. He’s a steadying presence for the show–knowledgeable but approachable, enthusiastic without being pandering. The show’s concept is simple enough that it might not be worth watching with a lesser presenter at the helm, someone who couldn’t lend their own gravitas to the new restaurants we’re visiting.

But when Andrew Zimmern tells me I should eat somewhere? I’m more than willing to listen. I’m making travel plans. The food that the Palinos serve up in their episode is a feast for the eyes–slow-braised pork ragù served over “drunken” noodles cooked in wine, fried escarole pie, hand-formed dumplings and more.

Sex and Skin: None, unless you consider pork ragù sexy. (Which, to be clear, I do.)

Parting Shot: Zimmern gives his final thoughts–after working a dinner rush waiting tables for the Palino family–and we fade out on a crowded parking lot after a great night of food and family. It’s like a warm hug in television form.

Sleeper Star: Vecchia Osteria is run by Pasquale and Anna Palino, who emigrated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania from Naples. But the star of the family business might be eldest daughter Carmela, who offers a funny anecdote about being dragged into waiting tables by her father without even knowing the restaurant’s menu.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Make yourself at home,” Palino patriarch Pasquale says to a group of customers entering the restaurant, something that Zimmern takes note of. Palino elaborates his feelings: “It’s my home, you’re in my house, I’ve got to make you comfortable.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Family Restaurant is a pleasant serving of slow television, a gentle look at good food and the people behind it, and it’s an absolute delight to watch.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.