"Fresh Off the Boat" star Hudson Yang has criss-crossed Singapore in a Beach House Pictures (BHP)-driven food journey that debuts at Mipcom this week.

The eight-episode series, "Order Up!", taps Yang’s long-held interest in food, taking him across the U.S. for four episodes and Singapore for the other four, exploring his Asian roots and chasing his dreams of becoming a chef.

Produced during the pandemic, the Gen-Z series, for global service Insight TV, is on track for a first-half 2023 release, says BHP’s creative director, Donovan Chan.

Chan says the series avoids Singapore’s well-trod traditional food features in favour of more modern trends, such as farm-to-table and in-home interpretations of, for instance, curry. “We wanted to explore a little,” Chan said ahead of Mipcom. 

While Yang’s roots are Taiwanese, Chan said Singapore was chosen as the kick-off country because of its culinary diversity and for practical pandemic-related reasons.

The show aims to “surprise Singapore/Asian audiences as well as Western audiences,” Chan says, adding that the series is as much a “coming of age story as it is Hudson’s story moving out of his teens into a new phase of his life”.