Jamie's American Road Trip Jamie’s American Road Trip – Episode guide

Date Published:

27/08/2009

Find out what's coming up on each leg of Jamie's American Road Trip

Jamie leaves the glamorous restaurants and fancy cocktail bars of Manhattan behind and heads to the heart of the world’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhood: Queens.

It’s a journey into uncharted territory, and Jamie uncovers recipes and people he never thought he’d find in New York.

The city’s food culture is built on wave after wave of immigrants, all searching for the American Dream. It’s a place you can literally get the world on a plate.

He first meets Ali El Sayed, who pioneered home-cooked Egyptian food in New York three decades ago, and believes that food brings people of all backgrounds together. Jamie tries Ali’s spicy stuffed flatbreads, visits the local halal butcher and shares a Hookah.

Underground restaurants are the latest subculture in the Big Apple and Jamie tracks down an illegal Peruvian restaurant run in a family’s living room. And he meets George, a Columbian bus driver who makes home-cooked food every night for illegal immigrants living on the streets.

Jamie also infiltrates the burgeoning ‘anti-restaurant’ scene, where people open their homes to strangers. He meets Zora and Tamara, who provide restaurant quality food at wallet-friendly prices from their apartment and met their husbands the same way.

And faraway from Chinatown, in a street market Jamie tries his hand at a fiery Szechuan dish and making noodles from scratch.

Finally, Jamie decides to host his own supper club, with a menu that pays homage to New York’s eclectic melting pot of food cultures.

Arriving in Louisiana just weeks after Hurricane Gustav has wreaked havoc in New Orleans and the surrounding area, Jamie is on a quest to understand why people continue to live in an battered by hurricanes. He finds a state full of people who use food as a way to celebrate life and keep the party going through adversity.

In New Orleans his first stop is with ‘gumbo queen’, Leah Chase, whose Creole restaurant is only finally getting back on its feet nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina. He also meets local jazz star, Kermit Ruffins, who’s famous for his street barbeque and knows the city inside out.

Jamie decides he has to try his hand at Louisiana cooking for real, and gets himself a stall at an underground event known as a "second line" – a street party used by the African American community to raise money for local projects.

Jamie continues his travels upstate into Cajun country where he spends time with an alligator-hunting grandmother, Sydnie Mae Durand. She teaches Jamie how to hunt alligator the local way – setting traps and then shooting the alligator before skinning and cooking it. Luckily, help is at hand in the form of Sydnie Mae’s 11-year-old granddaughter Whitney.

Tasting and cooking his way through the Cajun and Creole staples, Jamie comes across a restaurant where the party has abruptly stopped. McGee’s Landing has been destroyed by the recent hurricane, the roof and kitchen ripped away.

Owner David wants to re-launch the restaurant in style and Jamie agrees to help to cook a Louisiana feast for a hundred guests. Can Jamie put the Louisiana spirit back into McGee’s and get the party going again?