Cooking Show Host Lidia Bastianich

Celebrity Q&A
on March 6, 2012
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Where does Lidia Bastianich film her cooking show?
—Candy Chase, Bailey, Okla.

When Bastianich, 65, was first asked to film a cooking show, Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, she agreed to do it on two conditions—it had to be on public television and it had to be shot in her own kitchen in Queens, N.Y., where she continues to film today for PBS.

“I was afraid of getting onto a set which I wasn’t familiar with,” she says. “I knew my kitchen, I knew where everything was. Secondly, [I asked] that I be on public television. That’s a venue that delivers information and I wanted to deliver my information via that venue.”

But this April, Bastianich, who was born in Pula—currently part of Croatia—steps out of her comfort zone for Lidia Celebrates America: Weddings: Something Borrowed, Something New, which finds her traveling the United States as she learns about wedding traditions tied to ethnicity and food. “The beauty of it is seeing, tasting, and understanding from the [participants] what is meaningful,” she says of the experience, which included a Korean wedding and an African-American wedding.

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