25 Years With Lidia: A Culinary Jubilee
8/7c, PBS (check local listings at pbs.org)
Award-winning chef Lidia Bastianich—cooking show host, restaurateur and bestselling cookbook author—marks a quarter century on public television with this special showcasing her life story.
Beginning with her childhood in Istria, an Adriatic peninsula that’s now part of Croatia, to later years shares how she turned the challenges of immigration into a recipe for success. “I think I took off like a jet,” Bastianich (above, with Becco chef William Gallagher) says of her arrival in the U.S. after two years in an Italian refugee camp. “I was only 12, but I was going to finally be free. We had a home, we could speak Italian, we could go to church. I think it made me who I am.”