At a church lutefisk dinner, Yia Vang, the prolific chef and burgeoning TV star, came face-to-face with his audience.
“I can’t tell you how many people came up and were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re him!’ ‘Are you him?’ ‘We watch you every Saturday at 2 p.m.’ I was like, oh, my gosh, I think I found my people,” Vang recalled.
He was there, with a production team from Twin Cities Public Television, to film the latest season of “Relish,” which was released last week for streaming online.
Co-producers Brittany Shrimpton and Amy Melin launched the show about the diversity of Minnesota cuisine in 2019. Episodes back then were quick 5-minute bites that only streamed online. But over five seasons, “Relish” has grown to become a full-fledged 30-minute show that also airs on a traditional television station.
And Vang, as host, has become a household name — among a certain PBS-watching set, anyway. “I’m like, I need to do stuff where women in their 30s think this is cool,” he joked.
In that church basement, the adoration of his fans was palpable. At one point, Shrimpton had to shield Vang from the crowd to get him out of the building.
“Is this how Taylor Swift feels all the time?” Vang laughed, before he was pulled away from a conversation to take selfies with yet more fans. But this time, he was at his own restaurant, Union Hmong Kitchen, to celebrate the release of the fifth season of “Relish” with the chefs and food purveyors featured in each episode.

In its new format, each episode focuses on two foods from vastly different cultures that, it turns out, have something in common. Lutefisk, the Scandinavian dehydrated fish, for example, is paired up with smoked Ukrainian sausage from Kramarczuk’s, the venerable deli in northeast Minneapolis.