Former Top Chef contestant and fun-loving Chef Chrissy Camba is the host of this unique food adventure series celebrating cultural grocery stores and the communities they serve. (Photo from the Grocery List Show website)
Filipina-American Chef Chrissy Camba brings food, identity, and community together in a new PBS docuseries that honors the cultural heartbeat of immigrant grocery stores.
Food is never just food—it’s identity, tradition, and survival. And for Filipino-American chef Chrissy Camba, it’s also joy.
That infectious spirit—along with her deep-rooted love for heritage—anchors The Grocery List, a five-part PBS docuseries that does something quietly radical: it brings viewers into America’s immigrant-owned grocery stores and asks us to look again. To slow down. To really see the stories folded into banana leaves, nestled between cans of coconut milk, and stacked in boxes of SkyFlakes.
Each short, beautifully filmed episode follows Camba through a different market—Filipino, Palestinian, Caribbean, Italian, Latin American—where she shops, chats, and cooks with the people who’ve made these grocery stores cultural sanctuaries. The show blends food history, family narrative, and neighborhood heart in one deliciously grounded series.
A Market of One’s Own
The journey begins at Seafood City in Chicago, the Midwest flagship of a Filipino grocery chain familiar to many diaspora families. On a quiet weekday afternoon, the store hums with life: aunties comparing rice brands, uncles filling bags of bangus (milkfish), shelves lined with bagoong (fermented shrimp paste) and SkyFlakes (Filipino crackers that bring back childhood memories for many).
Camba strolls the aisles like she’s never left. She greets customers playing Sunday bingo, shares stories of growing up Filipina in Chicago, and cooks tortang alimasag—a crab omelet passed down from her mother—back at home with her husband.
“This isn’t a cooking show,” she says. “It’s a people show. And the food just happens to be incredible.”
Chrissy Camba: Chef, Daughter, Storyteller
Before she was telling stories on camera, Camba was making waves in kitchens. A graduate of the Illinois Institute of Art, she trained at fine-dining spots like Aria and Mirai Sushi, and later opened Laughing Bird in 2014—one of Chicago’s first restaurants to spotlight Filipino flavors with boldness and pride.
In 2012, she competed on Top Chef: Seattle, where her unfiltered charm and unapologetic celebration of Filipino dishes like longganisa (sweet sausage) and calamansi-glazed pork won over fans nationwide.
Now, through The Grocery List, she shifts from fine dining to familial storytelling, amplifying the voices behind the shelves: the aunties, the bakers, the shopkeepers, and the grandmothers who’ve turned markets into memory banks.
“The Grocery List Show” celebrates the rich diversity of communities and cultures that shape the American experience. In one standout episode, Filipina-American Chef Chrissy Camba takes viewers on a flavorful journey through Seafood City in Chicago, Illinois—an iconic Filipino supermarket chain—where she introduces audiences to the vibrant ingredients, traditions, and stories behind her native cuisine. (Photo from the Grocery List Show website)
From Brooklyn to Ridgefield, Culture in Every Cart
In each episode, Camba visits a culturally distinct market and shares meals with those who steward its traditions. Her role isn’t to “discover” these places, but to honor them—learning and listening alongside cooking.
- Balady Market, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn – A halal market run by three Palestinian-American brothers, where Camba learns to prepare mansaf (lamb in fermented yogurt) with matriarch Ferial Masoud.
- Labay Market, Flatbush – A Grenadian-Caribbean grocery pulsing with spice, song, and stories of resilience.
- Piccolo’s Gastronomia Italiana, Ridgefield, NJ – A cozy Italian deli where Camba makes mozzarella and puttanesca pasta, sharing wine and laughter with co-owner Nancy.
- La Placita de Brooklyn, Sunset Park – A Latin American market that bridges cultures, highlighting where Filipino and Latino flavors meet on the shelf and on the plate.
Language as Seasoning
The show lovingly weaves in Filipino terms, letting language flavor the narrative the same way garlic might enrich a pot of adobo:
- Lola – grandmother
- Adobo – meat stewed in vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic
- Lumpia – crispy spring rolls
- Pandesal – soft breakfast rolls
- Bagoong – fermented shrimp paste
- Sinigang – sour tamarind soup
- Tortang alimasag – crab omelet
- Sari-sari store – corner convenience shop, often run from one’s home
These aren’t just ingredients or vocabulary. They are cultural timestamps. And in Chrissy Camba’s hands, they become bridges—linking generations, communities, and kitchens.
Behind the Lens
The Grocery List is directed by Emily Strong and produced by Diane Quon, the Oscar-nominated documentarian behind Minding the Gap. The series is elegantly crafted, shot by cinematographer Sebastian De Silva, edited by Brent Bandemer, with production by Grace Sin and original music by Noah MacNeil.
Each episode is filmed with intimacy and care: warm kitchen lighting, close-ups of hands peeling garlic, elders telling stories between bites. There are no flashy graphics or fast cuts—just deeply human moments, captured in real time.
Where to Watch
All five episodes of The Grocery List Show premiered May 28 on PBS Food’s YouTube channel, available for free streaming. Each runs under 15 minutes—a perfect pairing with your morning coffee or a shared dinner.
Final Bite
Whether you’re from the diaspora, a lover of global cuisine, or someone who’s ever felt the power of a market to transport you to another place, The Grocery List Show offers more than flavor. It’s a reminder that the most meaningful food journeys often begin not in a restaurant, but in the quiet intimacy of an aisle—and for many of us, in the first time we recognized ourselves on a label, a spice jar, or a grandmother’s recipe card.
Each episode may only last a dozen minutes, but the resonance lingers far longer—especially for anyone who has ever found home in the aisles of a neighborhood market.
