Mixing drag with restaurant makeovers is “the best of both worlds,” says host Priyanka.Crave/Supplied
Priyanka, the inaugural winner of Canada’s Drag Race, is back on Crave this spring with her very own reality show: Drag Brunch Saved My Life.
In it, she plays fairy godmother to bistros and steakhouses across Ontario, bringing in interior design, food and drag experts to help their brunches dazzle on all fronts.
While this is the first project to emerge from a development deal, the singer and drag personality signed with Bell Media in 2023, it’s far from her first time hosting rather than competing on a television show.
In her pre-drag days as Mark Suknanan (or Mark Suki), she was the face of a number of Canadian children’s shows on YTV from The Zone to The Next Star.
Priyanka, who also starred in the just-wrapped a season of HBO’s We’re Here, spoke to The Globe and Mail over the phone.
How did you come up with the concept of mixing together drag with a restaurant makeover show?
The best of both worlds. I thought back to when I first started in television. The first show that I ever hosted was called Durham Dining when I was just a teenage boy with a huge dream. I thought about drag brunch and how it brings people together. We can show the straight restaurant owner who calls the drag queen who happened to host kids TV when their kids were watching, and we’re all more alike than you think.
Durham Dining is not something I stumbled upon in your credits.
I definitely leave that one off the resume considering what else is on there now. During high school, I volunteered at Oshawa Rogers TV. One of the producers there was looking for a correspondent host type person for Durham Dining. We went to local restaurants in and around the Durham region highlighting their amazing menus and interviewing the chefs.
Sometimes the brunch seems like a secondary thought when it comes to drag brunch. How much does the food quality matter to you as someone who performs or attends drag brunches?
Drag brunch for a lot of drag performers is such a coveted spot because you know it is gonna be sold out. So I’ve been to many great ones. I’ve been to many not so great ones. I was like: If these restaurants and if these performers just had the tools they needed to bring that quality to really blow this up, we would be unstoppable.
Drag’s often in the news these days because of right wing politics. That masks the fact that it is, in many ways, at a peak of mainstream popularity. But I still balked at the idea that the first two episodes took place at two different restaurants in Barrie, Ontario. Does a town like Barrie have room for two drag brunches these days?
These towns are like a lot bigger than we think. I, too, had that same thought, right? But even without us there, drag performers were already doing two brunches. We go to the Alpine in Toronto in one episode – and their story is that they tried to have a drag brunch and it failed. So even in the city it could still fail, too.
What for you were the most surprising experiences you had in these Ontario towns?
In Belleville, we had more of that right wing pushback that you’re talking about. It wasn’t through protest. It was just some staff members who had a small-minded mentality. We were shocked because they show up on day one, it’s open arms – and all of a sudden it’s “drag is not for kids.” We’re like, “oh my God, what are we gonna do here?” Because it’s not that kind of show. We’re not trying to dig into the drama and make it Real Housewives, but here we are faced with this real problem. And we talk about it.
This point, or this question, about performing drag in front of children. As someone whose first career was as a children’s TV host, how do you approach those conversations?
I love when the argument is brought to me because you can’t tell me that I cannot entertain your child because I probably already have. Do you actually want to learn how to make it appropriate for children – or do you just want to add to the narrative of it being not for children? Having worked under a corporation making kids content, it’s tough. If it’s an all ages show and we’re marketing it for kids, what does that mean in our themes and our music selection? Toys, movies, everything has these ratings on it for children and drag brunches and a lot of shows don’t. We know that kids want to come see it. We know that parents want to bring their kids. But there needs to be a transparent conversation as to what kind of show you’re signing up for.
The Bloom Bistro in Barrie you visit in one episode is run by a Guyanese woman. That’s your background as well: Indo-Guyanese. Can you tell me about that?
Nalini is her name. Everybody just loves her in the community. She’s like everyone’s mom. She had a really bad experience when she did a Mother’s Day brunch – and there was a bad service and it tarnished her reputation. It was tough for me seeing a fellow Guyanese struggle. As a Guyanese person, we want to show people that we can do things. Here she is feeling like she had to put her ego away to call me to help her out.
You end up with a successful Guyana-themed drag brunch.
Literally, the next week I was asked to perform in Guyana for their Pride kickoff show. It ended up just being this very full circle thing. When I was on Canada’s Drag Race, I talked about Guyana being very homophobic and that you can’t be gay here and that’s why my dad hasn’t seen me do drag. Cut to: I’m in Guyana performing my own headline show and my dad’s there watching me for the first time.
Amazing.
It’s a really, really cool thing: Don’t hide from your culture. Don’t hide from yourself. Because if you continue to nurture yourself, you’ll be able to have success.
You were just on We’re Here on HBO – which has now been canceled after four seasons. How good is it to have a Canadian TV contract right now?
What Crave is doing is actually crazy. We’re way past the, “oh, it looks Canadian” thing. No, no, no, no, no. We are stepping it up and it looks so good and that makes me happy as someone who has been in Canadian media for over 20 years now.
This interview has been edited and condensed.