Chef David Chang is back on CNN, but this time he's behind the wheel instead of behind a stove. His new series, The Detour with David Chang, sends him down six American road trips that skip the interstate exits everybody already knows and go looking for the stuff you only find by getting appropriately lost.

The premise is simple and, if you read this column regularly, very much my religion: the best stops are rarely the ones on the billboard. Forbes' rundown covers all six routes, and Chang's picks lean hard into food, small towns, and the kind of roadside weirdness I keep telling people is the whole point of a road trip. I've logged enough hours in the car to know a two-star diner with a line out the door beats a four-star chain off the exit ramp every single time.

What works about the format is that Chang treats food as the map, not the destination. He routes trips through what people are cooking and eating along the way, which is honestly how most of us plan drives anyway. You don't remember the mile markers. You remember the barbecue shack that was out of ribs by 2 p.m. or the pie place somebody mentioned at a gas pump.

I haven't watched all six episodes yet, so call this a heads-up, not a review. Still worth flagging. It's armchair road-tripping at exactly the right moment, since a lot of us are plotting fall routes right now and Chang's detours might hand you an anchor stop or two. Also, TV travel shows tend to either romanticize the golden age of the American road or treat the whole country like a theme park. The good ones do neither, and early word says Chang stays on the right side of that line by just eating where the locals eat and letting the places speak.

The Forbes piece walks through each of the six trips if you want the full itinerary before you tune in. Worth a read for the stop-by-stop detail alone.

Me, I'll be watching with a notepad, because about eight of the gaps on my golden-age road trip list are still open and I'm not above stealing ideas from a guy with a TV budget.