Chefs stir the pot of tradition

Mapo tofu, a dish created on the show.

Meng Yuyang (left) and Cao Siquan, contestants on the second season of Chef of China.

Kung Pao chicken and Lion's Head meatballs, created on the show.

As a child, Meng Yuyang would stand beside the pot as his mother cooked rice cakes, watching bubbles rise and burst in the water. Years later, he still remembers the sound as a soothing childhood memory.

He spent four years studying Huaiyang cuisine in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, before moving to Beijing in 2019 to apprentice in a French kitchen. The cuisines and techniques changed, but the sound of that boiling pot stayed with him.

Now competing in the second season of the cooking show Chef of China, streaming on Tencent Video, Meng has turned that memory into a dish. He replaced the pork in his childhood favorite, noodles with shredded pork and preserved mustard greens, with blue lobster, combining French techniques with flavors from home.

His story is one of many in the new season, where traditional char siu (Chinese BBQ pork) appears alongside molecular cuisine, and homestyle breakfasts and regional snacks share the judges' table with fine-dining creations.

The second season has also changed the rules. Sixteen established master chefs no longer receive first-round exemptions and compete alongside 84 challengers. Once all advancement spots are filled, there is no waiting list: newcomers must beat those already in contention.

The 100 contestants represent Sichuan, Cantonese, Yunnan, and Hunan cuisines, northern Chinese cooking, fusion cuisine, and Chinese food traditions developed overseas. They span three generations and vastly different professional backgrounds, but face the same clock and judging standards.

This season shows how chefs turn training, ingredients, regional identity and personal experience into food while negotiating tradition and change.

For the competition, Meng re-created the dish with blue lobster, low-temperature cooking and preserved mustard greens stir-fried in lard.

To perfect the sauce, he worked until the early hours for two months and lost nearly 5 kilograms. "I hope that one day, when people see me again, they'll say, 'Oh, he's from Yangzhou, but he's cooking French cuisine,'" he says.

When Hong Kong chef and Chef of China judge Vicky Cheng gave him the go-ahead, Meng shouted with excitement. He had spent the previous six months questioning whether he was good enough to take the stage, and Cheng was the first person to taste his untested dish. "As long as I came here, I had already won," he says.

For Cheng, however, personal stories ultimately have to become something tangible on the plate. "In the end, it's always about taste," he says.

Creativity, storytelling and presentation can enhance a dish, but they cannot replace flavor. A chef's experience may explain why a dish exists, but it cannot save one that does not taste good.

Cheng, who competed in cooking contests when he was younger, also sees the show as a test of skills that are difficult to demonstrate in the routine of a restaurant kitchen.

The competition allows chefs to show not only what they cook in their own restaurants, but also "what they're capable of in such a tight timeline, fierce, intense situations, how quickly they adapt, how well they work as a team, and also how well they perform as an individual", he says.

No easy pass

For Cao Siquan, a cofounder of Guangzhou's Bingsheng Restaurant Group who has worked in Cantonese cuisine for more than 30 years, the new rules meant putting his experience to the test alongside everyone else.

Despite his decades in Cantonese cuisine, Cao had to start in the same opening round as younger, less established contestants. In the first episode, he made lemongrass crispy char siu despite a hand injury.

The dish was based on a Bingsheng signature, but he was not simply reproducing it. Judge Zhang Yong, founder of Xin Rong Ji, whose Xinyuan South Road restaurant in Beijing has three Michelin stars, says Cao maintained Bingsheng's usual standard while introducing changes under competition pressure.

"As a master chef, chef Cao lived up to his reputation," Zhang says.

Cao describes his cooking as traditional Cantonese cuisine, but not "too traditional", because ingredients and circumstances are constantly changing.

His philosophy is simple: preserve tradition without becoming conservative, and innovate without forgetting one's roots.

Some innovations, he believes, go so far that they lose the connection to tradition. A visually impressive combination that fails on the palate is merely a concept floating on the surface of the plate.

Cao believes young chefs today have better education, broader horizons and richer culinary exposure than his generation did.

"We might have taken 20 years to succeed. They can stand on the shoulders of giants and succeed in five," he says.

But experience cannot always be compressed. His advice is to innovate without abandoning the fundamentals and, above all, to avoid impatience.

When Cao entered the profession at 15 or 16, being a chef was often regarded simply as a trade that could provide a living. Today, he wants the public to see the profession differently.

"Outstanding chefs have to step out," he says. "If you simply keep your head down and cook, a guest might think the food tastes good and give it a six. But if you can explain where the dish comes from, how it is made, and the ideas behind it, it can immediately become a nine or a 10."

After filming, Cao described the experience as transformative. In the later rounds, he sometimes slept only two or three hours a night. Yet, the intense competition exposed him to different cuisines and younger chefs' ideas, giving him a new perspective after more than three decades in the kitchen.

Five things that matter

For Zhang Yong, the question is what allows a chef to keep moving forward.

He evaluates dishes on five dimensions: ingredients, flavor, heat control, presentation and the ability to change. The first is not about expense but understanding; the second is seasoning; the third is precision. Presentation reflects aesthetic judgment, while change depends on mastering the fundamentals well enough to adapt and integrate, Zhang explains.

A Sichuan chef approaching 70, Deng Huadong impressed Zhang with his "extraordinary" fundamentals and ability to make changes under pressure.

A young Chaoshan chef offered a completely different example, using only lily bulbs, without additional seasoning, to create what Zhang called "a bowl of plain 'congee'".

For Zhang, both demonstrated the same principle: innovation does not necessarily mean abandoning tradition. It can mean mastering tradition so thoroughly that a chef can use it freely.

Since the first season, Zhang has also treated judging as a learning experience. He wants to understand what younger chefs are thinking and trying to express.

More young people, he observes, now enter the profession out of genuine passion. But moving from apprentice to head chef requires more than talent and effort. It also takes learning, exposure and experience.

"The pressure of a competition like this is enormous. It is an opportunity for them to train and grow," he says. "Chefs from different culinary traditions become friends on the stage, and it also creates opportunities for them to exchange ideas."

Once filming ends, the chefs return to their kitchens. They continue preparing ingredients, adjusting flavors and refining dishes, now with new experiences to draw on.

For Zhang, this continued learning is essential. He hopes young chefs can "start from their own hometowns and reach all of China, and then go from China to the world".

"Chefs who return after gaining that kind of experience are completely different," he says.

Zhang does not see a single model for the next generation of Chinese culinary masters. He expects a future in which "a hundred flowers bloom".

"As long as young people today have this passion and are willing to put in the effort," he says, "I believe many Chinese chefs will eventually step onto the world stage."

Contact the writer at liyingxue@chinadaily.com.cn