Chefs stir the pot of tradition

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.