Chefs stir the pot of tradition

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.