Flying Chef, Can’t Fly Free

In recent years, dining experience activities such as “flying kitchens” and “shared supper tables” have begun to gain traction. As a former cook, I was itching to jump in. Isn’t this the dream of anyone who loves to cook? You get to cook to your own heart’s content, free from the pressure and tension of a commercial kitchen. You can return to the original joy of cooking for others, and use food to connect people and build community.

So when the opportunity to head to Shanghai arose, I didn’t hesitate — I decided to give it a go as a “flying chef”.

Over the course of more than a month, bouncing between restaurants, bars, and studios for multiple events, I did connect with a great many people who love food, and I felt the joy of in-person interaction. But for the first time, stepping into the restaurant system domestically, I had a far more complex experience. In overseas kitchens, the exhaustion was physical. Domestically, the whole thing is just — body and soul, completely spent.

◉ Two-thirds of my 30-inch suitcase was ingredients and seasonings from Chiang Mai. I’d heard from another Thai chef working in China that 80% of the Thai soy sauce on the market is fake — and I also had some fish sauce and shrimp paste that I’d carefully sourced myself.

F& B Professionals Trapped in the System

I first crossed paths with bar owner A (a pseudonym) over our mutual interest in sustainable farming and music. Tucked on one of Shanghai’s trendy ‘influencer’ streets, the bar has a dark, stark interior, yet its exterior is planted with herbs and vegetables of every kind. A is also drawn to local, lesser-known dishes. Our thinking is equally unconventional, and we hit it off immediately. I was grateful for his unguarded trust — he sealed the deal before even tasting a dish. So, with a suitcase brimming with seasonings and a heart full of the thrill of shaking things up, I flew from Chiang Mai to Shanghai.

◉ Stylish cocktails and the pop-up kitchen menu inside the bar, with vibrant herbs growing outside. Photo: Wugong

Having lived in Chiang Mai for a long time, I chose Northern Thai cuisine as the theme for the pop-up dinner. For most Chinese diners, Thai food means pad krapao, som tam, tom yum, and assorted curries — the handful of dishes that seem to be on every Thai restaurant menu. But just as kung pao chicken and scrambled eggs with tomato cannot capture the full diversity of Chinese cuisine, Thai food too is divided into several major regional traditions: Northern, Northeastern, Central, and Southern. Chiang Mai is the heart of northern Thailand, and I wanted to present a more local side of that region’s cooking, giving diners a sense of how rich and varied Thai food truly is. Take Khao Soi, for instance — a dish that migrated from Yunnan and absorbed Lao and Northern Thai influences — or Nam Ngiao, a Shan rice noodle dish made with kapok flower. Recreating these dishes in Shanghai — dishes that are hard to find outside Northern Thailand — also meant more difficult sourcing and a much longer preparation process.

◉Local ingredients used in Nam Ngiao, a sour and spicy Shan rice noodle dish from northern Thailand — dried kapok flower cores (left) and fermented soybean paste disc, Thua Nao (right).

As a flying chef working a revenue-share arrangement with the bar, it was supposed to be a flexible model. I never imagined I’d end up trapped in the system myself.

On a peak dining weekend, the bar owner came across a one-star review on Dianping, complaining that they’d been waiting over half an hour and still had no food.

I could probably work out which customer it was — across the whole service, only one person kept sending the server back to the kitchen to rush things. It’s not that I hadn’t considered how it feels to be waiting. When the room fills up, I have the server let people know at the point of ordering that they should expect at least a twenty-minute wait, and make sure they’re happy with that before confirming. In the kitchen there’s only me and a helper, who mostly does washing up and tidying — most of the work, from prep to making every curry base by hand, sauces, and the cooking itself, falls to me. But I get it — as a customer, what matters is how much longer you’ll be waiting, not just what a mad scramble the kitchen is in.

◉Making curry sauce from scratch. Working out delivery dates for herbs ordered online, calculating proportions, testing recipes, preparing the curry sauce, straining it, packaging and preserving it… When all these tedious tasks fall entirely on one person, the pressure within builds day by day.

A is an emotionally steady friend. He had no intention of blaming me at all, but I could sense that the negative review had put him under considerable pressure. The logic behind that pressure, I only gradually worked out later.

Dianping’s system works like this: a negative review directly lowers a restaurant’s rating, and the rating determines platform visibility—the higher it is, the more likely the platform is to recommend the restaurant to a wider audience. If you’re aiming for the Must-Eat List or Black Pearl, the rating is an even more direct barrier to entry. According to official data, newly listed Black Pearl restaurants in 2023 saw search volume jump by over 150% in the period surrounding their listing, with actual footfall rising between 30% and 70%. Maintaining a rating is not just about a restaurant’s public image—it’s essential to whether the business can keep running.

To make matters more complicated, reviews from different users carry different weights. The platform weights them by user tier—the higher the tier, the greater the impact. A friend in the restaurant industry told me, “When a negative review shows up on Dianping, it’s the kind of thing that calls for a full staff meeting. A single negative review can drag the rating down by 0.1 points, which might mean a restaurant drops from page one to page three or four in Dianping search results. Less visibility, and that hits foot traffic hard. I suppose it’s because people have become so reliant on Dianping these days.”

If the person who left the negative review is a Dianping V8 user, it is a “fatal blow” for the owner. In extreme cases, a single negative review from a V8 user can cause a restaurant’s rating to drop by half a star overnight. In other words, every high-level account the owner sees is not just an ordinary diner but a hand that can make or break a restaurant.

For consumers, upgrading to V8 is no easy feat, and this has given rise to a grey industry. Under Dianping’s own rules, the difficulty jumps sharply between V7 and V8. The platform itself admits that the higher up the levels you go, the more non-linearly the review count and quality requirements grow – the closer to the top, the harder it becomes to level up.

◉Dianping users have also expressed dissatisfaction with the rating system.

This is also why, for a considerable period, the V8 account itself became a quantifiable asset, and specialist agency firms emerged to manage ratings on behalf of restaurants. An investigative report in Caijing magazine in 2021 noted that third-party agencies would purchase the services of positive-review writers at openly listed prices, with costs rising according to the reviewer’s level.

The platform itself stepped in, offering rating-related promotional campaigns at openly listed prices. In 2021, a restaurant owner interviewed by food journalist Mei Shanshan mentioned paying the platform 4,000 yuan per session to invite high-level users in for a free meal, thereby accumulating high-impact positive reviews.

◉Food journalist Mei Shanshan discussed Dianping’s free-meal review scheme on Xiaohongshu in 2021, drawing extensive commentary from both users and restaurant owners in the comments.

By August 2025, although Dianping claimed to have improved its rules, merchants who aggressively and at scale invited users to their stores to write positive reviews would face restrictions on their star-rating gains, while restaurants less adept at managing reviews but more focused on food and service would be better placed to climb through genuine word of mouth. According to the 2025 Review Transparency Report published by Dianping itself in March 2026, half a year after the new rules took effect, the number of merchants engaging in high-intensity review solicitation had dropped by 42%; over the full year, 310,000 merchants had their star ratings downgraded while 320,000 were upgraded. In other words, the ratings merchants had previously secured by every trick in the book—including the star-rating windfall obtained by treating V8 users to meals—are being actively narrowed by the platform.

◉Dianping selectively publishes praise from some businesses about its rating reform, while behind the scenes, many more are quietly frustrated by unwarranted star-rating downgrades.

As a result, the industry is evolving: services for deleting negative reviews have begun to openly list their prices, ranging from 60 to 1,500 yuan per review, with pricing dependent on the star rating and the specificity of the content — the more detailed and well-substantiated a negative review, the lower the chance of successful removal. Meanwhile, AI moderation systems designed to identify ‘malicious negative reviews’ have begun to spark new controversy: some users have reported on complaint platforms that their genuine negative reviews were taken down within minutes on the grounds of being from ‘suspected competitors,’ with the platform providing no specific evidence to support its decision.

◉On the Heimao Complaints platform, a Dianping user reported that the platform had arbitrarily deleted their genuine review.

The bargaining power of Dianping’s V8 users may be narrowing as the rules tighten, but the game between merchants and this rating system has not grown any more transparent for it.

The first time I cried in a kitchen

Only after understanding all this did I grasp why everyone was so tense: a single bad review could trigger a cascade of problems. And I stood at the end of that chain – all I could do was apologise and propose a remedy. I suggested the manager contact the person who wrote the review, let them know they were welcome to come back, and that I would offer a complimentary meal. It was the only solution I could think of, and even as I said it, I felt how powerless it was.

For me, cooking always comes with the expectation of facing other people’s judgements. But the real pressure came from causing trouble for others. The kitchen I was using had been run by A for years – my collaboration with him was short-term, and I could walk away, but the mess I left behind was his and his team’s. On top of that, a friend had chosen to work with me without even having tried my cooking – that was a trust I didn’t want to let down.

Before I’d even finished processing that, a day later something similar happened again. After a few guests had finished eating, they had a member of staff call me over and told me the food was terrible and they weren’t going to pay. I asked which dish was the problem – the sauce or the ingredients. They couldn’t say. Though I didn’t quite understand how they could complain about the food tasting bad yet finish every last plate on the table, I still tried to keep things civil and asked whether any dishes needed to be remade. None of the guests actually answered the question.

I felt like I was watching a play. One guest played the tough one: “I’m not paying for food like this!” Another played the amiable one: “It’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll cover it!” The other two wore expressions of impatience, setting the mood. I was just about to continue my explanation when a member of staff held me back and said: “Don’t worry! We’ll waive the bill! If the guests don’t like it, so be it – everyone has their own preferences, right?”

In the end, the guests walked away with a free bill, and the staff and owner present all breathed a sigh of relief: they had promised that once the bill was waived, they wouldn’t post about it online.

That night, I cried in the kitchen for the first time. I can’t quite put my finger on what it was – some mix of feeling wronged and powerless, I think: when a conflict like this erupted, there wasn’t even room for a normal conversation. I didn’t blame the staff – I understood why they’d cut me off, and I felt deeply sorry to put my friend in that position again. Even though he told me things like this were perfectly normal back home.

But food is inherently a matter of personal taste – different opinions are only to be expected. Yet before online rating systems became so powerful, no guest would get a free bill simply because the food didn’t suit their palate, even after finishing every dish on the table. And no restaurant owner or member of staff would grovel so low, begging for the bill to be waived just to keep the peace.

◉While simmering soup, I snapped a photo of these chicken feet — deathly pale, mechanical, perfectly in keeping with my mood.

One Exception

But then again, some owners refuse to back down.

Another bar owner, Mai Zi, maintains no presence on Dianping or any social media platform — he relies entirely on his regulars. I was hosting a pop-up dinner at his bar. The food was all ready, but he still hadn’t laid out the chopsticks and spoons for the guests. I couldn’t help nudging him. He dashed across to a neighbouring restaurant to borrow some cutlery, then turned back with a smile and said, “Don’t rush — slow is steady, steady is fast.” The line suits him perfectly: he’s never in a hurry, and neither are his guests. The whole bar drifts with an ease that seems entirely out of place in the Jing’an Temple commercial district.

Mai Zi’s kitchen is tiny — two people in it and it already feels cramped. And yet it’s the most comfortable kitchen I’ve ever cooked in here in Shanghai: nobody is rushing me. I’m grateful for the guests’ patience, and they reward me with the highest praise of all — eating every last bite of the food while it’s still steaming.

Mai Zi says that the people who love this place love it a lot, and those who don’t come once and never return. Many of his guests come not just for the drinks but, more than that, for the conversation. On Dianping, his rating sits at a modest 3.8, yet that hasn’t stopped his regulars from coming back again and again. Some even have a key to the bar — they let themselves in, finish their beer, and settle the bill. For me, cooking as a flying chef in Mai Zi’s kitchen, the greatest joy of all has turned out to be eating the sour soup dumplings he makes. The ground chilli and the seaweed are both sent by his mother from back home.

◉Sour soup dumplings by Maizi, a man from the Northwest.

“I still feel that ‘people’ is the most important factor in my shop,” Mai zi told me. He has been running his bar in a busy part of Jing’an District for eight years, without relying on any platform for promotion or traffic. I asked him what kept him going. As ever, he said it quietly: “Slow is steady; steady is fast.”

I met Maizi by chance, and perhaps his presence is a reminder to me that this system has no single path—staying true to your original vision can also be a choice.

A Month Without the Sun

In Shanghai, I met a few flying chefs and found that the source of everyone’s stress was remarkably the same: mental exhaustion. What the exhaustion looks like specifically varies from person to person, but the underlying logic is the same—one person shouldering every part of the operation, with no buffer zone when anything goes wrong.

Sourcing is the most mentally draining part of the whole thing, to the point where I now walk into a supermarket or the market and feel like I’m back at work doing ‘sourcing.’ Cleaning the kitchen, checking through the fridge, making a list of what needs restocking—none of it sounds complicated, but it takes at least an hour or two every day just to get through all that tedious work.

Especially when it comes to herbs—Thai basil, sweet basil, and other ingredients that go off quickly. The timing of sourcing has to be just right: buy too early and they’ll go off; buy too late and you might not have them when you need them. Every day I’m searching and comparing across Taobao, Meituan delivery, Hema, the market… Being the particular person I am, I have to keep costs down while also trying to find tomatoes with a proper tomato flavour and a good acidity, meat with the right fat content, Thai basil that’s consistently good quality… I’m really serving meals at home-cooking prices while carrying fine dining on my mind.

◉I ordered holy basil, but the shop sent sweet basil instead. It was already nearly dinner time — my mind went blank.

So outside the kitchen I’m the buyer, and inside, I’m the chef. The switch between the two leaves barely a moment to catch my breath.

I’ve always loved the wet market — hand-picking everything. But during that stretch, I found myself actually dreading it. For instance, when I was buying green chillies and asked the vendor how hot they were, she rolled her eyes: ‘How should I know how spicy you like it?’ She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t understand why she was so impatient… (though I’m not one to leave a bad review over something like that)

Another time I went to buy rice, and after I’d paid, the shop owner looked me up and down: ‘You’ve got one arm longer than the other, haven’t you?’ I still haven’t worked out what she meant.

Eventually I just switched to Hema and Dingdong — thirty-minute delivery, reasonably reliable quality, and most importantly, it’s convenient. But depending on online grocery shopping has its own frustrations. Once I forgot to update my delivery address, and the order landed at a friend’s place. All I did was ring customer service to ask where it had gone. The delivery rider straight off went to my friend’s to check, declared the package delivered, and started calling me nonstop, pressuring me to retract my complaint. I was equally baffled — I had merely asked where my order was; I had no intention of filing a complaint. I don’t know whether that misunderstanding left a mark on his record, but even now, thinking about it still makes me feel a bit guilty.

Beyond the shopping, my entire rhythm of life was quietly warping. During the Flying Chef period, I was clocking off between eleven at night and midnight almost every night, sleeping until two in the afternoon, getting washed up, then heading into the kitchen at four to prep. By the time I’d finished plating, cleaning, and counting through the stock, it was the small hours again.

◉When I’m not out sourcing or cooking, I still have to work on menu design.

It’s been days since I’ve properly caught some sun. My colleagues at the bar are in about the same state — not asleep until three or four in the morning, not up until one or two in the afternoon, and back on shift again by four or five. Exercise and sunlight are both luxuries we can’t afford. Seeing that everyone is so often too busy to eat, I often use whatever ingredients are left over to cook something for the team after I finish around eleven at night. It’s one of the rare, unhurried moments of the day.

What the Algorithm Can’t Capture

Still, there have been moments during this past month that have made the drain of everything before feel a little less heavy.

An artist from Bangkok tasted my cooking and said it reminded them of home. A diner who had once gone to a temple to study vegetarian cuisine specifically tasted every dish on the menu at the vegetarian dinner, then left me a long note sharing their thoughts and suggestions for improvement. Compared to the generic compliments, this kind of feedback makes me feel more that what I’m doing is worthwhile. Another diner, on a return visit, sat at the bar for a long while and quietly designed a handwritten menu for me…

◉A menu hand-written by a diner.

The most unexpected discovery was in rice sourcing. I couldn’t find suitable Thai jasmine rice in China, and I could tell the dishes were still a touch short on flavour. A supplier who deals in small-region rice from Yunnan reached out and offered to send some over. The aroma of the steamed rice reminded me of that fresh, steaming scent I’d caught in Thai alleyways, and also made me realise that for the next event, I should build the menu around more local ingredients. The supplier was a lovely woman who said that seeing my dishes made her hungry, so she figured they deserved to be served with good rice. It’s probably because we share a common conviction about food — as she put it, “Get closer to the food, and you’ll get closer to the people.”

◉A regular diner photographed my dishes.

It was only after tasting rice this fragrant, soft and glossy, with a distinct rice aroma, that I came to appreciate how germ rice, a quality single variety, and the soil and water it grows in all shape both the texture on the tongue and the health of those who eat it.

The moments that moved me were never computed by any algorithm, and no rating system will ever factor them in.

From Dianping to Meituan, the rating mechanisms and the grey areas beneath them seem to be something no one in the food industry can ever escape. Over the past month, I too have had a small taste of what it is like for food operators here to be strangled by these apps. Every time I find myself hemmed in by these external voices, I am reminded of Maizi, who has run a bar for eight years and operates on no platform, slowly saying: “Slow is steady, and steady is fast.”

Perhaps this system is not quite as impenetrable as it appears. It is simply that most of us inside it — myself included — have not managed to be as at ease as he. Yet I still choose to believe that what will carry us further on this road of working with food is not the ‘optimal solution’ pushed by an algorithm, but the moments of truly savouring a dish and connecting with real people.

– This is Foodthink’s 823rd original article –