Pop-up Chef, Grounded by the System

In recent years, dining concepts such as “pop-up kitchens” and “shared-table suppers” have been gaining traction. As a former chef, I was eager to give it a try. After all, isn’t this the dream of anyone with a passion for cooking: to prepare meals exactly to your own taste, free from the stifling pressure of a commercial kitchen, while returning to the original joy of cooking for others and building community through food?

So when the opportunity arose to head to Shanghai, I didn’t hesitate to try my hand at being a “pop-up chef”.

Over the course of more than a month, moving between various restaurants, bars, and studios for a series of events, I genuinely connected with many food lovers and savoured the joy of in-person conversation. Yet, stepping into the domestic restaurant ecosystem for the first time brought a far more complicated set of experiences. Back in kitchens overseas, the exhaustion was purely physical. Here in China, it’s been a complete drain on both body and mind.

◉A 30-inch suitcase, two-thirds of which is packed with ingredients and seasonings brought back from Chiang Mai. I was prompted to pack them after another Thai chef working in China told me that 80% of the Thai soy sauce on the domestic market is counterfeit. The remaining space holds fish sauce, shrimp paste, and a few other staples I’d personally sourced and carefully vetted.

F&B Professionals Trapped in the System

I met bar owner A (a pseudonym) over our shared interest in organic agriculture and music. Situated on one of Shanghai’s fashionable, internet-famous streets, the dark, stark bar was unexpectedly bordered by beds of herbs and vegetables, and A himself had a keen interest in regional, niche dishes. Our outside-the-box thinking aligned perfectly. I was deeply appreciative of his straightforward trust—he sealed the collaboration before I’d even served a tasting plate. So, with a suitcase packed with spices and condiments, and buzzing with the anticipation of embarking on something new, I flew from Chiang Mai to Shanghai.

◉Inside the bar, stylish cocktails sit alongside the pop-up kitchen menu, while lush herbs thrive outside. Image source: Wu Gong

Having spent a long time living in Chiang Mai, I chose Northern Thai cuisine as the theme for my pop-up dinners. The typical Chinese diner’s idea of Thai food usually revolves around a handful of staples found in practically every Thai restaurant: Pad Krapow, green papaya salad, tom yum soup, and various curries. But just as Kung Pao chicken and stir-fried tomatoes with egg cannot encompass the vast diversity of Chinese cuisine, Thai cooking is also split into four major regional traditions: Northern, Northeastern, Central, and Southern. Chiang Mai sits at the heart of the north. I wanted to showcase more authentic Northern Thai dishes, giving diners a chance to experience the full breadth of Thai culinary culture. Take Khao Soi, for example—a noodle dish that migrated from Yunnan and blends Lao and Northern Thai influences—or Nam Ngiao, a Shan noodle soup featuring kapok flower buds. Recreating these dishes in Shanghai, which are notoriously difficult to find outside Northern Thailand, naturally meant more arduous ingredient sourcing and a much longer preparation process.

◉Local ingredients for Northern Thai Shan-style sour and spicy noodle soup, Nam Ngiao: dried kapok flower stamens (left) and fermented soybean paste, Thua Nao (right).

Operating as a pop-up chef under a revenue-share deal with a bar was meant to be a flexible arrangement. I never imagined I’d end up trapped in the system myself.

One particularly busy weekend, the bar owner spotted a negative review on Dianping complaining that food had still not arrived after waiting for over half an hour.

I could probably guess which guest it was—over the course of the evening, only one person kept sending the staff back to the kitchen to check on their order. I’m certainly not oblivious to the frustration of waiting; when it’s busy, I ask the staff to warn guests of a twenty-minute minimum wait before they confirm their order, ensuring they’re happy with it. With just a kitchen assistant and me in the back—whose main duties were washing up and tidying—I handled almost everything myself, including prep, making all the curry bases and sauces from scratch, and the cooking. Still, I can understand that as customers, they’re far more concerned with how long they’ll be kept waiting than with the absolute chaos going on in the kitchen.

◉Making curry paste from scratch. Tracking the delivery dates of online-ordered herbs, working out ratios, testing recipes, cooking the paste, straining it, packaging and preserving it… When all these tedious tasks are done entirely by myself, the pressure builds day by day.

A is a level-headed friend, and he had absolutely no intention of blaming me. But I could sense that this negative review was putting him under considerable pressure. The logic behind that pressure only slowly became clear to me later on.

Dianping’s mechanism is straightforward: negative reviews directly lower a restaurant’s rating, and that rating dictates traffic allocation—the higher the score, the greater the likelihood of the platform recommending the restaurant to more users. If a restaurant aims to make it onto the Must-Eat List or the Black Pearl Guide, the rating becomes a strict threshold. According to official figures, restaurants newly added to the Black Pearl Guide in 2023 saw their search volume surge by over 150% around the time of listing, while actual dine-in footfall rose anywhere from 30% to 70%. Maintaining a strong rating is not merely about a restaurant’s public image; it is essential to keeping the business running.

What complicates matters further is that reviews from different users carry different weights. The platform assigns weight according to user tier, so the higher the level, the greater the impact. A friend who runs a restaurant told me, “When a negative review appears on Dianping, it’s serious enough for us to call a meeting. A single bad review dropping the rating by 0.1 points could knock a restaurant from page one to page three or four in Dianping’s search results. With less visibility, foot traffic takes a severe hit. I suppose it’s because everyone relies on Dianping so heavily these days.”

If a negative review comes from a V8 user on Dianping, it amounts to a “fatal blow” for the restaurateur. In extreme cases, a single negative review from a V8 user can drop a restaurant’s rating by half a star overnight. In other words, every high-tier account a restaurateur sees is no longer just an ordinary diner, but a hand capable of deciding whether the establishment lives or dies.

Consumers find it difficult to reach V8 status, which has given rise to a grey-market industry. Under Dianping’s official rules, the hurdle rises sharply between V7 and V8. The platform itself acknowledges that the higher you climb, the more non-linearly the review count and quality requirements escalate: the closer you get to the top, the tougher the upgrade becomes.

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

This is precisely why, for a considerable time, V8 accounts themselves became a quantifiable asset, giving rise to specialised agencies that would maintain ratings on behalf of restaurants. An investigative report by *Caijing* magazine in 2021 noted that third-party operators would purchase the services of positive review writers at fixed, tier-based prices, with higher levels commanding higher fees.

The platform itself also stepped directly into the fray, attaching clear price tags to promotional campaigns tied to ratings. In 2021, a restaurant owner interviewed by food journalist Mei Shanshan recounted paying the platform 4,000 yuan per session to host high-tier users for complimentary meals, a move intended to accumulate influential positive reviews.

◉In 2021, food journalist Mei Shanshan discussed Dianping and its free-meal promotion scheme on Xiaohongshu, sparking extensive discussion in the comments from both users and restaurateurs.

By August 2025, Dianping claimed to have improved its rules: merchants who aggressively invited customers in-store to leave positive reviews would see their star-rating benefits restricted, whereas restaurants less skilled at managing reviews but dedicated to their food and service could more easily climb the rankings through genuine word-of-mouth. According to Dianping’s own *2025 Review Transparency Report*, published in March 2026, six months after the new rules took effect, the number of businesses engaged in high-intensity review solicitation fell by 42%. Over the full year, 310,000 merchants were downgraded, compared with 320,000 that saw an upgrade. In short, the ratings shop owners once secured through every trick in the book—including the rating advantages gained by treating V8 users to meals—are now being actively curtailed by the platform.

◉Behind Dianping’s selective publishing of praise from a handful of merchants regarding its rating reform lies the wider frustration of many other businesses unjustifiably downgraded in their star ratings.

Consequently, this grey-market industry is also evolving. Services for deleting negative reviews now advertise fixed prices, ranging from 60 to 1,500 yuan per review. The cost depends on the star rating and how specific the content is—the more detailed the review and the more robust the evidence, the lower the success rate for deletion. Meanwhile, the AI moderation system designed to identify ‘malicious negative reviews’ has sparked fresh controversy: users on complaint platforms report that their genuine negative reviews have been taken down within minutes by the system, ostensibly for being ‘suspected competitors’, with the platform offering no concrete justification for its rulings.

◉On the Black Cat Complaint platform, a Dianping user complained about the platform arbitrarily deleting their genuine review.

The bargaining power of Dianping’s V8 tier may be tightening under stricter rules, but the tug-of-war between restaurateurs and this rating system has not become any more transparent for it.

First time crying in the kitchen

Only after grasping all this did I understand why everyone was so tense: a single negative review could set off a whole chain of complications. Standing at the end of that line, all I could do was apologise and propose a remedy. I suggested the manager reach out to the reviewer, offering them a return visit with a complimentary meal on the house. It was the only solution I could think of, and even voicing it left me feeling utterly powerless.

To me, cooking has always meant facing other people’s critiques; I was braced for that. The real weight, however, came from causing trouble for someone else. I was working in a kitchen that A had spent years building. We were in a short-term collaboration: I could simply walk away, but the fallout would be left for him and his team. On top of that, a friend had agreed to partner with me without even tasting my food first. That was a trust I had no intention of letting down.

I hadn’t even fully processed that feeling when, a day later, something similar happened again. A group of diners finished their meal and had a member of staff call me over, declaring it inedible and refusing to pay. I asked which dish was at fault, whether it was the sauce or the ingredients. They couldn’t quite put their finger on it. Though I struggled to see how they could complain about the food being unpalatable while clearing an entire table of dishes, I still tried to keep things civil and asked whether they’d like anything remade. None of them gave a straight answer, however.

It felt like I was watching a scene from a play. One diner played the bad cop: “I’m not paying for food like this!” Another played the good cop: “It’s all right, don’t worry, I’ll cover it!” The other two wore impatient expressions, stoking the tension. Just as I was about to continue explaining, a member of staff pulled me back and said, “Don’t worry! We’ll waive the bill! If they don’t like it, that’s fine—everyone has their own preferences, after all.”

In the end, the diners walked away with the bill waived, and the staff and owner in the room all breathed a sigh of relief: the diners had agreed that, in exchange, they wouldn’t post about the incident online.

That night, I broke down crying in the kitchen for the first time. It’s hard to pin down exactly—a blend of feeling wronged and utterly powerless. When disputes like this erupt, there isn’t even room left for a proper conversation. I didn’t blame the staff; I understood why they had to step in, and I felt awful for putting my friend in that position again, even though he insisted that incidents like this were perfectly normal over here.

Yet taste in food has always been a matter of preference, and differing opinions are only to be expected. Long before online review platforms became this influential, a diner wouldn’t get the bill waived simply because the food didn’t suit their palate after clearing an entire table; restaurateurs and their staff wouldn’t feel compelled to grovel in quite such a manner, just to write off the bill and keep the peace.

◉Taken whilst simmering the soup: these pale, mechanical chicken feet, perfectly matching my mood.

An exception

Yet, there are also owners who refuse to bend.

Another bar owner, Maizi, maintains no presence on Dianping or social media, relying solely on returning patrons. When I hosted a pop-up dinner at his bar, the food was ready but he hadn’t yet laid out the chopsticks and spoons for the guests; I couldn’t help but urge him on. He dashed to a neighbouring restaurant to borrow cutlery, returning with a smile. “No rush,” he said. “Slow is steady, steady is fast.” The phrase perfectly suited his entire demeanour—neither he nor his patrons ever hurried, and the bar’s laid-back atmosphere stood in stark contrast to the frantic pace of the Jing’an Temple commercial district.

Maizi’s kitchen was tiny—barely wide enough for two people without feeling cramped. Yet it was the most comfortable kitchen I had used in Shanghai, precisely because no one was rushing me. I was grateful for the guests’ patience, and they offered me the highest compliment of all: they cleaned their plates of the piping-hot food.

Maizi says that those who take to the place really love it, while those who don’t will never return after a single visit. Many come not just for a drink, but primarily to sit and chat with him. On Dianping, his rating is a modest 3.8, yet it has never stopped regulars from making the journey again and again. Some guests even possess a key to the bar, letting themselves in to pour a pint and leave their cash. For my part, the greatest pleasure of working as a pop-up chef in Maizi’s kitchen turned out to be eating the sour broth dumplings he prepares. The chilli powder and dried seaweed are both sent from his hometown by his mother.

◉Sour soup dumplings made by Maizi, a native of Northwest China.

“I still believe “people” are the most important factor in my business,” Maizi told me. He’s run a bar for eight years in the bustling centre of Jing’an District, without relying on any platform’s marketing or traffic. I asked him what had kept it going. He answered with his usual quiet calm: “Slow is steady, and steady is fast.”

Our chance encounter with Maizi may well serve as a reminder that this system does not dictate a single path; staying true to your original vision can be a choice in its own right.

A Month Without Seeing the Sun

In Shanghai, I met a handful of pop-up chefs and found the source of our stress was remarkably consistent: mental exhaustion. The specifics of the fatigue varied from person to person, but the underlying logic was identical—shouldering every stage alone, leaving no buffer zone if anything goes wrong.

Procurement is by far the most mentally draining aspect of the operation. Now, even a routine trip to a supermarket or local market feels like slipping back into a full-time purchasing role. Cleaning the kitchen, checking the fridge, and drawing up restocking lists may sound straightforward, but these tedious chores reliably eat up at least an hour or two every single day.

This is particularly true when it comes to herbs. Delicate ingredients like holy basil and Thai basil need to be sourced at precisely the right moment; buy them too early and they go off, too late and you might run out before service starts. Every day, I find myself repeatedly cross-referencing options across Taobao, Meituan Waimai, Hema, and the local market. As a perfectionist, I have to keep costs down while still hunting for tomatoes with proper acidity and a genuine tomato flavour, meat with the right fat content, and consistently reliable holy basil… It’s essentially running a menu priced like a home-cooked meal, but with the fine dining-level stress to match.

◉Ordered holy basil, but the shop sent sweet basil instead. With dinner service looming, I could only feel my heart sink.

So, outside the kitchen I was a shopper, and inside I was a chef. The constant toggling between the two left me with hardly a moment to catch my breath.

I’ve always relished a trip to the wet market, carefully selecting everything by hand. Yet during that period, I actually found myself dreading it. On one occasion, while buying green chilies, I asked the stallholder about their heat level. She simply rolled her eyes: “How should I know how spicy you can handle?” She was right, naturally, but I couldn’t understand why she was so impatient… (Although I certainly wouldn’t leave a negative review over something like that.)

On another visit, after buying a bag of rice and paying, the shop owner fixed me with a stare and asked, “Is one of your arms longer than the other?” To this day, I’m still none the wiser as to what she meant by that.

Eventually, I switched to Hema and Dingdong. Deliveries arrived within thirty minutes, the quality was reasonably reliable, and above all, it saved me an enormous amount of hassle. But relying on online grocery runs comes with its own headaches. On one occasion, I forgot to update my delivery address and the order was dropped off at a friend’s place. I simply contacted customer service to ask where my order had gone, and almost instantly the delivery rider rushed over to my friend’s flat, verified the drop-off, and then started phoning me non-stop, urgently asking me to withdraw the complaint. I was utterly baffled—I’d merely enquired about my groceries, with no intention of lodging a complaint. I’m not sure whether that misunderstanding left a mark on his record, but the memory still leaves me feeling rather uneasy.

Beyond the shopping, my entire daily rhythm began to warp. During my stint as a pop-up chef, I’d almost always finish work between 11 pm and midnight. I’d sleep until 2 pm, have a quick wash, then head into the kitchen at 4 pm to start prepping. By the time I’d finished serving, clearing tables, tidying up, and taking stock, it would be the early hours of the next morning once more.

◉When I’m not sourcing ingredients or cooking, I’m still working on menu design.

I hadn’t properly soaked up the sun for days. The bar crew were in much the same boat, not getting to sleep until three or four in the morning and not rising until one or two in the afternoon, only to head back on shift at four or five. Exercise and daylight had become luxuries. Seeing how often everyone was too busy to eat, I’d often cook something up from the leftovers after wrapping up my own shift at eleven. It was a rare moment of proper relaxation in the day.

What algorithms miss

That said, there were moments during this month that made the earlier toll feel a little lighter.

An artist from Bangkok tasted my food and said it reminded them of home. A diner who had previously studied vegetarian cuisine at a temple sampled every dish at a vegetarian dinner event and left me a lengthy note sharing their thoughts and suggestions for improvement. Compared to those generic, impersonal reviews, this kind of thoughtful feedback is what makes me feel this venture is truly meaningful. On another occasion, a returning guest sat at the bar for ages, quietly helping me sketch out a handwritten menu…

◉A hand-drawn menu by a guest.

The most unexpected discovery came when sourcing rice. Since I couldn’t find a suitable Thai fragrant rice locally, I felt the dishes were missing a touch of their intended flavour. A supplier specialising in rice from a small Yunnan growing region reached out and offered to send some over. The scent of it cooking reminded me of the fresh, steaming aroma of rice in Thai alleyways, and it made me realise I should build the next event’s menu around more local ingredients. The supplier—a lovely woman—said my dishes looked so appetising that she felt they deserved to be paired with proper rice. This kind of thinking likely stems from a shared belief about food, just as she put it, “The closer you get to food, the closer you get to people.”

◉A regular guest photographing my dishes.

It was only after tasting rice that was so fragrant, soft and glossy, with such a rich, natural aroma, that I truly began to understand how germ rice, premium single varieties, and the soil and water they are grown in affect both the mouthfeel of the grain and the health of those who eat it.

These moments that moved me were not generated by an algorithm, nor will they ever be factored into any rating system.

From Dianping to Meituan, the rating mechanisms and the grey-market practices behind them appear to be an inescapable reality for anyone in the dining industry. Over this past month, I have briefly sampled what it feels like for local restaurateurs to have their throats squeezed by these apps. Whenever I feel trapped by these external voices, I am reminded of Maizi, the bar owner who has run his venue for eight years without ever listing on a platform, slowly remarking: “Slow is steady, and steady is fast.”

Perhaps this system isn’t quite as impenetrable as it seems; it’s just that most of us caught within it, myself included, have struggled to remain as unfazed as he is. But I still hold on to the belief that what will take us further on the road of working with food isn’t the “optimal solution” dictated by an algorithm, but the moments spent truly savouring a dish and connecting with real people.

– This is Foodthink’s 823rd original –