Netflix’s most successful Korean series of 2024 so far, Culinary Class Wars rocketed to its Global Top 10 (non-English) and stayed there for several weeks. The 12-episode cooking reality show’s popularity has given the struggling Korean restaurant industry a boost, catapulted its top contestants and their restaurants to fame, and launched a thousand memes. A second season has recently been confirmed, with Gordon Ramsay at the top of the casting list. Here’s our take on this buzzy culinary showdown.
The Concept
100 of South Korea’s most talented chefs must survive a series of intense elimination rounds for 300 million won (about USD225,000) and the bragging rights to be called the country’s best.
Inspired by the abstract strategy board game baduk or “Go,” the cooking competition divides contestants into two “classes:” white and black. The White Spoons are twenty industry veterans including Michelin-starred chefs, winners and judges of prestigious cooking competitions, and chef-owners of Seoul’s dining institutions. Challenging them are the Black Spoons: an assortment of up-and-coming chefs, YouTubers, and owners of popular local eateries who have much less to lose and more to gain by being on the show.
While the White Spoons use their actual names (with renowned Korean-American chef Edward Lee’s being the most recognizable), the Black Spoons only go by such nicknames as “Meat Master” and “Auntie Omakase,” and must earn the right to be known by their real name by cooking their way to the finals.
Two industry titans with vastly different backgrounds and perspectives—Korea’s most successful culinary entrepreneur Paik Jong-won and its only Michelin three-star chef, Ahn Sung-jae—serve as judges in this thrilling battle for supremacy.
The Review
It’s been way too long since a Korean series has had me glued to my screen for one weekend, taken me on a rollercoaster of emotions, lured me down the rabbit hole of articles, behind-the-scenes and post-show related content, and then made me want to rewatch the entire series right after.
Not really being a fan of reality shows in general, I never would have imagined that Culinary Class Wars would be the series that would pull me out of my long K-content slump and finally inspire me enough to actually finish a review for this blog, but here I am!
The series’ creators compiled over 700 pages of research on previous cooking competitions in order to come up with fresh concepts, and it shows. Culinary Class Wars brings a distinctively Korean flavor to the genre, with its hints of recent global hits Physical: 100 and Squid Game, but more so, because of its unmistakable “jeong”(정/情) – that sense of warmth, human connection, and affection you feel among the contestants even as they face off in the kitchen.
As contestants whipped up their signature dishes, pushed their creativity and stamina to the limit, and revealed their touching backstories, I found myself moved to tears several times. Even as the egos of these highly driven, fiercely competitive individuals collided, the camaraderie and respect among them was evident and moving.
In that sense, the series doesn’t quite live up to its “class war” concept. Not that that’s a bad thing. There is some trash talking that comes with the genre’s territory, but it's mild by western reality TV standards (it was enough to have forced a public apology out of a contestant though). Overall, the competition is friendly from the very beginning, with White Spoons cheering on their hoobaes (juniors) as they watched them from the massive cooking arena’s balconies.
Culinary Class Wars’ billing as Korea’s biggest cooking survival show ever is no exaggeration. Built in an enormous sound stage, the scale of the show’s 3300 sqm. (35583 sq. ft.) set, outfitted with dramatic production design, impressed even the veterans of previous contests like Iron Chef America and MasterChef Korea.
The production went all out, providing the chefs with commercial grade equipment and premium hard-to-find ingredients, while also allowing them to bring in their own. Fully equipped with the tools and ingredients they needed, the contestants masterfully
fully realized their culinary visions.
From deconstructed traditional Korean favorites to exquisitely plated French-inspired dishes infused with Asian flavors, there was no shortage of creativity on display. Even a non-cook such as myself eagerly looked forward to watching culinary magic unfold with each challenge. It was hard to pick a favorite, as everyone was clearly brilliant, and even harder to predict which way the judging would go.
Mouthwatering, thrilling, and inspiring, once you start watching Culinary Class Wars, it's pretty easy to get sucked into it and to understand why it has found such a large audience both domestically and abroad.
I just have a few beefs. The first is the lack of English subtitles for a lot of the Korean text flashed on screen, forcing me to hit pause so I could run everything through my translation app so many times. The second is the sudden change in mechanics while one challenge was already underway, putting some contestants at an unnecessarily cruel and unfair disadvantage. Thankfully, since this was a common complaint, the show’s producers have promised not to make the same mistake in season two.
And finally, [SPOILER ALERT], as much as I enjoyed this series, I wasn’t at all satisfied with the structure and outcome of the last two episodes. As a k-drama fan, I'm used to otherwise great scripted series having disappointing endings... it sucks to feel the same way about a survival show! [MORE SPOILERS AHEAD, so please stop if you haven’t watched this yet!]. Probably the most insane cooking challenge ever invented, Endless Cooking Hell should have been mandatory for all eight semi-finalists. The writers of this show had been brilliant up to the point that they decided to grant an exemption to the contest’s ultimate test of culinary brilliance. As many other viewers have opined, I agree that the last two chefs standing at the end of the tofu round were the true finalists, and with all due respect to the actual winner, the mad genius who won tofu hell should have been declared the overall winner. Said genius may have lost the competition, but he overwhelmingly won the audience's heart. But what’s done is done, and as flawed as we think the rules were, the winner won by them fair and square. Plus, he probably needed the cash prize (which was hardly ever even mentioned) more than the runner-up, anyway. [END OF SPOILER]
That said, I’m still rewatching Culinary Class Wars, binging on all the chefs' variety show appearances, battling some intense Korean (and Chinese) food cravings, and recommending this super entertaining ride to anyone who will listen.
What did you think about the Culinary Class Wars finale? Let us know!
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