The Pop-up Chef Who Can’t Fly Out of the System

In recent years, dining experiences such as ‘pop-up kitchens’ and ‘communal dinner tables’ have been gaining popularity. As a former cook, I was itching to get involved. Isn’t this every food lover’s dream: to cook freely as your heart desires, without the pressure and tension of a commercial kitchen; to rediscover the simple joy of cooking for others; and to connect with people through food, building community?

So when the opportunity to go to Shanghai came up, I decided, without a second thought, to try my hand at being a “pop-up chef”.

Over the course of just over a month, hopping between multiple events in different restaurants, bars, and studios, I did connect with many people who love food and felt the joy of face-to-face interaction. But taking part in the food industry in China for the first time brought far more complicated experiences. In kitchens abroad, the tiredness is physical. Back in China, it’s body and mind, completely exhausted.

Food Industry Workers Trapped in the System

I met bar owner A (a pseudonym) through a shared interest in ecological agriculture and music. His bar sits on one of Shanghai’s most fashionable, influencer-frequented streets, yet outside its dark, cool-toned interior, rows of herbs and vegetables grow in full view. A is also drawn to the obscure regional cuisines of China’s provinces. With our equally unconventional ideas, we hit it off instantly. I’m grateful for his uncomplicated trust — he agreed to the collaboration before ever tasting my food. And so, suitcase brimming with seasonings, I flew from Chiang Mai to Shanghai, buzzing with the anticipation of making waves.

Having lived in Chiang Mai for years, I set the theme for the pop-up dinner as Northern Thai cuisine. Chinese diners typically think of Thai food as Pad Kra Pao, Som Tam, Tom Yum, and the handful of curries served at virtually every Thai restaurant. But just as Kung Pao Chicken and Stir-fried Tomato and Egg cannot encompass the breadth of Chinese cuisine, Thai food divides into several distinct regional traditions — Northern, Northeastern, Central and Southern — and Chiang Mai is the great centre of the North. I wanted to serve truly local Northern Thai food and let diners experience the full richness of the country’s culinary landscape: Khao Soi, the egg-noodle curry that migrated down from Yunnan carrying Lao and Northern Thai influences; Nam Ngiao, the Shan rice noodles enriched with kapok flower pith. Recreating dishes so specific to the North in Shanghai — where you’d struggle to find them even outside Thailand’s northern provinces — meant far more difficult sourcing and a far longer prep process.

As a pop-up chef working on a revenue-share arrangement with a bar, I had expected a flexible, low-commitment model. Instead, I became yet another person trapped in the system.

On one busy weekend peak, bar owner A spotted a negative review on Dianping complaining that the customer had been waiting for over half an hour and still hadn’t been served.

I could probably narrow it down to which guest — across the entire evening, only one person had repeatedly called a server back to the kitchen to rush us. It’s not that I hadn’t considered what waiting feels like from their side: when the dining room was full, I’d have the servers warn guests at the point of ordering that the minimum wait was twenty minutes, and only take the order if they were happy to wait. The kitchen had just me and one helper, whose main job was washing up and tidying. Most of the work — the prep and cutting, hand-grinding every curry paste from scratch, making the sauces, and the actual cooking — was all mine. Even so, I could understand: as a customer, you care about how much longer you still have to wait, not about the mad scramble happening behind the pass.

A is a friend with an unshakeable calm. He never once blamed me. But I could feel the bad review weighing heavily on him. The logic behind that pressure was something I only pieced together gradually, later on.

Here is how Dianping works: a negative review drags down a restaurant’s rating directly, and the rating determines how much the platform promotes the listing — the higher the score, the greater the likelihood of being recommended to more users. If you want to make the Must-Eat List or earn a spot in the Black Pearl Restaurant Guide, your rating is a hard threshold. According to official data, Black Pearl restaurants newly listed in 2023 saw search volumes surge by more than 150% before and after their inclusion, while actual foot traffic rose by 30% to 70%. Maintaining a rating is not just about a restaurant’s image — it is a matter of whether the business can keep running at all.

What makes it even more complicated is that reviews from different users carry different weights. The platform tiers its weighting by user level — the higher the level, the greater the impact. A friend who runs a restaurant told me: ‘When a bad review appears on Dianping, it’s serious enough to warrant a meeting at our shop. One bad review knocking 0.1 off the score can mean dropping from page one to page three or four in Dianping’s search results — less exposure, which hits foot traffic hard. People are simply too dependent on Dianping now.’

And if the reviewer happens to be a Dianping V8 user, it’s a veritable death blow for the restaurant. In extreme cases, a single V8 user’s negative review can knock half a star off a restaurant’s rating overnight. In other words, every high-level account a restaurant sees is not just an ordinary diner — it is a hand that can grip a restaurant’s very life and death.

Getting a consumer account up to V8 is no easy feat, which has given rise to a grey-industry supply chain. Looking at Dianping’s own published rules, the difficulty jumps sharply from V7 to V8. The platform itself acknowledges that as users climb the levels, the number and quality of reviews required grows non-linearly — the closer you get to the top, the harder the upgrade becomes.

This is why, for a long time, a V8 account was effectively a quantifiable asset, and specialist third-party operations companies emerged to help restaurants maintain their ratings. A 2021 investigative report in Caijing magazine noted that these third-party firms would openly price out the services of review writers by tier — the higher the user’s level, the more they charged.

The platform has also stepped onto the field itself, putting a clear price tag on promotional activities that boost ratings. In 2021, a restaurant owner told food journalist Mei Shanshan they were paying Dianping 4,000 yuan per cycle to invite high-level users to eat for free, in order to accumulate weighty, credible positive reviews.

By August 2025, although Dianping claimed to have refined its rules — warning that restaurants which systematically invite large numbers of users to write positive reviews would see their star gains restricted, while shops that don’t play the review game but focus on food and service would be more likely to earn stars through genuine reputation — the picture is more nuanced. Dianping’s own 2025 Review Transparency Report, published in March 2026, revealed that six months into the new rules, the number of merchants engaging in high-intensity review pushing had dropped by 42%: 310,000 merchants lost stars over the year, while 320,000 gained them. In other words, the ratings that restaurants once clawed their way to by every trick in the book — including star boosts earned by treating V8 users to a free meal — are being actively tightened by the platform itself.

The grey industry chain, naturally, is also evolving. Bad-review deletion services are now openly priced — 60 to 1,500 yuan per review, depending on the star level and how detailed the review is: the more thorough and well-evidenced a negative review, the lower the success rate of getting it removed. At the same time, the AI moderation system introduced to flag ‘malicious reviews’ is generating fresh controversy. Users have reported on the Black Cat Complaint platform that their genuine negative reviews were taken down within minutes on the grounds of being from a “suspected competitor”, with the platform offering no specific basis for its decision.

The bargaining power that came with being a Dianping V8 user may be shrinking as the rules tighten, but the tug-of-war between merchants and this rating system has not, for all that, grown any more transparent.

The First Time I Cried in the Kitchen

Only after understanding all of this did I grasp why everyone was so on edge: a single bad review could set off a cascade of trouble. And I stood at the very end of that chain, able to do nothing but apologise and offer a remedy. I suggested the manager reach out to the reviewer, telling them they were welcome back and I would cook them a free meal. It was the only solution I could think of, and even as I spoke it aloud, I felt helpless.

For me, cooking has always meant opening yourself up to other people’s judgments — I’ve made peace with that expectation. But the real weight came from causing trouble for someone else. I was working in a kitchen A has run for years. Ours was a short-term collaboration; I could walk away, but the mess left behind would be his and his team’s to sort out. And besides, my friend had agreed to work with me without ever tasting my food — a trust I refuse to let down.

I hadn’t even finished processing that feeling when, the very next day, something similar happened again. After finishing their meal, a few guests asked a staff member to call me over. They said the food was awful and they wouldn’t pay. I asked which dish was the problem — was it the sauce or the ingredients? They couldn’t say. I couldn’t quite fathom how they could complain that the food was terrible and yet polish off an entire table of it, but I kept my tone courteous and asked whether they’d like anything remade. Not one of them answered directly.

I felt as though I were watching a Peking opera scene. One guest played the tough, uncompromising role: ‘I’m not paying for food like this!’ Another played the soft, conciliatory one: ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll pay!’ The remaining two wore looks of irritation, heightening the drama. I was about to keep explaining when a staff member pulled me back: ‘Don’t worry! It’s on the house! If the guests don’t like it, never mind — everyone has their own preferences.’

In the end, the guests had their bill waived. Everyone there — the staff and the owner — breathed a sigh of relief: in exchange for the free meal, the guests had promised not to post about the incident online.

That evening, for the first time, I cried in the kitchen. I can’t quite put my finger on what it felt like — something between a sense of being wronged and utter powerlessness. When a confrontation like that erupts, there isn’t even a sliver of space for a normal conversation. I don’t blame the staff. I understand why they cut me off, and I’m deeply sorry for dragging my friend through the same scene again. He did tell me, at least, that this kind of thing is perfectly normal in China.

But whether a dish is “good” is inherently subjective — you can’t please every palate, and differing opinions are only natural. Before the online rating system grew so influential, no guest who didn’t like the flavour — and yet finished an entire table’s worth of food — would walk out with the bill waived. Nor would restaurant owners and their staff grovel quite so abjectly, waiving the bill simply to keep the peace.

An Exception

But then there are owners who dig in their heels.

Another bar owner, Maizi, runs no Dianping account, no social media — he relies entirely on his regulars. I was doing a pop-up dinner at his bar. The food was ready, but he still hadn’t set out chopsticks and spoons for the guests; I couldn’t help but rush him. He dashed off to a neighbouring restaurant to borrow some cutlery, came back smiling, and said, ‘Don’t rush — slow is steady, steady is fast.’ The words suited his whole demeanour — he wasn’t in a hurry, the guests weren’t in a hurry, and the entire bar hummed with a relaxed atmosphere utterly at odds with the Jing’an Temple commercial district.

Maizi’s kitchen is tiny — two people in it and it feels cramped. Yet it was the most comfortable kitchen I have ever cooked in in Shanghai: because nobody was rushing me. I’m grateful for the guests’ patience, and they gave me the highest compliment in return — eating every hot plate down to the last bite.

Maizi says those who love the place love it deeply, and those who don’t never come back. Many people come here not just for the drinks but to chat with him. On Dianping, his rating is a mere 3.8, yet that hasn’t stopped his regulars from returning time after time. Some of them even have a key to the bar — they walk in, pour themselves a beer, and pay. For me, the greatest pleasure of doing a pop-up chef gig in Maizi’s kitchen was actually eating his sour soup dumplings. The ground chilli and dried seaweed are both sent from his hometown by his mother.

‘I still think the “people” are the most important factor in my place,’ Maizi told me. He has been running his bar in the bustling heart of Jing’an District for eight years, relying on no platform’s promotion or traffic. I asked him what keeps the business going. He simply said, as always, ‘Slow is steady, steady is fast.’

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

A Month with No Sun in Sight

In Shanghai, I met several pop-up chefs and found that everyone’s source of pressure was remarkably consistent: mental exhaustion. The particular flavour of that tiredness differed from person to person, but the underlying logic was the same — one person shouldering every single aspect of the operation, with no buffer zone when anything goes wrong.

Sourcing is the most mentally draining part of it all. It’s made me feel as though every trip to a supermarket or wet market puts me right back in procurement mode. Cleaning the kitchen, checking the fridge, listing what needs restocking — it sounds simple enough, but every single day it takes at least one to two hours to get through all those fiddly tasks.

It’s especially tricky when herbs come into it — holy basil, Thai basil, and other ingredients that turn quickly, where the timing of the purchase has to be just right: buy too early and they spoil, buy too late and you might miss the window entirely. Every day I’m checking and comparing across Taobao, Meituan Delivery, Hema, the wet markets — every channel there is. As someone who’s fussy about quality, I have to keep costs down while still hunting for tomatoes that actually taste of tomato, that have a proper tang; meat with just the right fat content; holy basil of consistent quality… Truly, cooking meals at home-cooked prices while fretting like a fine-dining chef.

And so, out of the kitchen I’m a buyer, into the kitchen a chef. Switching between the two with barely a breath in between.

I’ve always loved wandering the wet markets, picking through things with my own hands. But during that stretch I actually began to dread them. Once, buying green chillies, I asked the vendor about the heat level, and she rolled her eyes: ‘How am I supposed to know how hot you can take it?’ She had a point, but I couldn’t understand all that impatience… (though I still wouldn’t have gone out of my way to leave a bad review)

Another time, buying rice, the shop auntie fixed me with a stare after I’d paid: ‘Are you one hand long and one hand short?’ To this day, I haven’t worked out what she meant.

Eventually I just switched to Hema and Dingdong — thirty-minute delivery, quality reasonably reliable, and the real bonus is the effort it saves. But leaning on online sourcing has its headaches too. Once I forgot to update my delivery address and the order ended up at my friend’s place. I simply messaged customer service to ask where my order had gone. The delivery person immediately rushed over to my friend’s flat to check, confirmed the goods had been delivered, then started calling me furiously, urging me to withdraw the complaint. I was bewildered — I’d only asked where things were, with no intention of filing a complaint at all. I don’t know whether this mix-up has left a mark on his record. Even now, thinking about it, I feel guilty.

Beyond sourcing, the entire rhythm of my life was quietly distorting. During the pop-up chef stretch, I’d wrap up around eleven or midnight, sleep until two in the afternoon, get up to wash, be in the kitchen prepping by four, and before I knew it the serving, the cleaning and the stock-taking were done and it was the small hours again.

Days passed without a proper sight of the sun. My colleagues at the bar were in much the same state — not to bed until three or four in the morning, not up until one or two in the afternoon, back at work by four or five. Exercise and daylight are luxuries. Seeing everyone so busy they forget to eat, I often rustle something up from whatever ingredients are left after my eleven o’clock shift ends — one of the few moments in the day when things are genuinely relaxed.

What the Algorithm Can’t Capture

And yet, within that month there were moments that made all that earlier drain feel less crushing.

An artist who’d flown in from Bangkok tasted my cooking and said it reminded them of home. A diner who once studied vegetarian cooking at a temple came to a vegetarian dinner event, sampled every dish on the menu, and left me a long message sharing their thoughts and suggestions for improvement. Compared with those vague five-star reviews, feedback like this made me feel that what I was doing genuinely mattered. And then there was the guest who returned for a second visit, sat at the bar for a long while, and quietly helped me design the handwritten menu…

The most unexpected discovery was sourcing rice. Because I couldn’t find suitable Thai jasmine rice anywhere in China, I felt the dishes were always a touch short on flavour. Then a vendor who sells rice from a small-production region in Yunnan reached out to me and sent some over unasked. The aroma as the rice steamed brought back the fresh, piping-hot rice fragrance I remembered from Thailand’s backstreets, and made me realise that for the next event I should design the menu around more local ingredients. The vendor is a lovely woman — she said that seeing my cooking made her so hungry she wanted to make sure it was matched with good rice. That thought probably comes from a shared belief we both hold about food, as she put it: “Only by getting closer to food can we get closer to people.”

And it was only by tasting rice that soft, glossy and fragrant — rice with a true grain aroma — that I came to understand how germ rice, quality single-variety rice, and the soil and water behind them shape both the flavour on the plate and the well-being of those who eat it.

These moments that moved me were not calculated by any algorithm, nor will they ever register in a rating system.

From Dianping to Meituan, the rating mechanisms and the grey areas behind them seem to be a problem no one in the food industry can ever escape. Over this past month, I too have had a small taste of what it feels like for food workers in China to be held by the throat by these apps. Every time those external voices close in around me, I think of Maizi — eight years running his bar without managing a single platform — drawing out each word slowly: “Slow is steady, steady is fast.”

Perhaps this system isn’t as impenetrable as it seems; it’s just that most of us inside it — myself included — haven’t managed to be as unhurried as he is. But I still want to believe that what will carry us further along the path of working with food is not the “optimal solution” recommended by algorithms, but the moments when we truly savour what’s on the plate and connect with real people.

– This is Foodthink’s 823rd original article –

All images courtesy of the author.

Editor: Tianle

Layout: Minglin

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