‘Culinary Class Wars’ is a tribute to getting your reps

Since their inception, food competition shows have seen little real innovation. Most entries in the genre are variations on a theme, with the stakes artificially raised through reduced time, increasingly sadistic ingredient choices, or semi-regular trauma dumps. There’s something deliberately narcotic about it; the same way I know a sous vide egg snack from Starbucks will taste the same whether I buy it in New Jersey or Texas, I know what’s in store for me when I turn it on Minced meat or Great British bake-off or Top chef. At first glance Culinary class warsNetflix’s latest entrant into this gastronomic pantheon appears to be yet another of these variations. There are familiar elements at play here; two celebrity judges, mysterious ingredients and seemingly rigged team challenges are common. But by the end of the first episode, it’s abundantly clear that the creative minds are behind it Physical: 100 And The influencer have once again succeeded in creating a reality show with an elusive secret ingredient: novelty.

The premise of the show is deceptively simple: 100 of South Korea’s best chefs all compete for a prize of 300,000 won (approximately $217,000 USD). But before they can even turn on a gas stove, the chefs are divided into two classes: twenty white spoons and 80 black spoons. The White Spoons are all titans in their industries, with more than a handful of Michelin stars between them. Their first appearance on screen drew shouts of admiration and shock from the rest of the contestants, the Black Spoons, who are all highly respected chefs, but who also average at least 20 years less experience than their White Spoons. Spoon counterparts. It’s a classic generational battle, and at first the awkward jokes between the two groups fall into the familiar territory of age versus beauty. But there’s a clear, mutual admiration between the two groups of contestants at the end of the first episode, in which the Black Spoons are reduced to twenty chefs, while the more established White Spoons look on nicely.

The class divide disappears almost immediately thanks to the wording of the first challenge. Each Black Spoon chef must prepare their signature dish, which is then judged by the aforementioned celebrity chefs: renowned restaurateur Paik Jong-Won and South Korea’s only three-star chef, Anh Sung-jae. The standards are strict, so much so that watching veteran White Spoons dread their turn in the judges’ spotlight. At one point, Ahn eliminates a contestant because he didn’t serve his dish with rice. Another contestant is put on hold because Ahn felt that “the flavor of the fish was a little lacking, but not by much.” One of the observing older chefs comments, “If he’s that picky, I feel like no one will make it.” Another calls Ahn the “Grim Reaper of herbs.” Also here Culinary class wars innovates. Despite their position as judges, Paik and Ahn do not place themselves above the competitors they judge. At the end of the competition, one of the participants notes that the judges no longer feel like distant magistrates, but like two regular guests in his restaurant; it helps that during the judging, Paik and Ahn are put in positions that are as absurd as the contestants they’re judging. Over the course of ten increasingly grueling episodes, both demonstrate a willingness to get their hands dirty: at one point, Paik eats a leftover piece of steak from a discarded plate in a garbage can to check its doneness.

The second challenge, a head-to-head competition between Black Spoon-White Spoon pairs, is judged blind. Each pair is given a mysterious ingredient and 70 minutes to create a dish that Paik and Ahn judge solely on taste. It’s a form of physical comedy, where you see both titans of their industry blindly searching with their mouths for spoonfuls of food they can’t see, delivered to them by nameless assistants. Halfway through the challenge, both Paik and Ahn have visible indentations on their faces from the cloth blindfolds they wear. In one of the most brutal challenges I have ever seen, the final seven chefs enter Culinary class wars calls ‘Infinite Cooking Hell’. Using a mysterious ingredient, each participant must complete a new recipe every 30 minutes until only one chef remains. By the end of “Infinite Cooking Hell”, the final two chefs have developed and cooked six different recipes in three hours. Paik and Ahn consume more than twenty tofu dishes in the same time.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that by the end of the season, Culinary class wars feels much more like a feat of endurance than a feat of culinary prowess. It makes sense considering the show comes from the same team that created the grueling challenges Physical: 100. But maybe that’s why I and others (spoilers in the left) found the finale of Culinary class wars a bit disappointing. One of the most satisfying elements of the show, for me at least, is how consistently the show demonstrated the force multiplier of experience. Creative fields like cooking (and blogging) tend to equate novelty with youth. In the constant quest for innovation, for eating or reading something never seen before, prodigies tend to win. Culinary class wars There are plenty of them, including one who was admiringly described by an elder statesman as ‘a pervert when it comes to cooking’. But in what I consider the most objective challenge, the blind-judged Black Spoon-White Spoon deathmatches, the White Spoons defeated their younger counterparts, winning 11 of the 20 matches. There are also at least two Black Spoon victors, one a school lunch lady, who is considerably older than their opponents, but who still manages to defeat them.

For most of my career, I have been one of the youngest people in the room, both an asset and an albatross of my age. While I chafed at the paternalism, I was haunted by the feeling that one of my most important qualifications was the very thing over which I had the least control. In the back of my mind THere’s this lingering question that I first read in a blog from my colleague Kelsey McKinney’s old newsletter Written out: “It doesn’t really matter how old you are unless you’re trying to be a prodigy,” she wrote, “Unless you’ve been told that the reason you’re good is because you’re young, because no one your age should be able to. But what happens when you turn 40? Or 30 even? People of those ages should being able to do the work you’ve always done. And where are you?”

Youth is not a solid foundation on which to build a career, but as the proven White Spoons have shown time and time again, diligence and knowledge are a formidable combination. It is a given that technical skills such as knife work or grammar benefit from experience. But I have also seen that expertise comes at the expense of creativity; a signature style becomes a cage. Saying that experience or age always wins may sound like conventional wisdom, but in cooking – and especially in a food competition – expertise can translate into the confidence needed to transcend safe choices.

There was a brilliance in the dishes prepared by the White Spoons; one of the most common compliments from the judges was along the lines of I’ve never tasted anything like it. It may seem obvious that decades of tasting and testing would produce truly special dishes. But as I watched Paik and Ahn blindly swallow meatballs and dumplings whole, I found the steady stream of White Spoon victors strangely encouraging. Until the final, the most ingenious meals came from the experienced chefs; there was a confidence they possessed, not just in having a vision, but in executing it. It was the kind of confidence that comes from spending decades honing a skill, a confidence that is now muscle memory. To look Culinary class wars reminded me of the feeling I get when powerlifting. There can be enormous rewards from endless repetition, from doing something over and over until you can do just a little more than before.