Inmate Chef: I Shocked the World!

Traditional Chinese cooking has been pushed to the margins by Western restaurants, and most kitchens no longer bother training cooks in the old techniques. Zhao Dingkang spent thirteen years in prison after injuring a man while trying to save him, and inside he used the time to train as a chef, earning a national top grade certificate before his release. Out in the world, he finds Western cuisine dominant and tries to get hired anywhere that still cooks Chinese food. A restaurant owner named Zhou Ziruo, who runs a Western-style kitchen, humiliates him and turns him away. He ends up at Baiweizhai, a hundred-year-old Chinese restaurant on the edge of bankruptcy, where the owner Yang Xuefei takes him on. At Baiweizhai he starts cooking dishes considered lost, techniques nobody has used in years, and it draws attention. He challenges Zhou Ziruo directly and beats him, proving the old methods still hold up against anything from a Western kitchen. Word of this reaches Shen Shuyang, a businesswoman he once saved, and she puts up the money for him to enter the World Chef Championship. At the competition he goes up against cooks from other countries and against a chef who had once turned his back on Chinese cuisine to work abroad. Zhao wins the match against him and the tournament moves toward its final round. At the awards ceremony, one of his opponents brings up the truth about why he went to prison in the first place.