Culinary Class Wars Revolutionizes the Cooking Show

Spoilers follow for the first ten episodes of Netflix series Culinary Class Wars, which premieres its final two episodes Tuesday, October 8. 

The “class wars” component of Culinary Class Wars is a bit overblown. The South Korean series adds a dash of The Menu’s social-hierarchy tension and a sprinkle of Squid Game’s shifting-alliances instability to its cooking-competition format, but this isn’t a series interested in theory or praxis. There are no cooking tools that evoke a guillotine, and an uprising led by the workers and for the workers sadly does not occur. Instead, like so many reality series, Culinary Class Wars is about individual glory, and its political framing is merely a grabby front. And yet: It’s a blast because what Culinary Class Wars actually pulls off is the total shake-up of a stale genre.

The competition opens by positioning 20 “White Spoons” (famous and prestigious chefs working in or affiliated with South Korea) against 80 “Black Spoons” (professionals on a smaller scale or from a lower-brow establishment, like a school lunch lady, the owner of a fried-chicken restaurant, and a YouTube personality) in a battle for more than $200,000. The White Spoons can be addressed by their real names as a sign of the respect they’ve earned over decades in the industry, but the Black Spoons can be called only by nicknames they’ve chosen for themselves, from Napoli Matfia (an Italian-cuisine specialist) and Goddess of Chinese Cuisine (self-explanatory), to Comic Book Chef (he specializes in dishes from graphic novels). As the series opens, the White Spoons are elevated onto a platform above the Black Spoons in a literalization of the “class” divide as an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like host explains that the Black Spoons are fighting for the same level of esteem. Only Black Spoons who get to the series’ final round of competition will stop being “nameless unknowns” and, as a sign of how far they’ve come, “shed their nickname and reveal their real name.”

“I knew they were gonna pull this crap,” one of the Black Spoons says, and there’s a lot of bruised-ego grumbling from his comrades. But hilariously, the show’s conceit falls apart almost immediately because many of Culinary Class Wars’ competitors know one another. The Black Spoons are often familiar with one another’s restaurants or reputations and greet one another excitedly as they arrive. Multiple White Spoons are mentors or onetime employers of Black Spoons and, by the second episode, cheer for them by name. Name slips continue throughout the series and deflate the tension each time, but there are perfect-for-TV counter-moments as well: Judge Anh Sung-jae initially doesn’t recognize or remember former employee One Two Three, a Black Spoon who spoke frankly in his talking-head interview about how intimidating it was to work for the chef.

Unlike Chef’s Table, the hagiography is light. In a counter to Chopped, the contestants’ tragic backstories are few. On Throwdown! With Bobby Flay and Beat Bobby Flay, Flay nearly always bests his competitors at their own specialty dishes. Culinary Class Wars incorporates blind tasting so more famous chefs don’t get preferential treatment. Top Chef alumnus Edward Lee is competing here, but the assessments from extremely charismatic judges Anh and Paik Jong-won are more transparent than Tom Colicchio has ever been. The episodes’ pacing forces viewers to pay attention; instead of following a traditional three-act structure, climactic eliminations or judging decisions come 20 or 40 minutes in or even serve as cliffhangers before the series’ Challengers-esque score blares over the closing credits. Culinary Class Wars has no time for complacency, either from the competitors it pushes to the limits of their abilities or from us as viewers. Whenever it seems like the show has settled into a groove, it moves in a different direction — reorganizing the kitchen space, blowing up a team structure, or changing the parameters of the challenges.

Like fellow South Korean competition series Physical: 100, Culinary Class Wars’ greatest strengths lie in challenge engineering and production design, especially when they work in tandem. To whittle 80 Black Spoons down to 20, the competitors are shuffled into a giant room where they have to cook a signature dish at individual cooking stations while the White Spoons watch and comment from a perimeter balcony. Later, when the Black Spoons and White Spoons go head-to-head in dishes utilizing a specific ingredient, they wheel their meals into a room with rough-hewn walls where the blindfolded judges sit like fantasy creatures waiting to be coaxed out of their cave with special treats.

There are surprises everywhere. Culinary Class Wars carves up its gigantic warehouse through hidden doors and secret rooms that reveal new pantries or guest judges who can overrule Anh and Paik about eliminations. Departures of both Black and White Spoons who seemed like they’d go all the way are breathtakingly unsentimental; there’s no reliance on pleasant montage-style good-byes. To give us a little bit of transparency in contrast to the series’ other, more spontaneous decisions, the judges’ handwritten notes for dishes are blown up and shared onscreen, their immediate impressions on taste and technique providing us with more insight into competitors’ skills. Where other cooking shows feel codified in their structure and story arcs, Culinary Class Wars keeps adding little flourishes that poke holes in the distinction between fine dining and street food. A moment when Anh wonders whether he’s responding to a dish because of his own nostalgia and asks Paik to taste is a fascinating provocation, one that emphasizes the judges’ subjectivity and makes viewers question their own.

Even the panopticon quality that feels so weighted toward the White Spoons gets a radical readjustment. Deep into the season, once the White and Black Spoons occupy the same kitchen space, the blocking changes. In the team cooking challenge, 100 diners look down on the chefs from nearly vertical, amphitheater-style seats. In the restaurant challenge, the judges are positioned above all the remaining competitors. As the competition pool shrinks, the chefs must walk their dishes down a long path to Paik and Anh and offer themselves up for consideration. The series maintains a hierarchy after all, but not exactly the same one as other cooking series, where judges have final say from the top down. Instead, in Culinary Class Wars, every competitor, named or nameless, is subject to the twists and turns of a format intent on defying expectations. Its real revolution doesn’t come from its participants, but from how willing the series is to disrupt our food-TV status quo.