Culinary Class Wars in Taiwan: One Netflix Korean Reality Show, Seven Consumer Industries, Sixteen Months

30-second overview: Culinary Class Wars (흑백요리사 / Culinary Class Wars) is a cooking competition reality show co-produced by Netflix and Korea's tvN Studios. Season 1 launched on September 17, 2024, and concluded on October 8, 2024, spanning twelve episodes.¹ The show's scale and dramatic characters were a major draw — eighty "Black Spoon" independent restaurant chefs squared off against twenty "White Spoon" Michelin-starred and top-tier chefs, with Korean food culture icon Paik Jong-won and Michelin three-star chef Ahn Sung-jae serving as judges.² The show topped Taiwan's Netflix non-English television rankings in its premiere week,³ and over the following sixteen months, nine participants landed collaborations across different Taiwanese industries: convenience store fresh food, bubble tea, fast food chains, five-star hotel buffets, food delivery platforms, Korean restaurant chains, and a Galaxy Z foldable phone.⁴ This article traces the consumer industry trajectory across that period and documents the food safety controversies that arose within it.

How It Got Here: From Seoul Cooking Competition to Taiwan's Top Ranking

Culinary Class Wars was co-produced by three Korean television producers: Yoon Hyun-joon, Kim Hak-min, and Kim Eun-ji.¹ The competition format itself was the show's biggest selling point: of one hundred chefs, eighty "Black Spoons" represented the independent scene — hole-in-the-wall restaurants, street stalls, school cafeteria cooks, delivery chefs — while twenty "White Spoons" represented the establishment: Michelin-starred restaurants, luxury hotel kitchens, and Korean culinary masters.² The first round featured one-on-one blind tastings where judges wore blindfolds and judged by taste alone; next came a group round of one hundred dishes in two hundred minutes; finally, an eighty-minute "cook for your reputation" final determined the champion.²

The show's viewership validated Korean variety programming's global influence. Season 1 topped Netflix's global non-English television rankings for three consecutive weeks, accumulating 44 million viewing hours and breaking Netflix's record for reality shows.⁵ In Asian markets, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong all took first place in the premiere week, with the show entering the top ten in twenty-eight countries.³ For Taiwanese viewers, this was one of those rare shows where Korean competition vocabulary like "Black Spoon" and "White Spoon" rapidly entered daily conversation.

Season 1's champion was a Black Spoon chef named Kwon Sung-joon, who called himself the "Napoli Matfia," taking home prize money of 300 million Korean won (approximately NT$7.1 million).⁶ Over a year later, Season 2 launched on December 16, 2025, and concluded January 13, 2026. The champion was White Spoon Choi Kang-rok (Roy Choi), who defeated the "cooking monster" Lee Ha-sung with a sesame tofu soup.⁷

Curator's note: As a cultural export product, Culinary Class Wars' true role is as a market of quotable culinary authority. When Taiwanese brands want to convert "Korean food fever" into sellable product lines, the show provides a ready-made set of identity labels — from Michelin to school lunch — that can be plugged directly into retail promotional calendars.

Sixteen Months Across Seven Industries: From Regent Cafi to Galaxy Z Fold

Three months after Season 1's launch, the first wave of collaborations landed simultaneously in December 2024. On December 2, the Doofu Restaurant Group held its inaugural internal cooking competition, Culinary Class Wars-style, inviting Season 1 White Spoon Michelin one-star chef Kim Do-yun and Taiwanese celebrity chef "A-Ji Shi" to serve as final-round judges. White-team winner Huang Yu-wei took home NT$100,000 with his braised pork and tofu gold-brick dish. Kim Do-yun's own limited-run dish, hand-sliced blanched pork belly, was simultaneously available exclusively at five Doofu brands — Jdoufu, Bukchon Tofu House, Jiang Man Tang, Pad Thai House, and Han Jiang Hee's Little Kitchen — from December 10 through December 31.⁸

That same month, on December 13, the Regent Taipei's Cafi restaurant launched a Korean Food Festival (through December 30), inviting Season 1 Black Spoon "school lunch legend" Lee Mi-young to make in-person appearances for all three meal periods on December 13 and 14.⁹ Her role in the show was not the typical fine dining aura — she represented the ritual dignity of Korean school cafeteria trays. Cafi's presentation faithfully recreated it: three iconic dishes from the show — spicy napa cabbage, ssam pork, and spicy beef soup — served "in iron trays, recreating the unique dining pleasure of Korean school lunches."⁹ Reservations sold out within hours of opening on the first day.¹⁰

That same month, bubble tea brand Ten Sheng launched a collaboration with Season 1 Black Spoon Kim Tae-star: a limited-edition drink called "Rich-Brewed Rice Mochi," with a prize draw for Taiwan-Korea round-trip flights as an added incentive.¹¹

Note: Within three months, Culinary Class Wars chefs had simultaneously entered Taiwan's Korean restaurant chains, five-star hotels, and bubble tea shops — three completely unrelated consumer channels, all drawing on the same show's assets.

On January 11, 2025, at 5 p.m., food delivery platform foodpanda launched a collaboration section with Season 1 White Spoon "CHOIDOT" executive chef Choi Hyun-seok (thirty years of culinary experience). Two dishes were on offer: "Garlic Clam Pasta (don't forget the garlic)" at NT$430 and "Korean Ginseng Chicken Soup" at NT$495.¹² Sales ran through March 25, with eight pickup locations across Taiwan including Taipei Xinyi, Neihu, Datong, Sanchong, Xinzhuang, Zhongli, Hsinchu National Tsing Hua University, and Taichung Tunghai University.¹² That same afternoon, Choi Hyun-seok personally cooked garlic clam pasta at a live cooking show at Breeze Nanshan for pandapro members — the replicable delivery orders and the irreplicable department store pop-up were complementary halves of a single day.¹³

On February 20, the Shin Yeh Group's "Kaifu Szechuan Restaurant" announced its first cross-border product development collaboration, inviting Season 1 White Spoon "dim sum queen" Chung Ji-sun. The partnership involved approximately five months of development, with Chung making more than six trips between Taiwan and Korea.¹⁴ Two limited-edition dishes — Spicy Cream Gold Thread Shrimp Ball (delicate spring roll skin threads wrapped around fresh shrimp with spicy cream sauce) and Bird's Nest Caramel Pumpkin Pudding (using a candy-pulling technique to shower golden sugar threads from above) — were sold exclusively for dine-in at all Kaifu Szechuan locations nationwide.¹⁴

On May 15, Laya Burger launched a collaboration breakfast menu with Season 1 White Spoon Korean-American chef Edward Lee, running through August 6. Four products spanned rice burgers, hamburgers, bibimbap, and spicy rice cakes: "Edward Lee's Korean Bibimbap Rice Burger" at NT$115, "Edward Lee's Korean BBQ Chicago Burger" at NT$109, "Chef's Sauce Selection × Korean BBQ Bibimbap" at NT$160, and "Chef's Sauce Selection × Korean Spicy Rice Cake" at NT$60.¹⁵ On June 17, a bottled "Edward Lee Uncle Sauce Bibimjang" was added,¹⁶ with Laya NOW app purchases entering a draw for a SHIA (Edward Lee's modern Korean restaurant in Washington, D.C.) two-person dining experience plus round-trip airfare to the United States.¹⁵

From June 26 through August 31, Season 1 White Spoon and Seoul doughroom founder and executive chef Jun Lee (Per Se alum, New York three stars) brought the doughroom brand to Taiwan for the first time, setting up a pop-up restaurant section at the Le Méridien Taipei's "Kitchen at Le Méridien."¹⁷ Jun Lee personally presided for the first four days, June 26 through 29.¹⁷ Signature dishes included fresh shrimp squid ink angel hair pasta, Italian potato gnocchi, JUN LEE Caesar salad, and devil roast chicken with braised vegetables. Lunch and dinner started from NT$1,690 plus ten percent service; during the chef's personal appearance period, from NT$2,080 plus ten percent.¹⁷

The pace of this period showed the Taiwanese food industry a new playbook — temporary but structurally complete: from daily limited-run items at chain restaurants to VIP pop-ups at five-star hotels, Culinary Class Wars chefs had become a "currency" that could move across different price points.

Beyond Food: Ahn Sung-jae × Galaxy Z Fold7

On July 16, 2025, Samsung Electronics Taiwan launched the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Z Flip7, simultaneously announcing that Culinary Class Wars judge and Korean Michelin three-star chef Ahn Sung-jae would serve as brand ambassador.¹⁸ Samsung Taiwan publicly stated that its full-year sales target was 30% higher than the previous model, framing a three-way cross-sector narrative of "Michelin chef × luxury hotel × premium airline" with collaborations involving Regent Taipei and Starlux Airlines.¹⁹

Marketing copy placed Ahn Sung-jae's culinary philosophy alongside the phone's design language: he "deconstructed everyday technology from a culinary craftsman's perspective," commenting on the phone's "folding amuse-bouche," and praising the 200-megapixel camera's color and depth.²⁰ This was the only non-food-industry collaboration among the nine Taiwan cases — a phone endorsement requires no kitchen, no sauce, no promotional menu. It only requires "the four-word authority of Michelin three stars."

Curator's note: Ahn Sung-jae's move into the consumer electronics sector means more than a single endorsement. It defines the maximum range of the Culinary Class Wars IP in Taiwan — when a judge who appears fewer than ten times in the show can be used to endorse a foldable phone, it means the IP's authority has left the original domain of "cooking" and entered the level of "a quotable taste symbol." Of the seven industries, food accounts for six and foldable phones for one — but that one proves the IP can stretch across product categories.

The Stress Test: Twenty Months at Ten Sheng

The most instructive story to record in depth is the exit trajectory of Ten Sheng, the bubble tea brand backed by Kim Tae-star.

Ten Sheng was founded in Taipei on April 12, 2024 by influencers Ji Bu-xin and Xiao Wu, with Hokkaido aged milk tea as its signature.²¹ Less than four months after opening, the Consumers' Foundation of Taiwan publicly called out Ten Sheng on July 20, 2024 for unclear milk source labeling — their website listed only "Hokkaido milk," while the store refused to disclose the brand; the store later admitted it used "aged raw milk combined with Taiwan Uni-President fresh milk, with the aged raw milk recipe using imported Hokkaido raw milk powder and also incorporating non-dairy creamer."²¹ On August 8, 2024, Ten Sheng announced it was removing the word "aged" and rebuilding its website.²²

Against this backdrop of unresolved brand controversy, Ten Sheng launched its Kim Tae-star collaboration "Rich-Brewed Rice Mochi" in December 2024, leveraging the Korean reality show chef's celebrity to capitalize on the show's momentum.¹¹ The collaboration did generate lines of customers, but the narrative had already shifted: post-July 2024, a significant portion of Taiwanese consumers now saw Ten Sheng not as a "trendy bubble tea shop" but as "a brand that had been investigated by the Consumers' Foundation."²¹

By 2025, the picture was clearer. From May onward, Ten Sheng "closed three Taipei-New Taipei locations all at once"; by early December 2025, only the Taoyuan Zhongzheng branch remained.²³ On December 26, 2025, that final branch closed. The brand's total lifespan: twenty months.²⁴

Media coverage divergence: Mirror Weekly, Newpaper Taiwan, and other mainstream outlets covering Ten Sheng's closure made no mention of the Kim Tae-star collaboration, focusing instead on the influencer founders' own brand flaws. NOWnews and Newtalk, however, included "bringing in Kim Tae-star last December" as part of the event's causal timeline.²⁵ This divergence reflects a clear distinction in how Taiwanese media treated the "Korean reality show chef endorsement": Kim Tae-star was a collaborating party, not the brand owner; the Consumers' Foundation investigated Ten Sheng's milk source labeling, not Kim Tae-star's cooking.

For Taiwanese consumers, the lesson of Ten Sheng extends beyond any single brand: when "show popularity" and "food safety controversy" coexist, do the people in line keep lining up, and do the buyers keep buying? Those twenty months from 2024 to 2025 marked Taiwan's first systematic risk assessment of the phrase "Korean reality show chef endorsement."

Simultaneous Tension: Paik Jong-won's Scandal and the 7-ELEVEN Launch

Another tension played out even faster in December 2025. Season 2 launched on December 16, hitting number one on Netflix's global non-English television rankings in its premiere week (up 25% from the previous week).²⁶ But at the same moment, Season 2 judge Paik Jong-won himself was hit by a string of scandals: inaccurate product origin labeling, extremely low meat content in his ham products, a citrus beer with almost no actual citrus, and a food festival that publicly used industrial-grade cooking equipment while representing it as food-grade.²⁶ Netflix chose not to remove him, citing the one hundred chefs and three hundred crew members involved in the production.²⁶

Eight days after Season 2's premiere, on December 24, 2025, a joint lineup of fourteen Korean fresh food items bearing Paik Jong-won's name officially hit Taiwan's 7-ELEVEN shelves — a collaboration nearly half a year in the making.²⁷

Key phrases from the press release: "carefully selected Korean-direct-import sauces," "formulas supervised by Paik Jong-won," "Paik Jong-won's first overseas convenience store collaboration."²⁸ Representative products included Korean hamburger steak pink sauce rice, spicy beef cream sauce pasta, spicy BBQ pork bento, Korean beef bibimbap, sticky rice ginseng chicken soup, spicy cheese rice cake hot press toast, Korean fish cake skewers, Korean-style yangyang fried chicken, a jumbo onigiri (Korean ocean and land wrap sauce flavor), and drinks including citrus grapefruit black tea.²⁷

The collaboration happened. Taiwanese consumers got the products. But simultaneously, the judge's name was undergoing another kind of "judgment" in Korean and international media. This coexistence reflects a structural constraint of the IP era's collaboration timelines: retail promotional calendars are set months in advance, and content-side credibility shifts can't keep pace.

Why These Nine Cases Occurred Within Sixteen Months

Mapping all nine events on a single timeline reveals a clear rhythm:

Nine events distributed across sixteen months, averaging one new landing every 1.4 months. The densest period was December 2024 — Kim Do-yun × Doofu, Lee Mi-young × Regent, and Kim Tae-star × Ten Sheng all ran concurrently in the same month. For a Taiwanese consumer walking into a convenience store, five-star hotel, or bubble tea shop that month, the Culinary Class Wars IP appeared simultaneously across three unrelated channels.

Staying Guests, Not Residents

Nine chefs, and not one moved to Taiwan; no Taiwanese person can say "they're one of ours." Through the show's viewership, retail promotional windows, and brands' marketing budgets, they made a short-term home in Taiwanese consumers' lives — the landing vehicles were flavor profiles, products, endorsement photos, and lines of waiting customers. The bodies never actually arrived.

This is a new model of cultural flow in the latter half of the 2020s: the person doesn't come; the IP does. It moves faster than any cultural export that came before — Korean dramas require adaptation rights, K-pop requires touring concerts, Korean cuisine requires physical restaurants, but a Korean reality show only needs Netflix's global release plus local retail channel coordination. A single season can deliver nine names into seven industries within three months.

And precisely because it's fast, it's short. No collaboration is permanent: Kim Tae-star's endorsed Ten Sheng has closed; Edward Lee's Laya breakfast menu ended on August 6; Jun Lee's pop-up closed August 31; Lee Mi-young's Korean food festival lasted only half a month. When Season 3 comes (if it comes), new names will arrive, channels will book new promotional windows, and it will happen again for another sixteen months.

But one thing will remain: across 2024 to 2026, Taiwanese consumers encountered Culinary Class Wars names at convenience stores, five-star hotels, bubble tea shops, food delivery platforms, department store pop-ups, Korean restaurant chains, and on a Galaxy Z Fold. This collective taste memory — plus the "check the ingredients before lining up" reflex that the Ten Sheng episode left behind — will outlast any individual collaboration campaign.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Convenience Store Culture — The industry context in which the 7-ELEVEN × Paik Jong-won collaboration happened; understanding the competitive logic of the convenience store fresh food battlefield
• Taiwan Bubble Tea Culture — The bubble tea industry context in which the Kim Tae-star × Ten Sheng collaboration occurred; Taiwan's most internationally exportable beverage battlefield
• Pearl Milk Tea — Taiwan's iconic bubble tea symbol, offering a cultural contrast with the Korean-style bubble tea brands that entered during the Culinary Class Wars era

References