How Culinary Class Wars Is Made: Casting, Blind Tastings and the Rigging Questions

A one-line pitch and three hard months

Culinary Class Wars (흑백요리사: 요리 계급 전쟁, literally "Black and White Chef") is a Netflix cooking contest made by the production company Studio Slam (스튜디오 슬램), directed by Kim Hak-min (김학민) and Kim Eun-ji (김은지) and written by Mo Eun-seol (모은설).³⁸ It started as a skeleton of an idea. Kim Eun-ji says Studio Slam's CEO, Yoon Hyun-joon (윤현준), pitched Netflix "a survival show of 100 unknown cooks, judged by Paik Jong-won (백종원)", with nothing more worked out. It was Netflix Korea's first cooking show, and the working title was "Unknown Chefs 100".²

Netflix asked for "one more point" beyond sheer scale. The team took the syllable 백 (baek), which means both "white" and "hundred" and starts Paik's name, built a black-and-white world around it and pitted unknown cooks against famous ones: 80 "Black Spoons" against 20 "White Spoons".² Kim Hak-min says they spent three months on the idea of fixing classes in advance, where most survival shows start everyone equal. Mo Eun-seol says junior writers' research on other countries' cooking contests filled 400 pages, and calls the stretch "three months so painful I couldn't sleep". Because "black and white" could be read in racial terms, the producers checked the title with Netflix. They meant it like the black and white stones in baduk (Go), and the English title dropped the colours.³ Mo says every mission used by earlier cooking shows was deliberately left out.⁴

Casting 100 chefs who didn't know the rules

Netflix Korea opened applications on October 4, 2023 under the working title 무명요리사 ("Nameless Chef"), for "anyone confident in their cooking, regardless of age, career or genre".¹ About 600 people applied. Around 10 writers interviewed them, and 100 were chosen.⁷ Kim Hak-min says nobody applied knowing about the black-and-white split: the team picked the 100 first, then decided who suited a White Spoon. Better-known chefs were encouraged to apply, but they went through the same in-person interview.² Black Spoons competed under nicknames rather than the numbers first planned, "so viewers could connect more easily".²

Secrecy made casting hard. Mo says the only thing the team could reveal was that Paik would appear; Kim Eun-ji says that, unable to explain the concept, "all we could say was 'trust us'".⁴⁵ Chefs didn't know who else was taking part or who the judges were. White Spoons such as Edward Lee (에드워드 리) learned their class on set, and Kim Hak-min says "we didn't pay them more".³ The producers expected one or two Black Spoons to walk out over the class rule in episode 1. None did.⁵

Kim Eun-ji wanted the two judges to be opposites who could argue as equals: Paik, a restaurateur, and Anh Sung-jae (안성재), chef of Mosu Seoul, Korea's only Michelin three-star restaurant. "It had to be these two," she says.⁵⁶ The judges had never met before the shoot.³ Anh says he agreed only "after confirming with the producers that this show wouldn't turn us into a laughingstock".⁶

An underground "food bank" in Paju

Kim Eun-ji puts the set at 1,000 pyeong (about 3,300 m²), with room for 40 chefs to cook at once. Its floor sat a metre off the studio floor so gas pipes, water pipes and wiring could run underneath, and building it took more than 40 days.⁸ The season used 254 recipes and some 1,000 cooking utensils.⁹ The operator of Studio Eugenia (스튜디오 유지니아), a soundstage in Unjeong, Paju, north-west of Seoul, says both seasons were shot there.¹⁴

Art director Lee Yeong-ju (이영주) designed it as a "food bank" deep underground, modelled on a seed vault. Walls were finished in grey cement plaster so they wouldn't clash with the black and white jackets, and to stand up to sparks from charcoal grills. The stations faced different directions so every chef could be filmed, and the layout changed between rounds. The team had ten days between rounds to tear down one set and build the next.¹⁰ The producers asked chef Raymon Kim (레이먼 킴) to advise on station layout and burner direction.¹²

Round 1 alone used about 300 cameras, and the crew numbered 300.³¹³

Two months of Sundays and Mondays

Season 1 was shot from late January 2024 for about two months, wrapping in March.¹⁰¹¹ Filming ran every two weeks, on Sundays or Mondays, the days restaurants close, so the chefs' businesses wouldn't suffer.¹² Edward Lee, who runs restaurants in the US, says he flew back and forth during the shoot, sometimes 20 hours in the air and then hours by car. He wore an interpreter's earpiece, though "the interpretation was only brief", and chefs had stickers put over their phone camera lenses so nobody could take photos on set.¹⁶

Editing took three to four months after the wrap, followed by translation and error checks.¹¹ Kim Hak-min says the whole season is edited before any of it is released, so audience reaction can't change it.⁴⁰ Episodes drop on Tuesdays in batches: Season 1's 12 episodes came out from September 17 to October 8, 2024.³⁸ That left a long secret to keep. Kwon Seong-joon wrote after the final that he had struggled to hide his win for seven months.¹⁷

Blindfolds and spoon-feeding

The show's signature image is the blind tasting in Round 2: both judges blindfolded and fed by spoon, so a famous name can't sway them.³⁸ Kim Eun-ji says Paik first called the idea absurd, because covering the eyes dulls taste, and had to be talked into it.¹⁵ At the launch press conference he called it "madness" and admitted he swore while doing it. Kim Hak-min joked, "Who in the world would blindfold Paik Jong-won and make him eat?"⁸ Both judges later backed it. Paik said it let him focus only on taste and texture, and Anh called it "essential for a fair and unbiased judgment".⁹

When the judges split, nobody stepped in. They argued until they agreed, sometimes for more than 20 minutes.¹⁹ Only the judges tasted competition food, which was then thrown away. Kim Hak-min says crew tasting could have sparked "noise" about the judging. Unused meat and fish were portioned out by an on-site butcher and fishmonger and shared among the staff.¹⁵

Is any of it scripted?

The producers describe a show that sets the rules but not the results. Mo Eun-seol says the team decided in advance only how many chefs would survive each round. Even the rule that each team in the restaurant mission must dismiss one member was written before filming.¹² Kim Eun-ji says the judging was "left entirely to the two judges". The production team waited for their verdicts and then edited "only to make the results stand out".²¹ Contestants were rarely told what was coming: in Season 2, Kim Hak-min says, "as always, we didn't tell them the rules".³³

Chefs have described the same thing from the other side. Asked on an American podcast whether anything was fake, Edward Lee said the Koreans involved were very honest and everyone kept to the rules.¹⁶ Editing still shapes how people come across. White Spoon Ahn You-seong (안유성) said on CBS radio that the team rows were rowdier on set than on screen, and that a "devil's edit" made his tendon look late when he had prepared 200 servings in advance.¹⁸

Were any choices rigged?

As of October 16, 2026, we found no court case, regulator's ruling or official complaint finding that any Culinary Class Wars result was rigged, and no contestant who has publicly alleged it. What exists are viewers' suspicions, raised online and reported by the Korean press, and the producers' answers. Korean audiences have reason to be wary: in 2020 producers of Mnet's Produce series were convicted of manipulating viewer votes (see How K-Pop Survival Shows Pick Their Debut Lineups), and the Supreme Court upheld the director's two-year sentence in 2021.⁴¹ The main questions, and what was said:

"The class balance was fixed." Season 1's Round 2 left exactly 11 Black and 11 White Spoons, and the Top 8 split four and four, so some viewers suspected the producers had manipulated the results. Kim Hak-min said the rule that 22 chefs would go through, including two judges' "super passes", was set in advance, and that the team "secretly hoped the numbers would come out uneven, because that's the real result". On the Top 8, he said: "It's four Black, four White. That has nothing to do with our intentions."²⁰

The dismissal rule. Viewers criticised the Season 1 restaurant mission's rule that each team must cut a member six hours in; the three dismissed chefs formed their own team, came last on sales and went out.³⁸ Kim Hak-min said the team "humbly" accepted the reaction and would improve it in Season 2.²³ Before Season 2 the producers said their most important guideline had been "no rule like dismissals ever again", and that they had cut the team rounds from two to one and added 1-on-1 missions.²⁵

"Korean-cuisine chefs were sidelined." Kim Eun-ji: "We never designed it so chefs of a particular genre would be excluded."²²

"Edward Lee was disadvantaged." Some fans argued that Lee, without a kitchen of his own in Korea, couldn't practise like the local chefs. Lee answered on Instagram that in his free time he had turned his hotel room into a test kitchen.²⁴

The Season 2 "stock" question. In the "Last Box" round, where chefs could use at most 10 ingredients beyond their main one, viewers asked whether the runner-up, Lee Ha-sung (이하성, "Culinary Monster"), got special treatment by using a brown veal stock. Kim Eun-ji said the stock was a retail product, not something cooked in advance, and that buying ready-made products was a rule for everyone. "Gochujang is a mixture too," she said. "Chef Lee was absolutely not given special treatment."²⁹

The name-tag slip. Black Spoons' real names are revealed only when they reach the final. An interview shot in Season 2's ninth episode showed Lee's name tag, giving away that he made the final. Kim Hak-min called it "clearly the production team's mistake" and apologised. Ten staff had checked the episode several times and missed the frame.³⁰³¹ The producers also rejected the idea that they had edited Lee as a villain.³²

Leaks. A spoiler naming Choi Kang-rok as Season 2's winner circulated before the finale, and he did win. Kim Eun-ji says every contestant's contract carries an anti-spoiler clause with a financial penalty. Choi says he packed up and stayed out of sight for about half a year.³¹

What changed for Season 2

Netflix renewed the show in October 2024, after it became the first Korean unscripted title to spend three straight weeks at No. 1 in its global Top 10 for non-English TV.²⁶ A second open call followed on December 3, 2024.³⁹ Lee Ha-sung says Season 2 was shot in spring 2025.²⁸ New ingredients came from Korea's regions, and the producers say some Black Spoons would have been White Spoons in Season 1.²⁵

The biggest twist was the two "Hidden White Spoons", Choi Kang-rok and Kim Do-yun (김도윤), both eliminated in Season 1. Only the two of them were asked back, and they weren't told the rule that both judges had to approve their dish. If both had failed, there was no plan B: only 18 Black Spoons would have gone through.³³ Their return was so secret that even their families didn't know until it aired.³⁴ Choi got through, then went on to win the season.³⁸

In May 2025, with Season 2 still in production, Paik announced on his YouTube channel that he would stop all broadcasting except programmes already being filmed, to focus on running his company, Theborn Korea.³⁵ Netflix released the season as planned. Its non-fiction director, Yoo Ki-hwan, said that with 100 chefs and nearly 300–400 staff involved, Netflix chose to release on schedule and leave the judgement to viewers.³⁶ Season 2's 13 episodes came out from December 16, 2025 to January 13, 2026.²⁷³⁸

The scorecard

On Netflix's global Top 10 for non-English TV, Season 1 spent six weeks in the list, three of them at No. 1, with a peak of 4.9 million views in the week ending September 29, 2024. Season 2 spent five weeks there, two at No. 1, opening with 5.5 million views.³⁷ Season 1 won the TV daesang (grand prize) at the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards in May 2025.⁴² Netflix announced a third season on January 16, 2026, this time with teams of four cooks from the same restaurant.⁴³ For how it compares with other Korean reality shows, see Korean Reality Shows in Netflix's Global Top 10.