The Chinese Restaurant, Season 9 / 中餐厅·非洲创业季 (2025), starring Huang Xiaoming, Jiang Yan, Zhai Xiaowen, Ding Yuxi, Shen Yue, Patrick Nattawat Finkler (Yin Haoyu), and Chef Lin Shuwei, is a Chinese variety show we’ve been following with a lot of anticipation each week since it aired in late June this year.
We first came across the Chinese variety show last year when its eighth season took place in the French village of Giverny. We enjoyed watching the cooking aspect of the show, the beautiful shots of the food, and the interactions between the team and between them and the customers, as well as the challenge of promoting Chinese cuisine and culture to the French.
This year, Season 9 flies to the mountainous country of North Africa, Morocco, to promote Chinese cuisine and culture. We have to say, although we enjoyed Season 8, we weren’t hanging out for the next season, but the discovery that Ding Yuxi had signed onto Season 9 brought us back to watch another season; and whilst waiting for more episodes to release, we ended up watching Season 6 and Season 7 to fill the time in between releases.
Past seasons are pretty enjoyable once we get into watching them. But for us, Season 9 is hands down our favourite. Every cast member in this season is lively. They all love to joke, laugh, and talk, making every scene fun and interesting. Even Chef Lin is lively and playful and jokes around this season.
We love seeing Jiang Yan take on the chef role this season. Last season, she also took on the role of chef, being a pastry chef, making attractive little Chinese pastries for the restaurant in France. But she didn’t get a lot of screen time. It was in part because she has to return to China to attend an award ceremony, but when she returned, it felt like she was a bit in the background. It didn’t help that her workstation was out back, away from the rest of the team. In Season 9, Jiang Yan is in the kitchen, working alongside Chef Lin, cooking the mains as well as creating the desserts and snacks.
The interactions between them all are the best part about this season. Many of our favourite interactions are between Ding Yuxi and pretty much any cast member. In fact, any time he’s on screen, it is guaranteed that it is going to be entertaining, interesting, funny, or captivating.
It’s not been long since we came across Ding Yuxi and consciously looked out for his upcoming projects. We first came across him in the drama The Romance of Tiger and Rose back in 2020 when it aired, but it was not until watching Love Game in Eastern Fantasy and Melody of Golden Age last year in 2024 that we started watching out for his upcoming projects, which, as we already mentioned, is how we got to watching The Chinese Restaurant series again.
As people who also just mostly watch dramas and don’t look up too much about the actors or actresses, we didn’t know just how interesting the actor is. It’s through this season of The Chinese Restaurant that we found out how perceptive, clever, smart, hardworking, dedicated, caring, selfless, mannerly Ding Yuxi is and how extremely capable he is. He’s quite funny and entertaining, too, with his sweet-talking ways and quirkiness.
Chef Lin described Ding Yuxi as “brave” and “resourceful” during their trip out getting supplies for the restaurant. When Chef Lin promotes Ding Yuxi to Sous Chef in the last couple episodes of the show, he also used “persistent” and “passionate” with a level of “obsession” to talk about the way Ding Yuxi works and the way he talks about the dishes and the cuisine. Chef Lin even mentioned having his culinary inspiration inspired even more by Ding Yuxi.
Huang Xiaoming described Ding Yuxi as extremely capable. In Episode 11, Huang Xiaoming even threatens to cancel the next season if Ding Yuxi doesn’t return. Huang Xiaoming was probably only joking about going that far, but to express the value and the level of contribution Ding Yuxi made to this season of The Chinese Restaurant in this way was quite shocking.
Ding Yuxi really was quite the capable, multitasking all-round restaurant partner. He’s the bridge between the kitchen and his colleagues on the floors taking orders. He’s preparing elements, proactively doing tasks like heating plates so they’re ready well before Chef Lin and Jiang Yan need them. He delivers dishes to tables, entertains customers, and also sees to issues and resolves them.
He’s looking out for his colleagues all the time as well. Noticing that Patrick had a bit of difficulty with taking orders in Chinese, he worked out a shorthand code to make order-taking easier. Seeing Shen Yue show discomfort with the tasks, like her first time serving customers and going out into the public to promote the restaurant, he went to her to give her tips and words of encouragement. When Huang Xiaoming was struggling up and down the many flights of stairs serving dishes (because of a past injury to one of his legs), Ding Yuxi quietly checked on him before insisting on taking over (Huang Xiaoming insisted on carrying on a moment later, though). Guest cast member Dina was told to take a break, as he believed she’d been too busy the whole night, and Zhang Baiqiao, also a guest cast member, was assisted with English translations from Ding Yuxi when Zhang Baiqiao struggled with speaking English to the people he was trying to promote their restaurant to.
Ding Yuxi’s also always thinking about how to promote and get more people to know about Chinese cuisine and try more of their dishes. He suggested reducing the size of the portions and lowering the cost of the dishes after he read a review that the blogger found the dishes tasty but found them pricey, and he saw this as a way to allow people to try more. He brought over silicone dessert molds of historical Chinese structures to elevate the visual aspect of dessert dishes that Patrick made. He brought over little gifts from China and a badge maker to make more gifts for customers, a pen set for artwork and menus, a gong that was used to officially open the restaurant, a couple dragon dance ribbons and a long-spout teapot for his performances for the restaurant, and a couple pieces of fabric with Chinese embroidery to use as decor.
The amount Ding Yuxi takes on is so considerable that during the group farewell speeches in Episode 12 (final), Shen Yue straightforwardly tells Ding Yuxi that he’s the person she feels the greatest heartache for.
We already mentioned above that Shen Yue was someone he had looked out for. The extent to which he did seemingly isn’t all shown on the show. While sharing words about Ding Yuxi, Shen Yue reveals that he was especially willing to offer her tips. There were many times in places off-camera when he would check on her, asking her if she felt uncomfortable or awkward, seemingly knowing that she might. (Shen Yue had expressed finding it hard interacting with unfamiliar people and groups earlier). He would ask her if there was anything he could help her with. He was so good at looking out for her that he would magically appear behind her just when she felt like she really needed someone to lend a hand. Every time she turned her head around, he was there, quietly helping her with things.
This kind of care for her and his colleagues, as well as the many matters in the restaurant, is what leads her to her words about him being the one she feels the most for. Her intention seems to be to tell him that she hopes he puts himself first above all else and that he takes care of his health and takes his own feelings into account.
This scene was quite a shock when we first watched it. It was not anything we ever thought we’d see in a variety show’s farewell. Such genuine words and such genuine emotions were seen and expressed in this scene. When Shen Yue said this, there seemed to be a bit of shock from Ding Yuxi. His brows twitched, as if he was trying to find a response but struggled. In the end, he went with flattering her voice.
There were a lot of tears in the final episode. Shen Yue set off the tears with her words, but Ding Yuxi had pretty much everyone’s tears flowing. Not only the cast cried, but we couldn’t hold back tears, either. Ding Yuxi’s words about his time at The Chinese Restaurant were so heartfelt and so sincere.
He spoke about having gone into one of the studio rooms inside the kitchen to see what it was like to see everyone from this perspective. In there, he described it as like watching them in another world where they were all busy doing something, while he was outside, isolated from that world. He seemed to have felt reluctant to move on, as he mentions that he couldn’t imagine everyone moving on once every one of them had left The Chinese Restaurant, and seems to suggest that he might not be ready to move on when they already have.
He seems to really treasure his time on The Chinese Restaurant and the people, too, as he reveals having broken down at that moment as he thought about their time on the show coming to an end.
Chef Lin also creates a few tears in the final episode as he surprises Ding Yuxi with a notebook of the restaurant’s menu that he personally put together for him. It contained handwritten recipes, photos of the dishes, Chef Lin’s pencil artwork, and a personal message: “I hope our dishes will continue for a long time.” He even dated it so these days in Morocco, where he and Ding Yuxi worked together as chef and apprentice/sous chef could be remembered. What a special gift.
Ding Yuxi and Chef Lin—this team is our most favourite on the show. We love watching Chef Lin find an apprentice/sous chef in Ding Yuxi. The promotion was such a great way to acknowledge Ding Yuxi’s hard work and dedication to the show. Then, to see Chef Lin present such a gift he personally put together in his spare time—this is the most touching scene on the show. For a busy, famous chef like Chef Lin to do this, we can only imagine Ding Yuxi must have made quite a deep impression on Chef Lin.
Our second favourite team is Ding Yuxi and Patrick. They’re quite entertaining together. They’re dishwashing buddies at the end of the night, competing to be dishwashing king. They also compete for compliments from Huang Xiaoming. It’s quite amusing when they sometimes speak to each other like Patrick Star and SpongeBob SquarePants, or at least we think that’s who they are imitating.
We also love how they often partner up to do performances like the long-spout tea pouring performance, which Ding Yuxi performs with Patrick as his assistant. They also perform a dragon ribbon dance together, too.
Searching up on Patrick, he’s quite a smart and talented young person. He’s an actor, singer, songwriter, and dancer. As a German-born Thai, he speaks multiple languages and is fluent in Thai, German, English, and Chinese. He knows basic Japanese and apparently learning French, too.
Ding Yuxi and Jiang Yan another team we really like. They have some cool as well as some funny interactions on this show. There was a particular moment in Episode 6 we really loved, and that’s the one where Ding Yuxi comes up with a way to distract Jiang Yan from the painful sting of the iodine solution she needed to apply to her sliced nail plate. While chopping away, she had sliced it deep enough to reveal flesh.
Patrick had tried to help Jiang Yan apply the iodine solution, but even a light touch caused pain that was so excruciating that it had Jiang Yan double over in pain. She really wanted to skip the antiseptic. But Ding Yuxi worried that the wound would get infected and then it’d hurt more. So, Ding Yuxi comes up with the idea of shouting loudly together, in hopes that this would distract Jiang Yan when she applied the antisceptic solution. It was so loud that probably the people outside on the streets of Tangier could hear, but the idea totally worked! It was such a sweet scene and funny.
Another scene we really liked is the one towards the end of the season where Ding Yuxi accompanies Jiang Yan through the early hours of the night to help her make sweet desserts/snacks for the wedding episode that features towards the end of the season. Everyone had headed off for the night. Ding Yuxi had also looked like he was turning in for the night, but he returned, and stayed to work alongside Jiang Yan until 4 a.m. when everything she needed to make was done.
Shen Yue and Zhai Xiaowen is a pretty cool team. The two often teamed up to work on creating the pages of the menu and worked together on the third floor making drinks or selling drinks at their pop-up stall outside the restaurant. We initially didn’t think too much about the interactions, except that they really love to joke around and laugh a lot.
But in the final episode, Shen Yue revealed that she found it hard to fit in. She didn’t know how to interact with everyone, and it was Zhai Xiaowen’s friendliness who had brought into the group. He brought her downstairs from the third floor to do her tasks. He opened a stall with her to sell drinks, and on the second day, he dragged her around, making her help take photos of him.
It was revealed that before this show, they weren’t familiar with each other. But in the episodes, the way they got along, laughing and joking so much, it was as if they had met and worked together before. Respect for Zhai Xiaowen for looking out for Shen Yue, too. In the final, Shen Yue had told Zhai Xiaowen he was someone she was most grateful for.
It’s hard to imagine the next season topping Season 9. That farewell scene had us tearing up so much. For us, Ding Yuxi is the standout not only for this season but for all the The Chinese Restaurant seasons we’ve watched so far. He’s such a good person, so hardworking, so capable, so unbelievably caring of everyone, and we feel he had the greatest seriousness towards promoting Chinese cuisine and Chinese culture to the world. It didn’t feel like it was just a variety show to him where he was there to participate in. With all the things he brought along with the purpose of promoting the restaurant, it felt like his desire and dedication to promoting Chinese cuisine and culture is no less than Chef Lin’s desire to represent Chinese culinary culture in the best way. Can there be anyone better next season?
The cast as a whole—can there be a better group of people next season? We love the cohesiveness of this group. They all work so well together. They are all quite talkative and expressive. There’s no one who comes off as quite reserved or distant. The show could get any combination of the cast together on screen, and their interactions would entertain and hold attention because they all interact so well together. It’s the only season we’ve gone and watched the main version and the extended version, and sometimes even the shorter edited versions which Mango TV likes to release after releasing the main version.
But because of Season 9, we will be on the lookout for the 10th season, just like it’s because of Season 9 that we went back to all the past seasons we had access to watching and watched them. We discovered that each season has interesting themes and challenges which make each season just a bit different and quite enjoyable to watch. We also just like watching yummy food.
Season 6 was working with organic ingredients and livestock, with the challenge of needing to travel a long distance to source their ingredients from farms. Season 7 introduced a two-team restaurant, where the cast members split into two teams to compete against each other in hopes of encouraging more dish creativity and testing the teams’ ability to adapt and overcome challenges (we personally didn’t like this split-team concept, but the season was still pretty good to watch). Season 8 had the challenge of creating technically high Chinese dishes and trying to attract a rather hard crowd to attract to come dine at The Chinese Restaurant in a touristic part of France. And of course, Season 9 had the challenge of being a startup, needing to do quite a bit of research on local tastes, adapt Chinese cuisine to these local tastes, and needing to buy everything.
The Chinese Restaurant also features adorable little animations that make us laugh a bit. We love these.
Watching the actors/actresses/singers speak English to try to get customers to try their restaurant in a foreign country is interesting, too. With the last few seasons of The Chinese Restaurant taking place overseas, it’s a great place to discover the foreign language skills of the cast.
We had never heard Ding Yuxi speak English before watching The Chinese Restaurant, so we were pleasantly surprised at how good his English is. It’s quite fluent. He can hold long conversations with English speakers perfectly fine and even offer English-to-Chinese translations.
Patrick’s English is amazing. His Chinese is also amazing. Never would we have guessed Chinese was not his native language until there was a scene where he questioned why a phrase was said the way it was said in Chinese. He was mentioned as being of the greatest help to Huang Xiaoming because of his ability to speak English, Chinese, and French to the locals in Morocco. What a smart, multilingual person.
Then there are the celebrities cooking, showing off their skills. We don’t know why, but we really like seeing who can flip a pan like a pro. Both Ding Yuxi and Shen Yue seemed to have become pretty good at it by the end of the show. They don’t even flinch when their pans catch flames. It quite cool to watch them gain that skill with Chef Lin guiding them.
On the topic of Chef Lin, he didn’t get to show off his culinary expertise as much this season, as the season let Ding Yuxi, Shen Yue, Zhai Xiaowen, Patrick, and Huang Xiaoming make quite a number of dishes/desserts. Jiang Yan, she, too, should be included in the group of artists who also made dishes and desserts, but we see her as part of the chef team this season. She was often seen helping/mentoring Zhai Xiaowen, Patrick, and Shen Yue at times, like how Chef Lin was mentoring Ding Yuxi and, at times, Shen Yue. To see Chef Lin’s skills and creativity, Season 8 displays that the most, with him producing some beautiful dishes with high technical difficulty. He’s quite cool when he’s doing what he does best.
If anyone hasn’t watched The Chinese Restaurant, Season 9, we recommend it. Watch it for the amazing chemistry between the cast. Watch it for the food. Watch it to admire Ding Yuxi’s exceptional and interesting character.
We mentioned earlier about how mannerly Ding Yuxi is. In Episode 12, during the farewell speeches, even being overwhelmed with emotions, he didn’t fail to leap to his feet to bow as Huang Xiaoming bowed to them to thank them for their hard work this season. Not only does he bow, but he makes sure the bow is lower to show respect to a senior colleague.
In Episode 8, Ding Yuxi injures his finger over the lid of an opened tin can and tries to hide it from Chef Lin because he didn’t want to worry him and cause a break in work.
Ding Yuxi’s attempt to deny the blood-stained tissue Chef Lin spotted on the ground was quite interesting to see. Chef Lin had already suspected Ding Yuxi had injured himself in some way, but Ding Yuxi tried his best to avoid drawing attention to the fact by claiming the tissue was something he just spotted himself and went to dispose of.
Chef Lin persists, approaching and asking him directly whether he cut his hand. Ding Yuxi tried to deny it, coughing a little as he appeared uncomfortable with lying about not having cut his finger. In the end, he explains what had happened and tries to relieve Chef Lin’s concerns with telling him that he’s taken care of the wound appropriately and that it was a minor cut that was very normal to have happen.
It’s true that he’s fine and that the cut wasn’t serious enough to fuss over. The show also showed Ding Yuxi taking great care to protect the cut from infection as well as contaminating whatever he’s working on. But seeing him not even allow himself to reveal he’d been cut at all, it really seems to be true that he will only let himself worry and take care of others and allow others to trouble him, but he won’t allow others to worry and take care of him, nor will he allow himself to trouble others.
The above clip is from the variety show, Hello Saturday, which the cast went on to promote The Chinese Restaurant, Season 9. Even on Hello Saturday, Ding Yuxi was looking out for others.
It’s of a game in which Ding Yuxi is an opponent of Jiang Yan and Patrick in one of the games. It involves a dance-off and an attack mode where the three pairs, Jiang Yan and Patrick, Ding Yuxi and Meng Ziyi, and Yang Di and Ding Chengxin, try to remove the tail around the other’s waist.
When the game starts, the pairs naturally end up with Yang Di and Ding Chengxin dancing off against Ding Yuxi and Meng Ziyi. It leaves Jiang Yan and Patrick dancing off against no one. It has Jiang Yan shout, “Is no one going to challenge us?” Ding Yuxi hears her and immediately moves to them and goes all out dancing off against her and Patrick.
When we first saw this, we just thought Ding Yuxi was just going all out and being entertaining. But a second watch shows that maybe Ding Yuxi amped up his dancing to draw the others to Jiang Yan and Patrick’s position so that they’re all there challenging each other.
Above is a set of photos of Ding Yuxi shining on the world stage at the Milan Fashion Week held at the end of September 2025. We couldn’t help but drop these photos in this blog because of the eye-catching styles he wore as Versace’s Global Ambassador. He captured quite a bit of media attention for his gentlemanly, aristocratic aura when he appeared before the world’s fashion photographers. There were also some equally captivating shots of him that give off the vibe of a dark and dangerous character in a crime or undercover agent kind of film.
Here’s to cheering Ding Yuxi on to continue achieving bigger and better things and gaining even greater recognition all around the world. Good, kindhearted, hardworking and dedicated people deserve to be rewarded with everything they set their minds on.
Watch The Chinese Restaurant, Season 9
