The Onion-Cutting Ninja's Secret Crush

123 A Kind Person

Mister Yu smiled happily when everyone turned to look at him. "Well, what am I supposed to say? Xiao Ming just convinced me. I figured he would be a good addition to this kind of show."

The contestants started muttering again, feeling that this was really too lacking of an explanation! How could he fob them off with just this?

Fan Mei had the same thoughts and she wasn't the kind to keep her doubts silent. She looked up to Mister Yu when it came to cooking. She really didn't think that he should have a high opinion of Xiao Ming. After all, even though she hadn't looked into his channel too much, it had still seemed too low-effort. "Mister Yu, you can't just say you felt he was a good fit and ask us to believe that. Are you sure you weren't influenced? The other channels wouldn't have gotten this popular if they had no ability and some of these only have one person on the channel instead of three. It should have been much easier to incorporate them into the show."

Mister Yu rubbed his chin at that, wondering how to best explain. "Well, there were several things that I considered. In fact, the number of people involved in the channels was one thing that also stood out to me.

"Now, you have to know that I don't know too much about any of those channels. I really just saw the material that producer Bian showed me and decided based on that. There were some that I didn't feel were fitting immediately upon watching while for others, it took some comparison. For example, there was a channel they showed me that always had two women cooking together."

Fan Mei nodded. "That should be Little Kitchen. The two of them are mother and daughter and have been cooking together for more than a decade. They are on the ranking."

Mister Yu didn't know much about the stories behind the channels but producer Bian had given him some information at least. What Fan Mei said about Little Kitchen rang familiar. "Ah, yes, that should have been them. They were really good and I was considering them until almost the end. But finally, I figured that it wouldn't fit what the producer had told me he had in mind for the show.

"What he was looking for was a second main judge that would be at my side in all the episodes while only the third judge would be swapped out each week. Thinking about that, I felt that this meant that the person I chose should fulfill certain points. One of that would be to be able to judge on his own.

"Now, I guess all these streamers would be able to do that to an extent. After all, they are all cooking regularly. But in the videos that the producer showed me for this particular channel, it seemed that the two women were always working together closely.

"This doesn't mean that they wouldn't be able to judge dishes separately but I figured that it wouldn't be right to just ask one of them to be on the show. Which one should even be invited? For this channel, clearly, while both members are good alone, it is the way they interact with each other and complement each other's knowledge that makes this channel special. It wouldn't have felt right to take that from them for the show. So no, if they were to be invited, I think that both of them should have been."

The contestants that were a little more knowledgeable about the food streamer scene and had watched some videos from Little Kitchen knew exactly what Mister Yu meant. For those two, the interplay of their differences and similarities was their appeal.

The mother was cooking in a very traditional way, often telling the viewers about her mother and grandmother had made this or that recipe and how she had learned from them. Meanwhile, the daughter would bring in new ideas from outside that she chanced upon while at university, got from a friend, or saw online. Then, they would go through those things together, trying the recipes together and often adjusting them so it fit their taste and style better.