This Is Not What I Expected 2017

26-year-old Gu Sheng Nan is a chef at a hotel. One day, Lu Jin leaves a business meeting and spots Gu Sheng Nan vandalising his car, mistaking it for a different vehicle. Lu Jin heads to a hotel where he has his next buyout plan and discovers that Gu Sheng Nan is also employed there as a chef. To persuade Lu Jin to buy the hotel, the manager has each of the chefs prepare a dish for him. He’s dissatisfied with all of them until the manager asks Gu Sheng Nan to cook a special dish for Lu Jin. When the dish is served, Lu Jin responds with genuine delight and decides to keep the hotel afloat, but only if the chef continues to cook for him.

The next night, Lu Jin spots Gu Sheng Nan on the roof, drunk, and she accidentally falls onto his balcony. He confronts her, unaware that she’s the chef who cooked for him. Over the following weeks, Lu Jin keeps crossing paths with Gu Sheng Nan, growing convinced that she bears him a personal vendetta. Eventually, he concludes that Gu Sheng Nan is the secret chef who has been cooking for him all along.

While Gu Sheng Nan takes time off, Lu Jin tracks down where she lives and shows up, asking her to cook for him. He ends up falling asleep on Gu Sheng Nan’s couch after a meal, turning this into a daily ritual where he visits her apartment to eat and sleep on her couch. One night they share puffer fish together—unbeknownst to Lu Jin, the fish was bad and had been given to Gu Sheng Nan by a “rich friend” who is a fellow businessman trying to keep his boss satisfied with good food. The toxins make them both hallucinate while roaming the city, but the effects wear off for Lu Jin before Gu Sheng Nan, and he eventually carries her home. The next day, Lu Jin does not show up at the hotel.

Gu Sheng Nan goes to Lu Jin’s house and discovers he has his own personal chef, a woman, while Lu Jin explains that he stayed at the hotel and ate her cooking because his own personal chef was on leave. Gu Sheng Nan leaves in anger. Soon after, Lu Jin’s company informs him that the hotel will not meet standards and will be repurposed for a different business. All workers are fired, and Gu Sheng Nan confronts Lu Jin, who admits there is no choice but to terminate staff. He even reflects on a hard lesson: to succeed in life, he once fired a worker who had worked twenty years for the company when he was only nineteen.

Lu Jin travels to London for a time and, while there, asks his personal chef to join him for dinner. She replies that she cannot because she has always cooked for just one person. That night, she texts him that she can no longer be his chef because she senses he wants more than just food—someone to share life with. Lu Jin returns to Shanghai, using a prior alarm system to locate Gu Sheng Nan and avoid her, but she escapes him. He eventually finds her again and tells her he has a place by his side, not in another job. They meet again on a balcony to watch the sunset, and even as credits roll, they linger, hungry, while he promises to cook for her. In the quiet of the night, Lu Jin suggests they watch the sunrise together.