SaintCavish Season 3: Back on the Road Filming Food in China

Season 3 of SaintCavish is officially underway.

Chris SaintCavish and I started making these documentaries a couple of years ago - finding interesting stories about food in China, going there, and seeing how much nerdyness we could fit into a 10-20 minute long episode. Hear us chat about it.

The production has remained deliberately small. I shoot and edit the films with help from an assistant. Big film crews come with equipment, permits, logistics and unwanted attention. Although, as Chris puts it, we're basically "bloggers with a nice camera" in the eyes of the Chinese government, we'd rather avoid unnecessary scrutiny. So: no boom mics, no trucks full of equipment, skeleton crew, easy in and easy out.

It also changes the way we film restaurants. We don't shut them down or take over kitchens. We slip in, film people doing what they would normally be doing, and slip back out. As two tall white guys wandering around rural China, we get enough attention as it is.

This past summer, SaintCavish was nominated for a 2026 James Beard Media Award for Docuseries Visual Media, alongside productions including Netflix's Chef's Table: Legends. Not something we particularly expected when we started making videos for our youtube channel.

Season 3 starts in Guizhou, looking at the province's extraordinary culture of sour flavours and fermentation, before heading to Chongqing for hotpot. Coming up, we travel to Yunnan with Andy Ricker to explore Dai food and its connections to northern Thailand.

This remains very much a passion project. We're grateful to Rockbund and a few friends who invested in the channel for covering the costs of this season, but Chris and I keep making SaintCavish for the same reason we started it: we love doing it.