The young son of a Michelin-star winning pastry chef wants nothing more than to follow in his mother’s footsteps and light the patisserie world on fire but there’s a problem- he was born without the ability to taste sweetness. After being thrown out of his school’s pastry program due to his recipes being either too cloyingly sweet or overly bitter he does what any other person in his situation would- heavy amounts of psychedelic drugs with some self-loathing thrown in for good measure. While on a particularly potent peyote/ayahuasca cocktail he experiences a vision of a Shaolin monk, who implores him to travel to southern China to undergo training at his forest temple, promising him that there is a fruit found there containing compounds hundreds of times sweeter than sugar and that it may cure his stunted palate.
Upon waking the next morning traces of the vision remain, and he hurriedly gets himself together to go score more peyote before stopping at his front mirror to discover he has geographical coordinates on his forearm, apparently burned into his skin the night before by his brûlée torch. He googles the coordinates, which are indeed in southern China, and after guilting his mom for one last favor he is on his way, with the stipulation that a camera crew from her Food Network show follow along to document the journey and hopefully salvage something commercial out of this whole mess.
It’s one part Tropic Thunder, one part Story of Ricky, and one part Beat Bobby Flay as our hero contends with heavily guarded opium fields, ornery giant pandas, and the struggle of transmitting dailies back to the states via satellite uplinks from the heart of a forest. Witness the origin of the monk fruit craze brought to us by the only filmmaker qualified to do so, Jerry Seinfeld, in this follow up to his Pop-Tart movie.