| Director | Clifton Ko, Clifton Ko Chi-Sum |
|---|---|
| Genre | comedy film |
| Runtime | 95 min |
| Country | Hong Kong |
A man named Hui is the struggling proprietor of a Cantonese BBQ roast duck restaurant in Hong Kong. At the beginning of the film, Hui is visited by a health inspector, who finds a cockroach in his soup and other unsanitary conditions, and threatens to sue the restaurant. However, Hui's staff stop the inspector from leaving with evidence, allowing Hui to continue running the restaurant. While the restaurant is operated on ground floor, Hui lives upstairs with his wife and son. He receives a visit from his rich mother-in-law, who is convinced that her daughter, Ah Kuen, has married a good-for-nothing man.
Hui faces competition when a profit-oriented businessman, Danny Poon, opens what is to be the first of a fast food chain of fried chicken restaurants across the street from him. Danny's Chicken employs a wide range of marketing techniques that makes them instantly popular, causing Hui's business to plummet. Jealous of the employees at the rival chicken restaurant and fed up with their poor pay and working conditions, Hui's staff voice their dissatisfaction and one of the employees, Cuttlefish, leaves to work at Danny's Chicken. However, he discovers while being trained at Danny's Chicken that Poon's regimen is strict and humiliating. He is made to hand out leaflets outside the shop dressed as a chicken, much to Hui's disgust.
In response to Hui's dwindling business, his nagging mother-in-law offers to pay for a renovation, but Hui is at first too proud to accept. He finds out that his son visited Danny's Chicken with his girlfriend Judy, and decides to infiltrate the rival business dressed as an Indian woman, but is quickly exposed by Poon. Hui tries to turn his luck around by adopting Poon's marketing techniques and "packaging" in order to appeal to the fashionable crowd, redecorating and holding a disastrous karaoke night. He also begins to parade the street in a makeshift duck costume, leading to a physical altercation with Cuttlefish in his chicken suit that nearly gets them both arrested. His attempts only succeed in alienating his loyal customers, including a Buddhist nun whose regular order is vegetarian noodles with no lard.
Poon plots a final sabotage against Hui by releasing rats into the restaurant during a health inspection. Cuttlefish returns to the duck restaurant after he was fired for talking back to a customer, disillusioned with Poon's techniques to the point he even tried to foil the sabotage, and Hui refuses Poon's attempt to buy out the business that he has run for years. Hui overcomes his pride and accepts his mother-in-law's help to renovate the restaurant before she leaves for China. The renovation is a success, so much so that Danny's Chicken begins selling roast duck in imitation, but it is not as good as Hui's secret recipe. Angered that his fast food chain has been defeated, Poon resorts to an arson attempt that goes wrong and ends up setting Danny's Chicken on fire before he is rescued by Hui.