The Culinary Successor encounter in Where Winds Meet is what unlocks the Crispy Pheasant buff food recipe. On paper, it is simple: eat your way through street stalls until an encounter called Recipe’s Heir / Recipe’s Heir Encounter appears. In practice, many players run into a frustrating set of invisible conditions.
Culinary Successor and Crispy Pheasant basics
| Item / Quest | Type | Effect / Purpose | Key Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Culinary Successor | Encounter | Triggers a short quest chain about a recipe heir. | Eating from bowl vendors until the encounter unlocks. |
| Recipe’s Heir / Recipe’s Heir Encounter | Encounter entry | Actual encounter entry that pops after conditions are met, tied to Culinary Successor. | Appears as a new encounter once conditions are satisfied. |
| Crispy Pheasant | Buff Food recipe | Physical Attack +20–40 for 30 minutes, 1 buff at a time, inactive in Trials. | Complete Encounter – Culinary Successor to unlock the recipe. |
Crispy Pheasant sits in the Buff Food tab of the cooking menu. It requires Cooking Level 41 and these ingredients:
| Recipe | Cooking Level | Effect | Stamina Cost | Ingredients | How to Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crispy Pheasant | 41 | Physical Attack +20–40 for 30 minutes (one food buff active at a time, inactive in Trials). | 8 | Lethal Frog Meat x2, Mushrooms x2, Vicious Flower x1 | Complete Encounter – Culinary Successor |
Where to go and who to talk to
The encounter is tied to the game’s street food vendors – NPCs with a small white bowl icon above their heads. These vendors appear in towns and market areas, especially around:
- Qinghe / Qing area (early-game town and surroundings)
- Heaven’s Pier
- Kaifeng markets (for extra vendors, not strictly required to trigger)
The world map does not show these vendors. They only appear as bowl icons on the minimap, so you have to be nearby and look at the minimap to see them.
One commonly used route in the Qing area involves five bowl vendors clustered around the town and nearby roads. Some map screenshots group them with ham-shaped markers, and one of those spots has two vendors almost next to each other. The exact coordinates are less important than the pattern: you need a small set of bowl vendors, and you must fully sample what they sell.
How to trigger Culinary Successor
In simple terms: find bowl vendors, buy their food, actually eat it from your inventory, and clear out any cluttered encounters until Recipe’s Heir appears. The details matter.
1. Find the bowl vendors
- Head to Qing’s main town and nearby market roads.
- Watch your minimap for white bowl icons and walk toward them.
- Each bowl icon corresponds to a food stall NPC.
- There are five key vendors that players use to trigger the encounter; one location has two vendors close together.
2. Buy the right dishes from each vendor
Each bowl vendor usually sells two dishes:
- their “signature” dish, often the one with better stats
- a cheaper “home-cooked” or simpler dish
Players have triggered the encounter using slightly different purchase patterns, but the most reliable method is:
- Buy at least one of each dish from that vendor, ideally two of each, to speed up friendship gain.
- Do this for all five vendors you are focusing on.
Some runs appear to work with just the signature dish per vendor, but others did not pop until both dishes had been eaten. If you want to avoid a fourth or fifth loop, treat “buy both” as the baseline.
3. Eat the food from your bag (it is not auto-consumed)
Buying from a stall does not automatically consume the food. This is where many runs fail.
On PC:
- Press B to open your Bag.
- Go to the Food tab.
- Right-click each purchased dish to eat it.
Make sure you eat every unique dish type from the five vendors. If you are unsure, buy and eat again; the second time will not always grant Elegance or extra benefit, but it guarantees you did not miss a type.
4. Raise friendship with the vendors (when needed)
Eating vendor food raises two things at once:
- Your friendship bar with that vendor.
- Your Elegance stat.
In some runs, the encounter appeared as soon as all dishes were eaten once. In others, it did not appear until friendship was pushed much higher, or even to max, on most of the vendors.
- Several players triggered Recipe’s Heir once they had maxed friendship with all or most of the five vendors.
- Others got it at 4 out of 5 vendors maxed, with their Elegance stat landing in the 60s.
If your first “eat-everything-once” loop fails, stay at the stalls and:
- Keep buying food from the same vendors until their friendship bars fill.
- Aim to max at least four vendors, five if you have the stamina and coins.
This approach costs silver, and one player reported spending about 2,000 coins and gaining Elegance from 30 up to 75 before the encounter finally triggered.
5. Clear your encounter list cap
There appears to be a limit on how many encounters you can have active or pending at once. When that list is full, new encounters, including Recipe’s Heir, will not surface even if the game has internally flagged you as qualifying.
To avoid this situation:
- Open your Journal and check the Encounter section.
- Complete or abandon all active or nearly expired encounters.
- Once your encounter list is mostly empty, return to the food vendors and run the loop again (buy and eat).
Multiple players only saw Recipe’s Heir appear after they cleared their encounter list and then revisited the food stalls. In one case, the encounter popped after eating the sixth dish out of ten on a fresh post-clear run.
6. Look for “Recipe’s Heir” in encounters
When the game finally accepts that you are a true foodie, it creates a new encounter:
- Name: Recipe’s Heir / Encounter: Recipe’s Heir
- Category: Encounter quest, often listed without any obvious reward text
Key details:
- The encounter may already be in your encounter list, but without showing the Crispy Pheasant recipe as a reward, which makes it easy to ignore.
- Players have seen it tied to locations like Heaven’s Pier; one had the pop occur while at max affinity with two Heaven’s Pier food vendors after eating their dishes again.
- The encounter’s starting point may be in a different area from where you were eating, so you might need to travel to its marked location on the map once it appears.
Once you complete Recipe’s Heir, the game flags Encounter – Culinary Successor as cleared for your account, and the Crispy Pheasant recipe becomes available in your Cooking menu.
Quirks and edge cases players encounter
The interaction between food stalls, friendship, Elegance, and encounter caps leads to several common edge cases.
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Practical Fix |
|---|---|---|
| You ate at all 5 vendors, no encounter pops. | Food was bought but not eaten; or an encounter cap is blocking new encounters. | Eat dishes from the Bag; clear all active/inactive encounters; repeat the vendor loop. |
| Friendship maxed with all bowl vendors, still nothing. | A story/exploration quest gate or missed food type. | Complete “Hotpot Fever” (Exploration – Culinary) and “Forged Tales” (Encounter); rebuy and eat each stall’s dishes. |
| Elegance climbs but no quest. | Elegance alone is not the trigger; the game still needs a specific combination of eaten dishes and encounter space. | Focus on clearing encounters and verifying that every unique dish from the five vendors has been eaten. |
| Recipe’s Heir was in encounters the whole time. | The encounter does not show Crispy Pheasant in its reward list, so it is easy to overlook. | Open your encounter list carefully; complete any encounter that references a recipe heir or culinary successor. |
Some players also reported that the encounter only triggered after they were physically close to the area linked to Recipe’s Heir (for example, near Battlecrest Slope) while finishing their food loop. If the usual steps fail, try doing another vendor run while standing near that location.
What you gain once Culinary Successor is done
After completing Recipe’s Heir and finishing the Culinary Successor chain, your account permanently gains the recipe for Crispy Pheasant. From there:
- Go to any cooking pot and open the Cooking menu.
- Switch to the Buff Food tab.
- Find Crispy Pheasant under Level 41 recipes.
The recipe is a mid-tier physical attack buff that fits well between Rotisserie Venison and the high-end Double Shreds:
| Buff Food | Cooking Level | Effect | How to Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rotisserie Venison | 20 | Physical Attack +10–20 for 30 minutes. | Unlock The Thirteen Chambers. |
| Crispy Pheasant | 41 | Physical Attack +20–40 for 30 minutes. | Complete Encounter – Culinary Successor. |
| Double Shreds | 61 | Physical Attack +50–100 for 30 minutes. | Obtain the Fishing Contest recipes. |
All buff foods follow the same rules:
- Only one food buff can be active at a time.
- Reusing the same food refreshes duration; it does not stack further.
- Food buffs are inactive during Trials and do not increase Martial Mastery.
Crispy Pheasant is a strong everyday Physical Attack boost once you have consistent access to Lethal Frog Meat and Vicious Flowers, and it is a key part of pushing damage in open-world fights and world bosses outside of Trials.
When the steps above are followed carefully—finding actual bowl vendors, eating rather than hoarding their dishes, raising friendship, emptying the encounter list, and then completing the Recipe’s Heir encounter—Culinary Successor stops being a mystery gate and becomes a straightforward, if slightly costly, food tour that unlocks one of the game’s most useful midgame recipes.
