The restaurant owner introduced them to the cook, a local farmer around 60 years old, who usually takes at least six hours to cook the dish.
The process includes boiling the streaky pork, poking holes in the meat, frying the meat and then mixing it with fried taro before steaming everything for 40 minutes.
Alongside the food, the human stories in the film are also interesting.
A Guangdong martial arts practitioner uses the festival banquet as a social networking platform to introduce his son to veterans of the art; a Taiwan woman returns to her hometown from Beijing to rediscover the flavors she has been missing.
But despite the sentimentality and nostalgia in the film, Chen says the movie's tone is joyful.
Explaining his philosophy behind making the film, the 36-year-old director says: "I always regard the vanishing of a culture or the disappearance of dishes as an unavoidable, normal trend in a rapidly changing society.
"But people in the future will at least have a chances to see these things recorded clearly on film, which makes our job more significant than only defining it (the movie) as a commercial documentary."
Meanwhile, despite its significance, the film does not expect to become a huge commercial success.
And the example given is that of French director Jacques Perrin's Ocean.
The world's highest-grossing documentary feature earned only 25 million yuan ($3.8 million) after a one-month Chinese mainland release in 2011, a figure easily accessed by a domestic blockbuster on its first day.
Chen Xiaoqing, the chief director, says: A Bite of China is not the kind of commercial title "born for money".
"I will never do a movie just aiming for the box office, and I rarely care about the reviews," he says.
But Li Yansong, president of iQiyi Motion Pictures, says some TV series have led to "amazing" click numbers on the site, and believes its popularity will influence the moviegoers.
