At the Gu Family Noodle Restaurant in an ancient town, grandfather Gu Wenwen sets a test for his granddaughter Lin Tingyu: within one month, she must make the town's five old neighbors—Auntie Yang, Uncle Liu, Auntie Zhou, Old Chen, and Granny Wu—all approve of the noodles she makes, before she can truly take over the craftsmanship of the Gu Family Noodle Restaurant. Lin Tingyu thus embarks on the path of learning to make noodles; she visits the five neighbors one by one, exploring the techniques bit by bit: learning about the green vegetables and the timing of adding salt for plain soup noodles from Auntie Yang; learning from Liu the butcher that the soup base must use cylinder bones; following Auntie Zhou to comprehend the palm-root exertion in kneading dough; learning to control the fire in boiling noodles from Old Chen; and figuring out the saltiness proportion of coarse sea salt from Granny Wu, while also hearing past stories of the Winter Solstice fermented rice-wine noodles.