Chen Ting: The Chinese food influencer who's a hit from Barcelona to Beijing

Celebrations broke out at the Mercat (Market) del Fondo in Barcelona on March 28 to celebrate a massive milestone. Chen Ting had passed the five million follower mark on his social media following, and his Spanish friends were there to celebrate his achievement.

Since then he's tripled that number.

A tour guide, travel agent, and now a social media star, Ting (to his friends in Barcelona) shares Chinese food and culture with his friends in Spain, where he's lived for 25 years, recording videos of him sharing food and posting them online.

"I make food for small groups but my videos reach a lot of people online, a lot," Ting tells CGTN in fluent Spanish at his stall at the Fondo market in Barcelona, where we just catch him before he's off to cook in someone's house - one of his favourite pastimes.

"I think it's the positive nature of the videos and the interaction of cultures that gives my countrymen, I don't want to say an example, but they see someone doing it and living it and showing our delicious culinary culture, explaining Chinese history to people."

Ting rents a space in the local Fondo market in Barcelona in an innovative way – he doesn't actually sell anything there but instead uses it for show-cooking and food tasting, using fresh produce from the surrounding stalls, then bringing people together around the table, and posting the videos to his 15-million strong following in China.

"Just like dance or art," Ting continues, "food unites different cultures. You come out with a dish you carefully prepared and share it with people from different places and everyone wants to try some. Suddenly everyone is discussing, debating, enjoying.

"It's a cross-cultural universal language and it's so fulfilling for me."

Videos of him sharing Chinese dumplings, hot pots, steamed buns, noodles and much more get millions of views on Douyin (the Chinese TikTok), WeiBo, and other Chinese social media.

"My goal is to share the diverse and different food and culture from places that people maybe haven't heard of, like when we make a spicy dish that's from Sichuan for example, or Shanxi's famous noodles.

"Every day it's a different recipe and I tell them where it comes from, over there on the wall I have a map of China and I say see, this dish is from Shanghai or wherever.

"It makes me really proud that so many people are passionate about my culture outside China."

Sometimes he even takes the show on the road, bringing Chinese food to the streets of Barcelona, recording reactions and asking people if he can come to their houses to cook for them... they often say yes.

Ting's passion for sharing Chinese culinary culture is a big hit from Barcelona to Beijing, from Catalonia to Chongqing.

But his videos are about much more than food, they show a positive side of immigration and integration, how a universally shared love of food is something that unites us in a world that increasingly seeks to divide us. Maybe that's part of their massive popularity.