*The characters are a metaphor for bad parenting!*
This show didn't leave a huge impression on me but it gets a 9/10 for being the first Chinese modern drama that I watched all the way through and that deserves recognition if anything does. It's also not a bad show.
You should check this show out if you like:
1. Found family trope
2.Second-hand embarrassment
3.Slice of life
4.Food
5.Watching other people eat food while you're not
6.Food as a love language
7.Extensive and blatant verbal abuse of children throughout childhood and well into adulthood
8.Barely-there romance
9.Friendship and girls-supporting-girls
10.Easily resolved misunderstandings that don't stress the viewer out at all
11.Half-assed, there-only-for-laughs love triangles
12.Stories that handle concepts of trauma
13.Barely hidden implications about non-traditional family units (aka families with same-gender parents) being healthier than forced traditional family units.
14. Mothers having weird things for their kids...it's...complicated!

Summary: The story follows a widowed man named Li Hai Chao who runs a small noodle shop and takes care of his daughter on his own. He ends up becoming the primary caretaker for two neglected boys in the neighborhood and together with the upstairs neighbor dude, they make up a sweet, unconventional family unit. Then years later, the abusive parents show up and take the boys away just to prove that it's never too late to deeply traumatize and scar your children if you are determined enough!

So this show...is so comforting and cozy while also giving the viewers terrible anxiety. It's truly awe-inspiring how much drama they fit into a show that essentially has no central plot. Like I mentioned, the show is a "slice of life" type of show so for the most part it's about these people dealing with the banal difficulties of real-life but the circumstances of the characters are so dramatized and heightened that their daily issues involve weirdly high stakes.

Story: I really appreciate the time the show takes to really drive home the level of abuse and trauma parents can unpack on their children, intentionally or not. The whole concept of this show as I see it is challenging parenting norms of China, revealing the dark side of filial piety and asking real questions about what a true family consists of, and if blood really is thicker than water, or more importantly...should it be?!
Every one of the younger members of the cast (That is the main three kids, Jian Jian, Ling Xiao, and He ZiQiu as well as Ming Yue and Tang Can) are each different manifestations of traumatized children who grow up with some form of parental deficiency.
Jian Jian: Motherless, great dad. she is the least f*cked up one of the bunch. Her thing is that she was pampered because her dad didn't have the heart to be hard on her and she ends up rather demanding and unruly. She's very normal. She has almost no drama going on a personal level (just romantic bs). Although I did find her lack of sexual identity a bit odd given that she is the main "romantic" lead of the show. But I'm just gonna assume that's a cultural thing since "cute" girls seem to outweigh "mature" girls in terms of likability.
Next comes, Ling Xiao: Abusive mother, absent-ish father. He's just SO traumatized. He is the result of the most uncomplicated form of abuse. Depressed, with anxiety disorder. (He has little sense of preservation because he thinks he is unworthy of love and deserves the abuse he gets.)
He ZiQiu: He is the result of abandonment. He is emotionally suppressed and a perfectionist. (because he thinks he has to prove he deserves love)
Ming Yue: Is the result of a controlling mother and an absent father. She is childish and helpless as an adult. She is incapable of making any decisions. Utterly paralyzed between pleasing her mother and resenting her.
Tang Can: Commodified child star, burnt out. She is the example of a child who was used by her parents and praised when she brought in a profit and then later beaten down and ridiculed when she lost her benefits.
The story takes such good care of showing how damaged each of these characters are as adults because of everything that happened to them as children. The big event of the plot comes around episode 10 when Ling Xiao and He ZiQiu who had gotten away with moderate trauma, end up getting dragged back into really terrible family situations, suffer a form of arrested development, get traumatized even worse than before. The show is so good at showing their frozen mental and emotional state once they return to the story.
Then there's a lot of random plots at every turn with each revealing a new level of awful things that have happened to these kids. There are unnecessary love triangles but they seem to mostly be there for humor and they are all resolved quite fast and easily.
My main issue with the plot is that it ends up debunking its own hypothesis. By the end of the show, every single bad mother (and OH they were all bad!) gets redeemed one way or another and the children just resume their filial piety. Sure, there are important conversations that come up but it feels a little pointless. Plots are either undone or swiped under a rug to make a happy ending possible. There's no real statement made about bad parenting patterns.
There is also the fact that the healthiest family unit in the story consists of two men raising three kids together which says a lot about the argument that families must look a certain way for children to grow up mentally stable and healthy but then three fourth of the way into the show, it has to make up a romance for one of the men, in a very meh performance of "no homo".

Acting: The older actors were amazing. The younger ones were good too. Particularly Steven Zhang whose fans will not let anyone forget just how great he was in the show! lol. Seven Tan is praised a lot for this show but except for a couple of scenes here and there, I didn't love the choices made for the character so I didn't love her performance even though I think she did great with what she was given. Song Weilong is the one member of the main cast I am hesitant to pass judgment on. He plays a deeply depressed character and his character comes across as extremely depressed and introverted, so I think he did do an amazing job portraying that but that also means his character is significantly less flashy than Steven Zhang's so he can seem like he didn't do a good job and was just awkward. Didn't love the supporting casts' acting much. But again. similar to Seven Tan, their childish and exaggerated performances do add up with their characters' personalities so maybe they didn't have bad performances so much as their characters were just exaggerated and irritating!

The music was fine. Except for when that one song keeps repeating a million times over every time something emotional happens. A lot of cdrama/kdramas do this. Much to my displeasure...

The production was good. Especially compared to all the modern cdramas I have dropped. The audio was good, set design, cinematography and etc. were good in the way that good things go unnoticed because they are natural.

Negatives: There is a romance between two of the main kids. I think it's best to know this and go into the show because some people tried to make a "this is incest" argument which, no it's not. Stop trying to make a mockery of a serious issue. It's like, people love the childhood friends to lovers trope until they actually get to see that transition and suddenly it's gross and "how can you fall for someone you played with when you were kids?!" well that's what friends to lovers looks like in practice, Karen. It's literally in the name! Don't like it, don't watch! Knowing what to expect, you can notice all the tiny easter eggs the creators put in the childhood era about a possible future romance. It's also decidedly melodramatic. Some would say the childhood era was better than the adult era. I think everyone needs to accept that people can't stay kids forever and it's weird to love watching grown-ass people acting like 15-year-olds.

I would not personally rewatch it. It's not really something that I was super wowed by. It was good but just for one watch.