This is the moment a young woman who enthusiastically applied for a job at a new restaurant with a gourmet menu was allegedly seen photographing the contents of their secret cookbook.

The video of the incident showing the smartly-dressed young woman using a mobile phone to photograph pages of recipes has caused intense debate after it was captured by the restaurant in Huzhou, a prefecture-level city in China's eastern Zhejiang Province.

The restaurant complained that they had only recently opened and had decided to employ a young woman after she had worked incredibly hard to impress chefs and been given a temporary position in the newly opened restaurant as a reward.

She was required to undergo a four-day probationary period, and managers were shocked when they checked the CCTV footage from May 21 and noticed that she had been brazenly photographing the secret recipes that they had spent years preparing for the gourmet restaurant's launch.

They claimed that the young woman was probably going to sell them to a rival, destroying the strategy for success that they had hoped would catapult them to the top spot on the local gourmet scene.

At present, the police have summoned the employee and the case is under further investigation.

The store also stated that it would strengthen internal management and improve the confidentiality system to ensure that similar incidents will not happen again.