Really, I don’t have that many notes. It was a fun romp through Korean imperial and culinary history, and the main characters did have chemistry—but mostly when they hated each other….
Jeon Ji-young is a talented young chef who has just won a cooking competition in Paris that grants her funding to open her own fine-dining restaurant back in Seoul. Her father is a food historian, and in the process of flying back to Korea with a Joseon-era cookbook he’s requested from a French archive, some dubious and arcane combination of an eclipse, in-flight turbulence, and the cookbook whisks Ji-young back in time to Joseon during the rule of the worst king in Korean history: Yeonsangun (look him up: he did in fact suck). Not only does she arrive during his reign, she plops down right in the middle of the hunting ground he has seized from his peasants, and in the midst of the chaeyong to boot: a sort of draft of all marriageable women from the kingdom, supposedly as concubine material but really as a pretense to seek revenge against the nobles who Yeonsangun believes to have assassinated his mother the queen (this is also historical fact). Due to having paid attention in school, Ji-young clocks all of this right away and worms her way out of being executed as a gwinyeo (female revenge ghost) by cooking bibimbap for Yeonsangun: the king has a notoriously picky palate and is blown away by comfort food that won’t show up in Korea for another several hundred years. He makes Ji-young his head royal chef, promising to keep her alive and help her get back to her time as long as she keeps wowing him, and so she does—churning out boeuf bourginon, macarons and an array of other anachronistic dishes, much to the chagrin of Yeonsangun’s evil Fourth Consort, Kang Mok-Jo (also an actual historical b*tch), who’s part of a plot to poke at Yeonsangun’s tenuous mental health until he breaks and can be removed from the throne.
SPOILERS: Naturally, Yeonsangun falls in love with Jeon Ji-young, healing his trauma in the process and changing history—sort of. The show manages an ingenious legerdemain that keeps the historical record intact but allows Yeonsangun to redeem himself and escape to modern-day Seoul with Ji-young.
WHAT I WOULD KEEP: A lot of the show, like I said. The modern takes on Joseon cuisine that Ji-young comes up with are fascinating for foodies like me, and the animations of what her diners experience while tasting them are charming. The show lands some genuine points about how healing food and cooking can be when done with love. There’s some great supporting acting, most especially from Seo Yi-sook as the Queen Dowager (king’s paternal grandma) who warms both to her grandson and Ji-young while wrestling with the truly awful choice she made in the past to order her daughter-in-law’s execution: the show wisely leaves it a mystery whether that decision was justified or not and focuses instead on the understandable trauma it left Yeonsangun to bear. I also love the lean into what little we know about genius Joseon inventer Chang sun: he’s in some of the best scenes in the series, and not just when he’s inventing the world’s first pressure cooker!
WHAT I WOULD CHANGE:
- Kang Mok-jo as a scenery-chewing villain. The show already has one in Prince Jesun, her pimp and the mastermind of the plot to overthrow Yeonsangun in revenge for the first Literati purge that killed many of his friends. Since we know that Jesun bought Mok-jo as a child slave and groomed her to become 4th consort (and his own), it would be nice if the show could have saved some space for that trauma. There’s an intriguing moment where Mok-jo has to do away with her handmaiden/assassin to save herself from discovery, and it clearly upsets her terribly: this was a missed opportunity to build some backstory for the two of them, showing how they were preyed upon by Jesun. I would have built sympathy for the lack of choice Mok-jo really has in all the nasty things she does. I always like villains better, and am more terrified of them, when I can see part of myself in them. Mok-jo’s character was really a missed swing in that respect.
- The chemistry between Yeonsangun and Ji-young: it’s as flat as one of my soufflé pancakes—except for at the beginning when they hate each other. I would have kept that dynamic going waaaay longer to build up the suspense in their romance and make it feel earned, and it would have made more sense narratively to do so given both characters’ backstories and goals. But it seems the producers were worried about losing viewership, so they threw in a bunch of patently unbelievable and uncomfortably forced kissing scenes that just sucked the drama out of the drama. Also, I hate to say it, but Im Yoon-ah just isn’t a great romantic lead. She managed to kill the chemistry with Ji Chang-wook in The K2 as well, and that, my friends, takes some doing; he has more chemistry with set props than most K-drama actors do with their supposed love interests. Having said all that, I do think Im Yoon-ah is a talented comedic actor, and sweet, and so the scenes in Bon Appetit where she’s being funny or kind work very well. But unlike her knives in the show, she has no edge *whatsoever*, and so an edgy romance with Yeonsangun was never going to work. Yeonsangun and Kang Mok-jo make more electricity in the 3 scenes they have together than the main romance manages to generate across the whole series.
The Rookery 