Summary
Tastefully Yours lays the finale’s table effectively in Episode 9, but the obviousness of the storytelling leads to surprisingly muted emotion.
Let’s be frank – we’ve pretty much known since the beginning that Tastefully Yours is going to have a predictable, happy ending. Is this a bad thing? Depends on who you ask. But either way, Episode 9, the penultimate instalment, is all about setting the table – no, the food puns aren’t over just yet – for the finale and obligatory romantic and professional developments. And this close to the end, I think I can see the seams a bit more than I’d like.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine. Charming, even. But I’d wager there were slightly more interesting ways of accomplishing the same objectives. I was happy that we excised the Japan subplot just in time for Beom-woo to drop the bombshell on Yeon-joo, since that seemed like the best way of cramming all the right small-scale drama into the final two episodes. But there’s something a bit rote about how it’s handled. There’s a twist setting up a cook-off showdown that feels like contrivance, and a lot of the individual development of Beom-woo and Yeon-joo occurs separately so they can be brought back together later for the good of Jungjae. It works, undeniably, but it’s a little too easy.
It occurs to me that perhaps the show would have been better without the Japan subplot entirely, letting the revelation happen earlier and leaving a couple more episodes to work through its fallout. That would have probably helped. Here, Yeon-joo returns to work in classic “the morning after the night before” style to inform Chan-seong and Myeong-sook that Beom-woo won’t be joining them. It’s only later, when pressed, that she reveals he deceived them, but it means that Beom-woo is kept at arm’s length, left to drown his sorrows while Yeo-ul gets very angry and throws threats around.
The predictable contrivance that weasels into Tastefully Yours Episode 9 is Jungjae being given three stars in the Diamant list by a former customer, entering the restaurant into an upcoming cook-off right after its closure, and Yeon-joo taking a bit of a sabbatical. You can see clearly how the foodie undercurrents are fittingly being put to the task of resolving the underlying conflict between Beom-woo and Yeo-ul/Hansang, and the small-scale romantic drama between Beom-woo and Yeon-joo. I could practically recap the finale now, and I imagine I’d be spot on.
The extent to which this is a criticism depends on what attracted you to Tastefully Yours in the first place. I have repeatedly said that the show’s very competent adherence to tropes has largely been beneficial to it, but mostly in the context of highlighting the minor subversions, of which there are none here. The familiar rigging of a romantic drama leaves little room for anything to happen in the finale beyond the things we all already know will happen. Beom-woo returns to help Jungjae in the cook-off, and Yeon-joo is compelled to give him another chance because he has chosen a side. I reckon this all might have worked better with stronger intervening drama where Beom-woo and Yeon-joo had to live in the spectre of the betrayal for longer.
But whatever. Ultimately, we want Beom-woo and Yeon-joo to end up together, which I’m sure they will, we want Jungjae to ace the cook-off, and we want to see Yeo-ul and co humbled. The inevitability does make all that feel too obvious and easy, but if it gets us to the outcomes we’ve been hoping for all season, isn’t that a good thing? I’d argue it just might be, though mileage may vary.
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