Summary
Bon Appetit, Your Majesty gets off to a quintessential K-Drama start in Episodes 1 & 2, with all the right requisite elements. It isn’t immediately clear where it’s all going, but there’s enough charm and intrigue to keep us invested while we find out.
Bon Appetit, Your Majesty is, and I don’t say this lightly, possibly the most quintessentially “K-Drama” K-Drama that ever did K-Drama. There’s a K-pop idol lead, it’s set during the Joseon Dynasty with a lot of sumptuous production design and historical detail, and it has an overwhelming fondness for food, lovingly prepared and snootily eaten. If you were playing K-Drama bingo, Episodes 1 & 2 of this show, which run for about 80 minutes each, perhaps to reflect how much faith Netflix has in it, given the cast and the premise, would give you a full house out of the gate.
We should mention that premise, which finds a Michelin-star chef being transported back in time to meet the culinary needs of a tyrannical gourmand who is – all together now, K-Drama fans – a lot more internally complex than first appearances and harmful misdeeds suggest. Don’t worry about the details. Ji-young, a 3-star chef who has just won a Parisian cooking contest by improvising with a time-honoured traditional Joseon steak-searing technique, ends up hurtling through time on account of an eclipse and reading aloud from a book on the period in an airplane bathroom. It is what it is. Nobody’s here for scientific grounding.
Ji-young doesn’t get the memo at first. When she first encounters the king during a forest hunt that goes comically wrong on multiple levels, she thinks he’s an actor. When they plummet off a cliff together, she saves his life with a smear of Vaseline – I’m reminded of that silly thought experiment about whether you could take over the world if you were dumped at some random point in history with a smartphone – and then takes shelter in a house in the middle of nowhere, where she meets a young girl named Gil-geum.
As well as Vaseline Ji-young also carries lumps of butter and tubes of gochujang, which must be a three-star chef thing, and she whips up a reassuring meal for the starving girl and the king, both of whom find it a bit too spicy for their tastes – gochujang will do that – but nonetheless pretty delicious. The king has a sensitive palate and, apparently, soul, since he tears up at the memory of being fed by his mother. This is deliberately idiosyncratic, since the king’s kind of bad news, and the first episode ends with his men finding him and burning down Gil-geum’s house.
I should also mention that Ji-young is conveniently a history buff, which becomes useful in Bon Appetit, Your Majesty Episode 2, since it gives us some context. Young and beautiful captive women are being siphoned off by inspectors to present to the king, but Ji-young and Gil-geum are spared this fate by claiming to be older (Ji-young is 27, to be fair). Instead, they’re tasked with preparing a meal for the awful governor’s picky guests, which, despite Ji-young’s skills at sous vide and abundance of fresh regional ingredients, is nonetheless met with predictable hostility. Until, that is, the king, Yi Heon, arrives. He thinks Ji-young is two for two on great dishes – with the inclusion of a little MSG, which makes everything taste better – which spares her from being dragged away and beaten. You’ve got to take the wins where you can find them.
Yi Heon, is turns out, is a bit of a tyrant, fixated on revenge for the death of his mother, which explains why he got so emotional about being reminded of her in Episode 1. But even though you can sort of relate to that motivation, tyranny and purges are still a little questionable. He strikes a relatively complex figure, telling Sung-jae to release all the captive women because his revenge on the Governor is complete – the chaehong thing was all part of that plan – but then also forcefully takes Ji-young and Gil-geum to the palace with him, despite them having technically been released. Both ladies have figured out that the history book in Ji-young’s bag is likely her ticket back to her own timeline, but Ji-young clearly didn’t entirely think through her offer to do anything Yi Heon wanted if he’d simply return the bag.
This is how Bon Appetit, Your Majesty Episode 2 ends, with Ji-young now a prisoner of the king, who has big plans for her and her culinary talents, none of which bode well. The queen, Mok-ju, seems to be the real string-puller, and there’s also a suggestion that Ji-young might be altering the course of history with her presence, which is sure to have some far-reaching implications. It’ll be interesting to see how far the show goes with its temporal shenanigans, since it seems to function best as a relatively contained period drama, but time will tell. If nothing else, like Tastefully Yours, this probably isn’t a show to watch if you’re hungry.
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