Summary
Bon Appetit, Your Majesty leans very heavily into the cooking and tasting in Episode 8, perhaps a little to its detriment, since there isn’t a great deal going on beyond that.
And here I was, complaining about how long it took Bon Appetit, Your Majesty to finally get around to the cooking competition. I figured we were there now, and I was technically right, but Episode 8 gets the last laugh. It didn’t even occur to me, and in hindsight it should’ve, but of course the competition is so expansive it’ll take multiple episodes to conclude. Of course!
But hey, let’s look on the bright side of things. My personal annoyance at the pacing of this debacle notwithstanding, the competition itself, a showdown across three rounds spanning three days, is very much this show playing to its strengths. It’s even – dare I say this? – playing to its strengths a bit too much, with an absurd amount of cooking and tasting scenes. Are these nicely handled, as usual? Yeah, sure. Should they constitute the bulk of a 70-minute episode of television? Answers on a postcard.
If you remember from the previous episode, the first round of the tournament is an unseen meat dish. To be fair, I can’t help but feel like Ji-young has an advantage in this kind of thing, given she’s literally from the future and is an expert in a cuisine that definitionally wouldn’t have been seen before by anyone in Joseon-era South Korea. I’ll grant you that her secret ingredients keep getting stolen and a lot of the necessary stuff doesn’t even exist yet, but still. It’s a leg up, is all I’m saying.
Even the secret ingredient thing comes around in her favour, since she makes a big song and dance about wanting to taste the Ming Dynasty dish, and since their head chef is by chance the fairest dude who has ever existed, doing so allows her to prove a point. The Ming meal’s chilli oil was created with the help of the gochugaru – Korean chilli flakes – that Ji-young and her team made specifically. This is immediately identified as a disgrace by Tang, and the excuses about a fair swap with Prince Jesan fall on deaf ears. The prince’s justification that he was just worried about the king’s health doesn’t hold much water either. As a compromise, the first round is ruled a draw, but with the caveat that if all three rounds end up tied, the Ming dynasty wins by default. In a roundabout way that still seems to me like Ji-young being disadvantaged, so I’m not sure why Tang makes such a fuss. Maybe it’s penance for the whole “from the future” thing.
If you’d forgotten that Ji-young also picked up an injury during the assassination attempt, don’t worry, because Bon Appetit, Your Majesty Episode 8 reminds you in Round 2. Ji-young’s dodgy hand means she can’t remove and clean the skin of a duck, having to rely on Gil-geum for this, but since Ji-young’s name is still mud in court, Consort Kang leans on Chef Maeng to sabotage her in this round under threats to his mother. You will, I’m sure, be shocked to learn that this doesn’t quite work out and Ji-young is able to nail the dish either way, with the Ming Dynasty chef also having a very good showing.
So good are both dishes, in fact, that the show decides we’re going to have to wait a week to find out who actually won the round. If I were feeling uncharitable, I might say that treating the outcome of the middle round of a three-part competition – not even the final! – as a serious cliffhanger is a bit presumptuous, especially when the first round ended in a tie, meaning that whoever wins Round 2 isn’t going to be far enough in front for it to really matter. The suspense is supposed to come from the possibility that both dishes are so good that the round will end up tied, meaning that there has to be a winner in the third round lest Joseon essentially forfeit on a technicality. That’s fair enough, I suppose. But pardon me if I won’t be losing sleep over it.
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