Review of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty /폭군의 셰프)

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

On a personal note before we get into the Korean dramas: my life lately has been in flux. It’s been weird because I started a full-time job, after a year almost of deciding to go into a corporate job and putting my freelancing and content creation on the back burner. I kind of knew I was going to be tired in this kind of scheduling, but oh man I didn’t expect how tired I was when I got home each day.

My reading and watching has been all over the place. Before I was averaging about a show a week and 2-3 books, which meant this blog was really thriving in terms of content. I was putting out two posts a day even, as I had the time to write them and think about the kinds of art I was consuming in my daily life.

My content creation and blogging journey might be on a slow pause for a bit, as I need to focus on my main job, but besides that I’ve been slowly getting through the shows I want to watch. It’s taking a while, but I’m going to get there! I started watching Bon Appetit when it first started airing on American Netflix.

I did fall off in the middle of the show and had to play catch up towards the end, which was fine with me, especially as I booked a trip to Istanbul and had some free time in-between going to the historical mosques/sites and visiting family members who had also come to Turkey to see us.

I thought from the get-go I was going to love this show because of the food emphasis. Once upon a time I wanted to go into a PhD program and study food history and anthropology, but that never ended up happening because I refuse to move outside of the region I am in now, nor do I see academia as a path where I can survive and thrive in without sacrificing aspects of my mental health.

My feelings about this show though were pretty complicated. We’ll get into that later in the review—I’ve rambled enough already!

A Korean chef, who specializes in French cuisine, finds herself sucked back in history to a tyrant’s Joseon rule.

We start this show in the present day, as the female lead, Yeon Ji-yeong, is a rising star in the culinary world. The first episode shows her expertise in French cuisine and cooking in general, leading her to win competitions and the admiration of her fellow cooks and food lovers. However, when she gets on a plane and is asked to deliver an ancient book, she finds herself thrust back into the Joseon dynasty.

After stumbling in the woods, wondering where she is and why her cell phone isn’t getting any service, she meets the young king Yi Heon. If you know your Korean history, and I certainly do (I spent most of my graduate school experience pouring over colonial Korean history, but I had to read up quite a bit on Joseon throughout my time in the academic trenches), Yi Heon can be quite the controversial figure. More on that later.

She has no idea who he is and refuses to acknowledge him as a king, so she ends up rescuing him from the river they fall into and kind of keeps the poor guy hostage. He threatens her throughout their time together and even discovers a commoner living in a shack on the royal hunting grounds, and when Ji-yeong finally learns that he was telling the truth, and that she is in Joseon, it comes with potentially fatal consequences.

It helps her that the king has quite the advanced taste palette, so she saves herself and her new companion with her cooking skills. Not only is she going to introduce new recipes and cuisines to Joseon, with the local ingredients, but her relationships are going to flourish while in the past. Throughout each episode in the series we see how she evolves in her new role as the palace cook, as well as someone literally thrust into Joseon.

I really love food, and Korean foodways are something I genuinely want to study more. It was interesting and compelling to me to see how exactly the female lead adapted to the ingredients of Joseon—one of the key points early on is that peppers haven’t really been introduced in Korea at this point, but when she finds out the king has some from a shipwrecked Westerner, it makes her day.

The major point I want to raise though is that while I know this version of Yi Heon is fictionalized, I find it concerning that we’re romanticizing a literal tyrant. Like it feels like the fanfiction I used to read as a young adult, when the bad guys would go soft for the right girl (or guy), but the actual Yi Heon was not good to women at all and engaged in brutal censorship and violence against his own people.

It can be a bit problematic to sanitize this history, especially when he was so awful towards his subjects. Like yeah the character on the show is fictionalized and isn’t shown to be a great person all the time, but I don’t think we should idolize his real-life counterpart.

Overall Thoughts

As I wrote before, I thought I was going to be really into this show. In reality, this was a difficult show for me to get through. I know a lot of people loved this, and while I myself did not find it to my taste, I don’t yuck other people’s yums. Taste is so incredibly subjective, and neither of us are wrong.

A lot of the episodes have a similar formula to me where the core of the episode tends to be around the dish that she’s making, which makes sense considering each episode’s title is said dish. There’s usually some kind of struggle involving the dish, whether it’s her about to get her head chopped off because she’s cooking for a tyrant with attitude problems, or because she doesn’t have access to ingredients like in the modern day.

That got a little boring for me towards the end of the show as I wanted this rhythm to be broken up more. It began to feel like lazy writing in this sense, and while we do get fed the other pieces of the show, such as the evolving romantic elements and the side characters and their lives/issues, I really began to struggle getting through each episode towards the end.

The only thing that got me going is that I knew I inested a lot of time in this show, and I was also aware that people were going feral for this show. I wanted to see what they were seeing in it, but I just couldn’t at the end of the day.

And that’s fine! Usually I drop a show at this point, but I wanted to like this one. It just didn’t click with me. Go watch it though if it interests you—you might find it to be your favorite show! You’ll find yourself ignoring what this Internet stranger has to say.

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