Review of Cafe Minamdang / 미남당

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.

I tend to write about everything under the sun that I come across. Sometimes I don’t write blog posts about the content and entertainment I consume simply because I don’t feel like it, but I find that writing reviews and reflecting on movies, books, and television allows me to remember it more—and it serves as a bit of an archive for when I start to forget about it.

In 2025 I was on such a Korean drama kick, and I did end up expanding into other kinds of regional television, which you’ll see through my blog posts and archives, but I was really on top of my dramas. I kind of fell off that cliff in September, as I started an 8-5 job and went to Turkey for a trip, but I’m falling back into the grind slowly but surely.

This post was meant to come out a while ago, but I ended up starting the job and pushed it back on my editorial calendar because I didn’t feel like writing for a while. Like how I fell off of watching shows, I wasn’t writing as much, which depressed me in so many different ways. It genuinely felt like my life was becoming my job and the time I needed to unwind from it rather than the others things I wanted to do with my life.

Anyways, I’m getting back into the swing of things. Cafe Minamdang is one of the shows I took a long time to finish as well, as I found the pacing to be a bit off at times and I struggled to get through some episodes. I did really want to watch it though after I saw the jazz traditional fusion band Gonia cover the intro song.

I’ve said enough already—let’s get into the review!

A police officer/homicide detective gets tangled up with a profiler turned shaman and his sketchy cafe.

Our main character in this show I would say is Nam Han-joon, who is portrayed by Seo In-guk. Han-joon is the life of this show and the most interesting character out of everyone we meet, as he used to work with the crime world himself. He was a profiler, or the people who are used to help catch suspects, which comes in handy in his newfound work as a shaman.

He runs his shaman operations out of a cafe called Minamdang. During normal hours it looks like a typical aesthetic Korean cafe with lots of life to it, but in the back he runs his shaman operations. Not everyone knows about what he’s doing back there, even though some people definitely want to expose him as a sham.

However, his methods of reading people and what they want (helps to be a former profiler!) helps him really nail down his business and shaman gig, building a better reputation for his employees and him. When he catches the attention of homicide detective Han Jae-hui though, she’s not too impressed with his activities.

With the cops now onto him and suspecting Han-joon as being behind crimes, he’s going to have a lot to deal with in the coming months. He is technically scamming people in order to make a lot of money, which makes sense as to why the cops now want to keep an eye on him, but he can prove to be useful in other ways for cases. He also doesn’t entirely scam people—he does help them out when he feels like having a good heart.

The brunt of this show mainly shows how these two’s worlds keep colliding. I find Han-joon and his crew to be the more entertaining of the characters, as their adventures show more humor and heart than the police officers to me.

It kind of has this back and forth dynamic of where the people engaging with breaking the law have more personality than those upholding it, which makes sense, but for television it makes this show harder to get through. The romance itself between the two leads also feels a bit forced at times, which wasn’t my cup of tea.

Overall Thoughts

I really wanted to like this show, and I did in the beginning, but I think eighteen episodes was a bit too much considering some of these characters, including the female lead, seem a bit poorly written. As someone who reads a lot of women’s literature (in the feminist sense), I love to see a female cop asserting her dominance, but she comes across as a bit helpless at times.

Like our male lead, who’s not even in the industry anymore, has to step in and help her with some pretty basic stuff throughout the show. That makes me a bit sad for her potential, as I love to see female leads who now their stuff and can step up and show women can and will do the job better sometimes.

That said, I think the plot in this show in general was a miss as well. I wrote about how I thought Han-joon and his crew were more interesting, and I would’ve happily watched six episodes of their adventures without any romance aspects whatsoever. They’re pretty rad in the sense that I would be chill watching just them.

We didn’t get that though in this drama. I didn’t care for it in the end, but if you’re interested in the show, I say watch it anyways and give it a chance. Taste is so incredibly subjective, so what I might not love could your favorite show. Neither of us are wrong!

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