Review of Tastefully Yours / 당신의 맛

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.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I also had the opportunity to finally catch up on all of the Korean dramas I’ve been meaning to watch, but never had the time before. When you work as a movie and entertainment journalist, you never really have time for your own projects, nor keeping up with the latest and greatest. Until recently Korean dramas (and dramas in general) were seen as something that were frivolous, as they don’t make publications a lot of money.

This blog is a place where I want to challenge that. Yes, some dramas are pure brain rot, but others are television at its finest. Something like Beyond Evil should be seen with respect, even if other dramas can be a bit corny at times. We shouldn’t be discounting other countries and their media because it’s not profitable to do so.

Anyways, tangent aside, I’ve been watching quite a few dramas on Netflix. Netflix has really stepped up their game in recent years, and a lot of the shows I’ve watched have been quite impressive. The quality is there for a handful when it comes to story, but almost all of them are really good quality when it comes to the filmmaking.

Tastefully Yours is a show I watched recently because I love the food industry. At first I wasn’t into the show during the first episode, but after episode two I was really into it, although the plot did feel a tad rushed in order to fit the ten episode run time.

Let’s get into the full review! I already am spoiling too much of my thoughts early on.

A food CEO businessman finds a back alley restaurant in Jeonju to take over, but falls for its chef.

We first meet our male lead in this drama: Han Beom-woo is a hotshot director at a food conglomerate in Korea named Hansang. As we see throughout the series, Hansang isn’t a company that does its business by uplifting others, as a side plot in the show is about a depressed man whose business whose business was taken over by Hansang and then basically turned into a malatang joint he didn’t actually want.

Beom-woo’s newest objective is he needs to find a new restaurant, which leads him all the way to the back alleys of the city of Jeonju. For those who don’t know anything about Jeonju, it’s about two hours by train from Seoul, but it’s considered to be one of the food capitals of the country. The food there is really good.

The restaurant he’s looking for is run by Mo Yeon-joo, a female chef whose backstory we get to see later on in the show (hint: it’s a pretty interesting one—I was actually way more fascinated by her character than the male lead, whose background we don’t really get to know much at all), and she’s pretty picky about what she puts into her food.

A lot of what she sources for her tiny restaurant are locally grown or grown by herself, which means that she’s actually closer to fine dining than she thinks. Beom-woo is confused by her tactics, but he knows what he needs to do. A lot of his agenda is he needs to get her recipes and extract what he needs from her, then get the place shut down, but as we can imagine, this is going to cause a lot of internal conflict for him.

Jin Myung-Sook and Shin Choon-Seung are two characters who end up joining the restaurant as staff, and are our lovable side characters. The first main quest is to get the restaurant more business and traction, so the four characters are going to be doing it all in order to try and get their name out there in the world.

However, Hansang is always lurking, as we can see from the side plots in the show. As Beom-woo and Yeon-ju fall for each other, which is a major step up from barely speaking at the first episode and quarreling, it becomes a bit of a sweet partnership until the truth starts leaking out.

Overall Thoughts

This is a show I actually really enjoyed! Dramas can be hit or miss for me, but I was drawn into this show through the food element, but was thrilled to see the female lead was inspired by Buddhist cooking due to her background. Buddhist cuisine, especially at Korean temples, is something I’ve dove deep into, and I loved that it was represented in this show.

The main couple wasn’t exactly memorable in some ways to me though, even though both actors did a decent job. I think the show was a bit rushed in some ways because of how quickly we go through some of the plot points, which even includes them getting together.

All in all though I did really like the show, even if some characters were actually terrible. It’s one of the few shows I wished there were a few more episodes within it, but I can see why they chose to end it where they did and not extend it a few episodes.

Go watch it if you haven’t already! I think this one is worth giving a chance.

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