Netflix’s Bon Appétit, Your Majesty is the Next great K-Drama

It’s hard to imagine Korean food without gochujang, just as it’s difficult to imagine Italian food without tomatoes. However, both of those things were true once, before Europeans brought chiles and tomatoes over from the Americas. Netflix’s new Bon Appétit, Your Majesty distinguishes itself from other Korean dramas by imagining a modern-day chef working at a time when Korean food was decidedly chile-less. The streamer is just coming off the release of KPop Demon Hunters, which also spotlighted Korean food like ramyeon and hotteok, so here’s another chance to learn yet more about this unique cuisine.

The series begins with Chef Yeon Ji-young (Im Yoon-ah) winning the top prize on a French TV cooking competition that bears a strong resemblance to Culinary Class Wars, a Korean reality show that dropped on Netflix last winter. She wins in style, too, grilling a venison steak despite her stove malfunctioning. She’s flying triumphantly back to Seoul from Paris when a solar eclipse and the rare historical document that she’s carrying combine to mysteriously transport her back in time by 500 years, when the Korean peninsula was the Kingdom of Joseon.

That first episode is taken up with leaden comic misunderstandings, as Joseon’s young king (Lee Chae-min) mistakes her for a ghost because she appeared during a solar eclipse in his time, while she thinks she’s caught up with a bunch of soap-opera actors who are staying in historical character. When the king falls off a cliff and seriously hurts himself, she has a chance to impress him by nursing him back to health with gochujang butter bibimbap, which is the episode’s title. Both the Korean condiment and the Western dairy product are unknown in 16th-century Joseon, but Chef Yeon is carrying small containers of both from the airplane, and so she introduces the king to the combination of the butter’s fatty sensuousness and the gochujang’s funky heat. This marriage of ingredients has been enjoying a moment lately in real life, appearing on steak, vegetables, eggs, and noodles in the New York Times’ recipe, which received rave reviews.

Chef Yeon is lucky that the king has a remarkably discerning palate, because his appreciation for her cooking is frequently the only thing keeping her alive in the early 16th century. This being a Korean historical drama, there’s a ton of Game of Thrones-like palace intrigue among the king’s courtiers. These include the king’s beautiful queen consort (Kang Han-na), who immediately sees the new woman as a threat, especially after he makes Ji-young into his culinary Scheherezade, tasked with making new dishes for every dinner or face execution. 

The politics do not stop at the kitchen door, either, as the senior cooks (Hong Jin-gi and Kim Kwang-kyu) who were in line to become the king’s personal cook try to sabotage their female colleague by dulling the knives and throwing salt in the flour. Cooking is considered to be an unsuitable job for a woman in this time and place, and the men are outraged by a woman taking their job. This culminates in a contest in Episode 4, when the dowager queen (Seo Yi-sook) challenges all three cooks to make a dish that embodies the concept of filial piety (and also contains tofu and doenjang, which is a lot more helpful for the cooks). It’s all very The Great British Baking Show, with the king and his grandmother acting like Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith as they judge the contestants’ creations.

As you would expect, the show is best when it’s focusing on the food. Chef Yeon has to work with an extremely tough cut of beef in Episode 2, so she improvises a sous vide method with the meat wrapped in seaweed and paper. Contrast this with three episodes later, when the castle brings in a cut of high-grade beef, which she turns into a schnitzel paired with a raspberry jam. (I’ve yet to encounter a German restaurant that does this, even though it would make me order a schnitzel.)

Episode 3 has her taking a deer that the king killed on a hunting trip and making it into venison tartare and deer tongue that is sliced extremely thin and then grilled tableside. During the cooking contest, she finds spinach (which, as she notes, exists in Joseon, although nobody at court knows what to do with the leafy vegetable) and uses it to make a clam and spinach doenjang soup whose flavor reduces the dowager queen to tears of nostalgia. Episode 6 ends on a cliffhanger with Chef Yeon having to represent her country’s cuisine to a group of Chinese imperial envoys who turn up their noses at barbaric Korean food.

The main purpose of the time travel in this story is to encourage viewers to experience familiar food through new taste buds. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty manages to do this better than any other show on Netflix, and given that the streamer has been the most aggressive at chasing the foodies among its viewers, that says something.