Cooking Crush

Half Baked

I love food. I love OffGun. I love it when people fall in love over shared food. I love it when a lead scams his way into a ton of money because the other lead is adamant that he won't take cooking lessons from anyone.
Unfortunately, I didn't love this.

Seriously though, I love dramas that are in the food/cooking genre. There's something incredibly heartwarming about two people bonding over their love for a particular dish, or learning about each other through food, just sweet core memories. And Cooking Crush had that, plus a lot of stuff I adore in dramas: comedy, a great couple, good side characters and a reasonable plot. With each episode I watched, I liked it more and more. I had no major complaints and I enjoyed the prospect of watching something that was funny, light, and relaxing.

That is until it hit the halfway mark. It's like the writers, actors, director and every single person who worked on this forgot what they did in the first six episodes. Either that, or they changed the screen writers halfway through and said take it in whatever direction you want, there doesn't have to be any continuity, whatsoever. It's baffling how quickly it all changed because before I knew it, the characters were unrecognisable, the writing was so messy and it felt like a chore trying to get through some of the episodes.

Understandable that they needed to shift the focus onto the competition, but the shift was so abrupt and random, with them choosing to spend episodes on unnecessary conflicts, plotlines that saw no progression and the relationship between the leads going up and down like a rollercoaster. And by the time they focused on the actual competition, I felt no connection or investment anymore because of the aforementioned.

Through it all, I just kept hoping it would get better. Kept hoping.. and it didn't. The story after a while made absolutely no sense because they kept introducing characters who's sole purpose was to create conflict that was resolved within seconds without proper explanation. The chemistry between OffGun was suddenly non - existent, the acting felt really off, almost like the cast and crew themselves had given up on the production.

I don't mean to lay into the series like this, but it really does baffle me. How did something with such potential come down to this? The few positives in this were the supporting characters, the relationship between Firefy and Dy, and Ten. Even then, there isn't much to brag about here. Everything about this was simply, okay.

I would recommend watching the uncut version, although not as much as I would have liked, there are explanations to certain actions, the connections between the characters are explored a bit more, it really did make for more of an enjoyable experience.

Honestly, the best thing may have been the opening credits.

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oh sooooo boring....

While not really a bad show, man was it boring.
The writing was predictable, there were no real challenges and if you do food, why is the "super monster chef" just the jury verdicts?

At least one fresh face with Aungpao who did a good job but most were acting like highschool kids and not like grown up humans. I am also not a fan of the weird sounds used in Thai romcons, but at least they did not overdo it.

The kissing scenes with OffGun looked strange for me. I mean they kissed really well in other shows but here it feels shallow without the feeling of love or desire.

This show is a good downer if you have seen something like "Not Me", to calm you down and turn your brain off, because the story does nothing to challenge it.

The finale was an all around happy end, all the parents are soooo nice and so understanding especially Fire's mother. Of course grandma was always cool and always supportive but for the rest I would have wished a more rocky ending or more episodes to see them come to terms and less of the earlier meaningless stuff.

All in all this show was a disappointment.

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