Bon Appetit, Your Majesty (2025)

Bon Appétit, Your Majesty – When Mediocrity Goes Viral

The best way to watch this drama? Grab some food, put it on 1.75x speed, and just let it run.. The show has no real substance. The writers clearly got lazy and decided a proper story was optional; instead, it’s basically a long food showcase where dishes get more screen time than the actual characters.

Yes, the title hints at food, but the description also promised "romance, fantasy, comedy", Did it deliver? Let’s see:

Fantasy– Oh yes, time travel! The lead goes back to the past. I guess that’s *all it takes* to count as fantasy these days.
Comedy – Original jokes? Forget it. Just recycled gags from every older drama of the same genre you’ve ever seen. Classic.
Romance – Romance, they call it? There’s no buildup, no real conversations, barely any screen time together, and suddenly the ML falls for her just from tasting her food, forcing himself on her, while the FL randomly decides she likes him too. As if that weren’t enough, the leads have non-existent chemistry. They simply look like two good-looking people sharing the screen, nothing more. And after all this, the creators expect us to believe they’re in love. It’s utterly absurd

Now to acting.
Yoona’s performance was fine but predictable. She’s been playing the same rom-com roles for years, merely swapping the setting and profession. Nothing new, nothing surprising—just another comfort-zone performance from her, which, as usual, turned out to be average.

Chaemin shows good potential, but his acting here was wildly overhyped. He was mostly good throughout the run, but not the miracle the internet made him out to be. Honestly, most of the buzz seems driven by his looks rather than his actual acting, and that’s just how it works in K-drama land.

Also wanted to add this: Park Sung-hoon being dropped turned out to be a good thing—this weak script didn’t deserve an actor of his caliber. It was better suited for a rookie like Chaemin (who played his part well👍,still I believe his performance was exggerated by the audience), especially since it was the food, not the cast, that carried the show.

As for the central storyline—there wasn’t one to begin with. By the last four episodes, it felt like the writer finally as well as suddenly realized, “Oops, we don't have a plot,” and started throwing in whatever came to mind just to force a happy ending. The result? A drama with no sensible closure. The creators practically mocked the audience, with, “Let’s throw the dumbest stuff at them as we known they’ll swallow it,” and, unsurprisingly, audience did.

Conclusion: This is easily the most overhyped drama of the year—mediocrity at its finest. A one-time watch if you have nothing else lined up. With a 80-Minute episodes dragged out by endless food shots , average acting and no solid story, it’s not something anyone would revisit.

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Cookery, Radishes, and a King No One Should Date

From the start, this drama promised a feast: palace intrigue, time travel, food as centrepiece, and a spirited FL tossed into the past to cook with whatever she could find. For someone who binges cookery shows, the premise was irresistible. But a flimsy script and an unbalanced mix of kitchen theatrics and limp romance soon dulled the flavour. By the end, it felt less like a banquet and more like a reheated takeaway.

Romance was supposed to be on the menu, but it never made it out of the kitchen. Across twelve episodes, the leads had less chemistry than vinegar and milk. Then came Episode 11: after a shocking revelation, the king, in a fit of rage, nearly kills his own grandmother, stopped only by a sudden “I love you” from the FL. Dropped in without warning, it didn’t feel like passion; it felt like a clumsy patch on a gaping wound. Because really, if you’re prepared to slaughter your grandmother in front of the court, you’re not a brooding romantic lead. You’re a tyrant, and no pantry-stocked declaration of love can disguise that.

By episode 12, the king strolls into 2025 in designer clothes, and when the FL quite sensibly asks how, he shrugs: “It’s a secret.” That’s the narrative equivalent of slapping a bow on a plot hole. If I’d been swept up, maybe I’d let it slide. But here, it exposed how thin the scaffolding really was. And that final kiss? I’ve felt more spark peeling the lid off a yoghurt pot.

The Ming envoys didn’t help. From Episode 6, four whole episodes of stilted Chinese and tedious diplomacy drained all momentum. The drama never recovered.

And here’s the rub: this isn’t pure fantasy. The king is based on Yeonsangun, remembered for purges, executions, and seizing women for his pleasure grounds. With that baggage, turning him into a romantic lead is risky at best, distasteful at worst. And yes, it’s fiction, the whole time-travel device is meant to be fantasy, and it could just as well fling our FL into prehistory and still count as make-believe. But once that fantasy leans on real people and real atrocities, the “it’s only fiction” defence collapses. If it’s truly make-believe, why borrow the names of those who actually lived—and committed horrors that can’t be rewritten?

There were still highlights worth savouring: the two cooks, both genuinely charming; the eccentric inventor crash-landing into the palace like a Joseon-era Leonardo da Vinci; the concubine, played with such conviction her villainy felt sharp rather than cartoonish; and a dowager queen carried by strong acting. Yet these bright spots only threw the imbalance into sharper relief—because beyond the FL and her bumbling sidekick, the women are painted almost entirely as schemers or burdens. It’s a tired formula, and female characters deserve more than endless shades of wickedness.

So yes, squint and you might enjoy it as light entertainment. With a stronger script, one that didn’t brush off time-travel with a lazy “it’s a secret,” or drop the entire kitchen panel from the past into 2025 like rabbits pulled from a magician’s hat, this drama could have soared. Imagine how much fresher, and far less controversial it might have been if the ML had been a fictional nobleman rather than a historical tyrant. At least then the story could have avoided its baggage, and maybe even given us a FL who loved her man as much as her radishes.

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