SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Temperature of Love
(사랑의 온도 / Sarangui Ondo)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

You might have wondered what took me so long (lol), but I took my time because it was a long drama and I got more busy with work so I had less time. Since it was a 40 episode (2 episodes back-to-back) drama, I usually just watched one whole episode at a time.

Anyways, here it is! Temperature of Love. I wasn’t sure if I was going to watch it in the beginning, I was thinking of checking it out, and then a good friend of mine who also shares my passion for K-dramas told me she started watching it so I became more curious. Let me first say something about the cast and what my expectations were.

A reason which always make a drama more appealing for me to watch is if I know some actors that are in it. Of course, in some cases completely new and unfamiliar actors may surprise me, but I also like it when I see familiar faces.
In a way, seeing a certain actor or actress appear in different roles in different dramas helps me familiarize with the actor/actress and makes it more exciting for me to watch. In any case, I knew all four main leads of this drama.
It’s funny because I watched Romantic Doctor, Master Kim some time ago and the two main leads were in that drama together, although in that story they had a bit of an awkward relationship. It was fun to see them in a completely different setting, playing an adorable couple in love.
I wrote about Yang Se Jong before in my review on ‘Duel’, where he had a really intense and angsty triple-role. However, in Temperature of Love his character was quite simple compared to that, he was friendly and smiled a lot. Apart from his family issues he didn’t really have an especially remarkable character trait or anything.
I haven’t seen a lot of Seo Hyun Jin (the drama I will watch after this is also with her as the main female lead), but I feel like she is a really good actress and she always gets cast for mature female roles. One thing I also picked up on – also through Romantic Doctor, Master Kim – and this may sound strange, but I feel like she gets a lot of really mature passionate kissing scenes and excels at them, haha.
I couldn’t help but fangirl a little over Kim Jae Wook -I think everyone had a crush on him in Coffee Prince- and I’ve only seen one other drama with him, also in the second male lead role (Mary Stayed Out All Night). So it was nice seeing him again, although I couldn’t help but notice his graceful aging.
One thing that my friend already warned me about after watching this was that the second female lead would be incredibly annoying in this drama. It didn’t make it easier for me when I found out the actress was Jo Bo Ah.
I’m sorry, and this is my personal opinion, but I have a kind of allergy against her, which is solely because of the fact that all the roles I’ve seen her in up until now annoyed the heck out of me.
But I guess, because I was mentally prepared for that, it made it easier for me not to get too frustrated and I was actually able to laugh out loud at her craziness several times.

I always start a review with a summary of the story, but I actually felt a lack of storyline in this drama -which doesn’t occur very often. The main focus of the drama was the depiction of the development of the relationship between the two main leads, chef prodigy On Jung Sun (played by Yang Se Jong) and drama writer Lee Hyun Soo (played by Seo Hyun Jin). Their story has two parts. The first part is an extended flashback of when the two first meet during a city run with friends. They are introduced to each other and confronted with the fact that they know each other through a chatbox. There is an immediate spark but when Jung Sun asks Hyun Soo out she rejects him because she’s too concerned with their age gap (7 years) and she doesn’t fully realize her feelings for him yet. She only does when he suddenly leaves for Paris (after calling her one last time and she doesn’t pick up) and doesn’t see him for 5 years.
The second part is where they meet again after 5 years and they both have a career of their own. On Jung Sun is now a chef who has opened his own restaurant after studying in Paris. The restaurant is called ‘Good Soup’, and has a very good reputation. The name ‘Good Soup’ was Jung Sun’s chatbox nickname before, and Hyun Soo also used this name for her first draft drama called ‘Good Soup Won’t Pick Up His Phone’.
Hyun Soo starts out as an assistant drama writer, but she can’t get along with her fellow assistants and boss writer, so when she gets the chance to step out and go her own way, she does. She meets Park Jung Woo (played by Kim Jae Wook), the director of a big entertainment company, who shows interest in her scripts and hires her to work for his company. He is also the contractor for Jung Sun’s restaurant (everything is connected).
Ji Hong Ah (played by Jo Bo Ah) is a friend of Hyun Soo who also aspires to become a drama writer. She assists Hyun Soo for a while in her script writing but finds herself becoming jealous when Hyun Soo succeeds and she doesn’t, so she starts going her own way – this includes trying very hard to take a lot of opportunities away from Hyun Soo. Overall, the drama depicts both the sweet and awkward adorableness of two people who can’t help but be crazy about each other, and also the ups and downs of truly letting each other into their lives – ALL of their lives. The second leads try to create some tension between them as well, but end up failing. After a few bumps, Jung Sun and Hyun Soo still find their way back to each other, face their true feelings and let each other in. They even get their families to sit and eat together.

I distinguished four main themes in this drama, and in a way they all overlap with each other: ‘love and trust’ and ‘family and food’.
Let me start with ‘love and trust’. Jung Sun and Hyun Soo fall in love with each other in a very natural way. They feel a good connection to each other from the beginning, which subtly changes to wanting to call each other first when something good happens, wanting to see each other first when something bad happens, sending each other messages just to ask what the other is doing, etc. They start letting each other in on what they do in their daily lives, and they are very honest with each other -something I can always appreciate in Kdramas. When they finally reconnect after being apart for 5 years and Hyun Soo finally confesses she loves Jung Sun back, it just all makes sense and an element of passion is added to their relationship. Everything seems to be going well – but when Hyun Soo wants to take it to the next step -living together- Jung Sun suddenly wavers, and that’s where instability is created. They find something which they aren’t ready to share with each other yet. Or actually, Jung Sun isn’t ready yet and this makes Hyun Soo become more aloof, because she feels he doesn’t trust her enough after all. Conveying her insecurities to him makes Jung Sun feel like she doesn’t trust him either and they decide to take a break. I think this was an important part in their relationship because it shows that, even though a couple might seem perfect and it’s more or less taken for granted that they belong together, something like this might still happen unexpectedly and create confusion.
It showed how important trust, complete trust, is in a relationship. It’s very easy to say to someone that they can trust you, but there will always be things that they can’t convey easily and you’ll have to deal with that too. In this situation, I kind of agreed with both characters. I felt the anxiety of Jung Sun, his family issues were explained and why he couldn’t let someone into his life as permanent as that, but I also felt Hyun Soo’s frustration towards him for not being honest with her about the reason. I’m just glad that they worked it out in the end, because these kinds of misunderstandings can either break or strengthen a relationship when dealt with the wrong or the right way.

The other theme I will talk about is ‘family and food’. As mentioned, Jung Sun is a professional chef. When he and Hyun Soo officially start dating, he teaches her a lot about food and how to enjoy it the most. Almost all the lunches and dinners in the series are held in this very restaurant, and it was also the stage for many backstage scenes.
I think it was an interesting choice to show more of the restaurant’s kitchen than just the usual ‘Yes, Chef!’ and everyone cooking for their lives while it’s busy. It teaches the viewer a lot about the importance of financial stability and ratings in this kind of business, and how social media can influence customers in their choice for restaurants or how restaurants have to deal with negative reviews etc.
I will link the food theme to the family theme, so first let’s look at both main leads’ family situations.

Hyun Soo’s parents are said to have always been ‘so in love with each other that they never even paid attention to what their kids were doing’. They still plan romantic trips together and enjoy each other’s company to the fullest, but they are still concerned about Hyun Soo. They just want her to meet a nice man and get married and settled, and they worry about her working situation. Nevertheless they sometimes visit Hyun Soo and I felt like they had a really good relationship, so it didn’t really come across to me as though they ‘were so in love with each other that they never paid attention to what their kids were doing’. Maybe that was because Hyun Soo herself didn’t make a big deal of it.
Hyun Soo used to live with her younger sister, who was insufferable and made her life a living hell, treating her like garbage while feigning innocent and cute behavior outside of the house. When her sister unexpectedly gets married to a good man and moves out and has a kid, the whole thing, Hyun Soo finally finds the freedom of living on her own – though the shares her place with her assistant writer friend but she’s a 100 times better than the sister.
Jung Sun comes from a complete opposite family. His parents split early because his father was very dominating towards his mother and him, and as a child he always just watched his mother go along with it. After finally breaking away from her husband, Jung Sun’s mother has been kind eccentric: she dresses very young for her age, dates younger men and just does what she wants while being very direct with people; it’s mentioned by Jung Sun in the drama that her and Hong Ah’s personalities really resembled each other as they are both very straightforward and bold and get into rows with other people easily because of their strong personalities. His mother also tends to get manic depressive traits – when something doesn’t go her way or she feels abandoned she pulls back into the ‘the whole universe is against me’ idea. She also spends a lot of money and has a lot of debts. All in all, Jung Sun doesn’t have a good relationship with either of his parents. He never really knew warmth in his family, so that was a hurdle he had to get over when he got together with Hyun Soo. When she asks him to live together, he suddenly clams up, but he can’t seem to tell Hyun Soo honestly about what ‘living together’ entails for him and how it reminds him of his parents. He is also annoyed by the fact that Hyun Soo wants to get closer to his mother, running to her whenever she needs something and refusing to see she’s a hopeless case and she should just leave her alone (Jung Sun’s perspective).
To get to the point I want to make: I think Jung Sun’s way of upbringing has greatly influenced his love for food. Because for him, food is something that can bring people together. That’s why he enjoys making food and eating together so much. However, he finds that in some cases, food isn’t always the answer.
At a certain moment, when Hyun Soo’s mother is to be operated on an aneurism, Jung Sun naively thinks that it’s a good idea to make lunchboxes and eat together, but at that moment Park Jung Woo’s help in securing a fast surgery and a good hospital room is prioritized a bit more than happily eating together while waiting for a surgery. In moments like that Jung Sun suddenly became very insecure, because food is always the answer for him in these cases and suddenly it wasn’t. And it also wasn’t helping that he knew that Hyun Soo’s mother was less fond of him than of Park Jung Woo.

Speaking of Park Jung Woo, let’s talk about him for a bit.
Overall, I was a bit turned off by the immaturity of the second leads, but at a certain moment I was truly at a loss for what Park Jung Woo was thinking.
As mentioned before, Park Jung Woo met both Hyun Soo and Jung Sun around the same time, and they all got along separately (as in, neither Hyun Soo or Jung Sun knew that the other knew Park Jung Woo). Hyun Soo starts working for his company around the time she meets Jung Sun, and she is with him when Jung Sun calls her for the last time before leaving to Paris, which she doesn’t know, so she doesn’t pick up that one time (and regrets it for the next 5 years). However, Jung Woo also has a crush on Hyun Soo, and he begins to make advantages, but they don’t come across as more than business meetings to her. When he suggests they suit each other, Hyun Soo confesses that she’s in love with another man and that he left and she might not see him again. Jung Woo’s reaction at that was already a turn-off; instead of comforting her he literally said ‘Do you know what you’re doing to me right now?’ (crying in a public space, rejecting him in public, ‘do you even know who I am, you shouldn’t reject someone like me’, the usual ugh)
At this point, Park Jung Woo also had no idea that ‘this man’ was his good friend Jung Sun and he didn’t know that ‘that woman’ Jung Sun talked about whom he was rejected by was Hyun Soo.
When they are reunited 5 years later, Jung Woo is the first to realize that they are together. But that doesn’t stop him from trying again. While Hyun Soo had already rejected him twice, and he already knew that she and Jung Sun were dating, he came up with the brilliant idea of proposing to Hyun Soo. And not only that, he wants to do it at Jung Sun’s restaurant, while he’s serving them. He tells Jung Sun about his proposal plans (not the person of course), so Jung Sun -being the good friend that he is- gets to work excited to make this proposal dinner a success. Of course the whole story changes when he sees his own girlfriend sitting at the table. Hyun Soo also has no idea what’s going on, which I also found really disrespectful. You can’t just randomly ask someone to marry you while you know that it’s not mutual and she’s bound to reject you, but also in her boyfriend’s restaurant while he’s watching?! Just the whole point he was trying to make was beyond my understanding.
And then there was the usual childish declaration of war where Park Jung Woo started to act really immature in their ‘battle for love’. He threatened not to continue with the contract for Jung Sun’s restaurant, stuff like that. He is a grown man, yet he pulled such childish tricks like this, I was very confused and disappointed in him.

And then there was Hong Ah. I already talked about her a little bit, but here’s some more. Hong Ah seems to be the most superficial and selfish person you could imagine, who really just cares about herself and no one else. She doesn’t care how many things she takes away from other people as long as she gets what she wants.
When she likes Jung Sun in the beginning, and he doesn’t like her back and it turns out he likes Hyun Soo, she tries to come between them. When visiting Jung Sun in Paris, she tells him Hyun Soo is about to marry a hotshot director (meant to be Park Jung Woo because she ‘naturally’ thought they were together). To Hyun Soo she says she shouldn’t trust Jung Sun when he’s in Paris, because he’s bound to meet pretty French girls there and he is ‘most likely a playboy’.
When all her deeds explode in her face, like Jung Sun’s mother she retreats into the ‘the universe hates me’ state of mind and she blames Hyun Soo for everything, even though Hyun Soo isn’t to blame for anyting and isn’t even aware how her actions affect Hong Ah. Most of the things concerning her success are made possible through Park Jung Woo and she gets surprised by them just as much as Hong Ah.
Anyways, Hong Ah is the typical ‘starts out as a nice friend but suddenly becomes the ultimate frenemy’ kind of character. At a certain point she also starts to work at Park Jung Woo’s company, and becomes a direct rival in drama writing and casting to Hyun Soo.
One more thing that was crucial to Hong Ah’s character was her treating of other people. Usually, when she didn’t care or have use for people, she would just not pay attention to them or throw them away. But she always had one person on her side: Choi Won Joon, a close friend of Jung Sun, who’s also the sous-chef in his restaurant. Won Joon has always been in love with Hong Ah and has always been there for her, even though she never appreciated him. He was always the first to congratulate her when something good happened, always made and brought her food when she asked for it – and all he ever got back was complaints. But still, he he kept on doing it. At a certain point, he realizes that how Hong Ah has been treating him is not acceptable and he distances himself from her, with the help of another restaurant employee who is genuinely interested in him. At first, Hong Ah is just annoyed by this female employee and how Won Joon is now treating her and she deals with this frustration by blatantly posting about her ‘happy single life’ on social media. In these scenes it is made clear how lonely she really is, only caring about the amount of likes she gets and hashtagging everything with ‘#idon’tneedlove #i’mhappiestbymyself’ etcetera. However, she does get bothered more and more by the fact that Won Joon won’t come to her aid and won’t answer to her every call anymore. A typical ‘kid who cried wolf’ case occurs when she calls him that she got into an accident and he rushes to the hospital only to find her not hurt at all and he gets really mad at her. Seeing him like that and hearing from her that he’s not going to let her use him like her dog anymore really resonates with her. That’s when she realizes that she took him for granted and she actually really likes him.
In the end, coming to terms with her feelings about Won Joon is one of the major developments she goes through and in the end she does come out of her spiteful shell and gets him back after genuinely apologizing and confessing how she felt after losing him.

I want to give a special shout-out to some side characters who really made the show for me. First of all Hwango Kyung (played by Lee Cho Hee), the super quirky writing assistant and friend of Hyun Soo, and Kim Joon Ha (played by Ji Il Joo), the director assigned to direct Hyun Soo’s drama. The relationship between the two of them was one of the main reasons I kept watching, they were adorable. Both characters are really faithful to Hyun Soo, they stuck with her since she started on her own and especially Kyung is a real pillar of support and friendship for her, especially after Hong Ah leaves their team. Kyung started out at the same office as an assistant writer for the terrible boss and she followed Hyun Soo when she went her own way.
I loved the part where Hong Ah tried to snatch Kim Joon Ha away from Hyun Soo to direct her own drama, and he just brushed her off with no interest at all.
Furthermore, the female restaurant employee who helped Won Joon see the truth about Hong Ah, Im Soo Jung (played by Chae So Young). She was just so real and down-to-earth, and I loved how she could silence Hong Ah’s selfish tantrums. Soo Jung was in love with Won Joon and she just plain out told Hong Ah ‘If you’re going to treat him that way, give him to me because I really have feelings for him’. I wished they had ended up together, but even though they did like each other, Soo Jung realized Won Joon still couldn’t let Hong Ah go. I just really liked Soo Jung’s badassness and honesty, I think it dealt very well with everyone’s frustrations regarding Hong Ah.

One thing I’m really happy about is that the black-and-white sequences were properly explained in the end. Throughout the series, in the middle of a scene it would suddenly turn black-and-white and play in slow motion. I was wondering what that was for, if it was a metaphor for something, and why it only happened at certain moments. I thought it had something to do with the ‘temperature’ from the title, if they were moments where they felt the ‘temperature of love’ or something, but sometimes the moments were also a bit common or random.
In the last episode, when announcing their marriage, Hyun Soo says in a voice-over that she and Jung Sun had been recording their relationship in the past six years. And then all the black-and-white sequences were shown again in the right order and it all made sense. From the beginning they had been ‘recording’ their relationship in moments, from the first time they ever crossed paths without knowing each other to their first bike ride together, their first kiss together, etcetera etcetera.

I think the title of the series is a mixture of the main themes ‘love’ and ‘food’, because in both there’s difference in gradations and temperatures. I liked how they played with the simple things that make a relationship enjoyable, mostly just sitting together, eating and drinking tea together, happy smiles and cuddles, and rushing out to see each other whenever. I think it was very adorable. I’m glad I didn’t get annoyed as much as I thought I would because of my friend’s warnings, haha.
I must admit I really liked the last episode because all the indicated couples got together and it was really funny when Jung Sun and Hyun Soo were going around and everywhere they went people were kissing, lol.

It’s been a while since I took this long to finish a drama, and I’m kind of hoping the next one I’ll watch has more of an established storyline, because I miss getting sweeped away by the story haha. The next few dramas on my list are less recent, but I still hope very enjoyable.