Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.
Wok of Love
(기름진 멜로 / Gireumjin Mello / Greasy Melo)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10
Hello hello hello! Not me sneaking in one more review for September! As I mentioned in my previous review, I started a new chapter of my life this month which has completely filled my daily schedule with activities, so I wasn’t left with much time to watch episodes, but I still wanted to include this in my checked off watch items for September. I decided I wanted to include some series that have been recommended to me by fellow K-Drama lovers, and this one in particular was suggested by one of my lovely penpals because of her personal love for Lee Joon Ho (can’t blame her). It surprised me in a lot of ways and I was seriously debating on how to rate it at the end. All in all, I had a fun time watching it, and its lightness and comicalness were a very refreshing and charming aspect of it, but I also still found that it lacked a certain depth that I personally would’ve liked, and there were a lot of loose ends and inconsistencies. I really want to share my views with you, so let’s go!
Wok of Love is a K-Drama that you can either watch as 19 episodes of about an hour or 38 back-to-back episodes of about 30 minutes (I watched it in the latter format on Dramacool). This in itself is already quite a unique number of episodes, as K-Dramas usually tend to be a bit shorter, like 16 one-hour episodes or 32 back-to-back episodes. In any case, the plot of Wok of Love is centered on the revenge plan of hotel sous-chef Seo Poong (played by 2PM’s Lee Joon Ho). When we meet him, he is on top of the world, he’s about to get married to his beloved fiancée and he’s under the impression that he’ll be promoted to main chef at the restaurant he works at, Finishing Touch, which is located on the top floor of the famous Giant Hotel. He is thriving and therefore not aware that within one day, his whole life will be crumbling apart. Not only is he unaware of the deep-rooted resentment that the current main chef, Wang Cheon Soo (played by Im Won Hee) holds against him, but his so-beloved fiancée Seok Dal Hee (Cha Joo Young) is actually also having an affair, with none other than Giant Hotel’s CEO, Yong Seung Ryong (played by Kim Sa Kwon). After finding out about the affair and losing his position at Finishing Touch because both the main chef and his assumed friends at the restaurant all betray him, Poong vows to take revenge on Giant Hotel by starting his own Chinese food business to steal all of Finishing Touch’s customers away from them.
In the meantime, we also meet Mr. Doo Chil Seong (played by Jang Hyuk), a gangster/loan shark who has his own money-lending business called Light and Shadow Loans. He owns a building (the Chil Seong Building👌🏻) in which he has his office, but underneath that he also has a Chinese restaurant called the Hungry Frying Pan. While Chil Seong and his group of loyal men tend to the restaurant, they barely have any business and their food isn’t great. It also doesn’t help that it’s right opposite the Giant Hotel, which of course pulls in all the customers. Chil Seong is about to sell the restaurant when Poong suddenly appears, livid with vengeance, and demands that he gets to turn this restaurant into Finishing Touch’s rival. All he has to do is just get Chil Seong’s defensive men on his side and teach them how to cook. Despite their initial aversion towards each other, Chil Seong agrees to put Poong in charge of the restaurant, while he goes about the business he personally has with Yong Seung Ryong.
Finally, there’s Dan Sae Woo (played by Jung Ryeo Won), a young woman from a wealthy family (her father owns a bank) who, despite her rich upbringing and many privileges, doesn’t exactly flaunt around her wealthy background. Just like Poong, she’s about to get married when we first meet her, but on the day of the wedding everything falls apart for her too. Her dad is suddenly arrested for committing fraud and her husband just vanishes after not even turning up at the wedding. In some unexpected turn of events, she keeps meeting Poong and he keeps missing the chance to make her jjajangmyeon, but she somehow also ends up at the Hungry Frying Pan and as they manage to gather some more staff and get their business going, Poong’s revenge seems to come closer and closer.
I have to say from the start that it took me a couple of episodes to get into the story. It started off with a lot of information and rushed character introductions. We are shown glimpses of characters’ lives before we are actually ‘properly’ introduced to them. The three main leads already meet each other in the first episode, but this was also kind of confusing to me. They all meet by coincidence at the hairsalon, and Sae Woo just randomly starts talking to Chil Seong about how his haircut makes him look like a gangster – which immediately made me go like ‘wait, what, who even is this woman to start talking to him like that?’ – but then Chil Seong just falls in love with her (?) and in the next segment Sae Woo also starts rambling on to Poong about her upcoming wedding. At this point, only Poong had been introduced in more detail, so for the other two it felt like a very hasty and random introduction, especially since they were supposedly main characters but we had no idea who they were yet. We only find out afterwards that Chil Seong is actually a gangster, for example. It took away a bit of the comical element, and this happened on more occasions, as I will explain in a moment.
Despite the chaotic start of the show, as soon as everything (and everyone) started coming together and we actually got to the original ‘revenge plot’ of the story, I found that it became increasingly more entertaining to watch, and I really liked how they also managed to put in some truly heartfelt moments. My favorite parts included the scenes where they were all working together in the (by then called Hungry Wok) kitchen, I liked how they all closed the gaps that were initially between them and, of course, the cooking scenes themselves, because I’ve never started craving Chinese food as much as I have while I was watching this. Mouth. Watering.👌🏻It may have taken a while to get out of the confusing ‘who is everyone and how did everyone end up here’ part, but once they started working together and the relationship between the three leads deepened (I also really liked the brotherly affection that grew between Poong and Chil Seong), it all started making more sense. On the other hand, as soon as the story got on track, some of the more random elements from the beginning started making less sense to me and at some point I just felt like the whole revenge plan kind of lost its purpose. Of course, Poong manages to get his revenge on Giant Hotel and Finishing Touch, but at that point it didn’t even seem to matter all that much to him anymore the way it did in the beginning. Things that were initially made out to be plot- or character-defining kind of disappeared throughout the story here and there, while some other things were retained, for example the fortune cookie reference, so I found it a bit inconsistent at times.
Let me start by introducing the main characters and important side characters in a bit more detail. Starting with Poong, as I personally see him as the main character (even more so than Chil Seong and Sae Woo). We get to know him and his history in more detail from the start and we’re also able to hear his thoughts. Poong lost both of his parents at a young age and was then taken care of by the father of his future bride, Dal Hee. You could say in hindsight that it was probably more out of a feeling of obligation towards her father that he wanted to marry Dal Hee, as he’d promised her father he would take care of her. Not that he didn’t sincerely love her, but I think the obligation he felt towards her played a very important part in his reason to want to marry her. And to be fair, Dal Hee was mostly in the wrong here. She was actively sleeping with Seung Ryong while still going ahead with her marriage to Poong, and she even ended up going ahead with the wedding because she felt bad for him. We’re not shown how exactly they break up after being married for a month or something, but it’s suggested that Dal Hee told him she’d been seeing another guy. Of course, we know the moment he finds out the other guy is his own boss, because that’s the scene he slams his kitchen knife into Seung Ryong’s hotel room door. In any case, while I feel like he did have the desire to win Dal Hee back at first, it soon proves to be a lost cause – not to mention Dal Hee actually disappears from the story altogether. This is one of the examples I wanted to give, because I found it a bit weird. She stops appearing, I think after the scene in which Poong throws his knife into the wall above Seung Ryong’s bed where they’re sleeping together. I felt like she might have had another part to play, especially after Poong would succeed in getting Hungry Wok to thrive, but then she just never appeared again and is only mentioned one time by Seung Ryong when he tells Poong he’ll break up with Dal Hee if he’ll come back to work at Finishing Touch (and that made me go, ‘Dal Hee’s not even in the show anymore, bro’). So yeah, that was kind of a loose end, in my opinion. Not that I particularly wanted her to reappear or anything, but I just thought they’d give her some more purpose in the story as it developed – who knows she’d even try to get back together with Poong after seeing how well he was doing and become a love rival to Sae Woo? Anyways, moving on.
In regards to the Finishing Touch kitchen staff, we have to talk a bit about Chef Wang. From what I understood he was originally a Chinese chef (whether he was actually Chinese or not is left to be questioned because he didn’t seem to talk with an accent), and he came to South Korea with some money he ran away with (more about that later). He then built his way up as the main chef at Finishing Touch. Chef Wang’s character is built on pride, he doesn’t want anyone to question his knowledge, skill or experience, he’s not particularly open to new ideas or tactics, and he’s definitely not up for the idea to give his position to Poong, despite his talent. What’s funny is that the most prideful characters, the ones with all the high-quality experience and skills, actually turn out to be the most selfish and immature characters in the show. Basically the entire Giant Hotel-affiliated body of characters were frustratingly childish in their attempts to get back at Poong, and I really found myself grinding my teeth on several occasions. Because the thing is, Poong has every reason to be mad and to demand some sort of justice from the restaurant – after all, they unfairly threw him under the bus and everyone just cared about their own personal gain when it came to kicking him out, even his ‘friends’. The fact that they basically sent in the cavalry in order to stop Poong while he was working from a tiny, gangster-run restaurant just proved to me how insecure they actually were about their own business. If they really stood above Poong, they could’ve just let him do his thing and not look back at him. Instead they started conjuring up all these bribes and unfair ways to cheat Poong out of customers, it was really low. Even in that final competition, they literally sabotaged some members of Poong’s kitchen crew to get there on time. Like, seriously, is that how insecure you are? And then they were also super smug about their victory, like how can you feel proud about winning like that? They even stole Poong’s recipes and techniques and wouldn’t even admit it, it was really childish. It set my teeth on edge and a part of me even wanted Poong to lash out at them, but I think it was contrastively mature of him to just keep a straight face and not complain about a single thing. And hey, he still won, so boo for them.
About his three ‘friends’ at Finishing Touch, as much as they were all seemingly rooting for him while he was anticipating his promotion, Maeng Sam Seon (Oh Ui Shik), Gan Bo Ra (Hong Yoon Hwa) and Gong Rae Yeon (Kang Rae Yeon) all immediately caved as soon as Chef Wang started probing them about throwing Poong under the bus. I sincerely disliked them, even after they ultimately made up again, because they still never sincerely apologized to Poong. Even after he’d just left Finishing Touch, Poong still believed in them when they said they had nothing to do with it, and they didn’t know where his recipe notebook was while they literally stole it themselves, unbeknowst to even Chef Wang. There was just a lot of unfairness and frustration there, which I always find hard to swallow.
Before I move on to the others, I just want to lay a quick overview of some terms used in this drama, as it depicted professional kitchen cooking. Of course I don’t know if it’s common to collectively yell out ‘Service/Good to go!’ as soon as a dish is ready to be served, but it did create a nice vibe within the kitchen, as if everyone was genuinely happy that a dish got approved and was deemed worthy of service. For me personally it was the first time learning about all these utensils and terms like ‘Fire/Cutting/Noodle Part’. The Fire Parts of the kitchen are basically the people handling the wok (and ladle), the ones that are literally ‘closest to the fire’ and who are in charge of cooking the ingredients to the point of ready-to-serve. The Cutting Parts are the people in charge of cutting, so they have to know how to deal with different sorts of knives and the way different ingredients need to be chopped up in order to get passed on to the Fire Parts. They need to deliver the ingredients to make sure all the ingredients are chopped up in the right way (size, shape, etc.) so they can just pass them on to the Fire Parts ready-to-be-cooked. The Noodle Parts are in charge of kneading the dough for noodles, but also for dumplings and other fried dishes. They have to be strong as they need to use their arms a lot for the kneading and rolling. In some dishes, the dough needs to be paper thin, so getting the dough the exact right thickness also falls to the Noodle Parts.
I found the division of these tasks very interesting to see, mostly because it made the kitchen work look like a properly functioning machine in which everyone was dependent on each other. If one Part makes a mistake, it also affects the delivery of the other Parts. I guess that’s also a reason why everyone would be so happy when the main chef would call ‘Service’, because it proved that all Parts had worked together properly and all the ingredients had been prepared successfully. The calling of ‘Service!’ was basically a confirmation that they’d all managed to contribute successfully to a dish, so I thought that was a nice way to keep the entire kitchen motivated.
Moving on to Chil Seong, our gangster who we (or at least I) just couldn’t help but love. From the start, even when he’s dealing with bad guys, I just got the impression that Chil Seong wasn’t that much of a bad guy himself. He didn’t seem innately evil like for example Seung Ryong or that Crooked guy. Yes, he is a loan shark and he would go after people with his gang to get his money back, but there is just something about him that makes you feel like, ‘he can’t be that bad’. I think for me that something already manifested itself in the first episode when he fell for Sae Woo at first sight. A man who succumbs to a woman’s smile that easily can’t possibly be that heartless. Even after being repeatedly rejected by Sae Woo and seeing how she and Poong are drawn to each other, he never becomes bitter or vengeful about it, he even gives them his blessing. From the way he treated the little kitten (Dim Sum😭) to the way he literally got himself stabbed in order to retrieve Poong’s recipe notebook, the way he helped Sae Woo’s dad get acquitted of all charges and how he dealt with his mother when he found out she had cancer, I couldn’t help but feel that Chil Seong was a really good guy at heart.
Behind him there is his eternally loyal gang of men who, despite their initial disdain towards Poong, end up as unmissable assets in Hungry Wok’s kitchen, and I really liked their unwavering support and loyalty towards Chil Seong. Let me go over them one by one: there’s Oh Maeng Dal (Jo Jae Yoon), Jeon Yi Man (Choi Gi Seob), Kwang Dong Shik (Kim Hyun Joon), Bong Chi Soo (Cha In Ha) and there was also Yang Kang Ho (Choi Won Myung), but just like Dal Hee he suddenly disappeared at some point, without even an explanation. At some point I just caught myself going, ‘wait, wasn’t there another guy at the beginning?’. I don’t remember them ever justifying his disappearance, so I have no idea what happened there. Anyways, in the end there’s only four of them. Maeng Dal is kind of the leader of the gang as he is the oldest, and while he initially seems to be the most tiring to deal with for Poong, he also softens considerably after meeting Seol Ja and while he keeps helping Chil Seong with dealing with the Seung Ryong case. I think all the characters were already innately ‘good’ from the start, they just had to get over some prejudices, but afterwards they really became a good team in the kitchen as well. I liked the Gangster Squad mostly because of the funny contrast between them being actual softies but still always being there to have Chil Seong’s back when he needed them. Besides his loyal team of gangsters, there is also the old mysterious lady, later revealed to be called Kim Seon Nyeo (played by Lee Mi Sook) who keeps popping up to sell gum around Hungry Wok. No one, including Chil Seong, seems to know who she is, and they just tolerate her while treating her as the annoying old neighborhood lady. However, she’s ultimately revealed to be Chil Seong’s birth mother who abandoned him when he was five or something. I guess she started feeling guilty but still couldn’t bring herself to reveal her true identity to him, so she just kept popping up while nagging people to hide her underlying sentiment. I did find it peculiar that she’d keep following Chil Seong around, even when he was being attacked and even took him to the hospital and all that, but yeah that explained that. Chil Seong’s father (also played by Jang Hyuk, as he’s made out to be the spitting image of his dad, even in terms of hairstyle) used to be a famous boxer but he passed away of a heart attack (I believe?) right after becoming champion.
To note down some more inconsistencies and loose ends here, starting with the whole mother and son revelation, this actually didn’t come as a surprise to me. I believe it was even already mentioned before, when Chil Seong was in the hospital and the lady literally called him her son, although that could’ve been just a sentimental expression. Still, because of this I’d already entertained the possibility that she could be his mother, so the official ‘revelation’ kind of made me go like, ‘okay but didn’t we already know this?’ I felt like this was supposed to be a major ‘OMG she’s his MOM??!!’ moment in the story, but the effect was taken out of it for me.
In terms of the gangsters, there was another minor plotline in which Dong Shik’s wife, who was working at Giant Hotel as a cleaner, was having an affair with Sam Seon, who in turn didn’t know she was married. This affair was shown/mentioned a couple of times in the beginning, but then never came back. I thought it was okay to keep this additional resentment side plot in, but they just kind of threw it away until suddenly in one of the final episodes, when the Hungry Wok crew started working at Finishing Touch, Dong Shik suddenly comes at Sam Seon for sleeping with his wife, and that just made me go like, ‘why now?’. He already knew it was Sam Seon, I feel like he already saw him before, and they’d already been working in the same kitchen for a few days by then, so why suddenly add in this particular moment for Dong Shik to attack him? It was a bit random to me.
Sae Woo’s part contains probably the most inconsistencies in the story for me, so let’s go to it. As I mentioned before, Sae Woo is originally from a wealthy family, and she’s suddenly stripped of her privileges after her father is unfairly charged with bank fraud or money-laundering or something (my brain tends to go on standby mode when financial stuff is mentioned so I couldn’t keep 100% track of what was going on exactly). The first few episodes in which everything was still very fuzzy and chaotic to me mostly had to do with Sae Woo because despite her being the female lead character, I feel like the writers kept her character very vague. I had a lot of difficulty gauging what exactly she was feeling and she was also very ambiguous about her feelings, especially towards Poong and Chil Seong. I have to admit that in the beginning, I was really scared for another Jealousy Incarnate situation in which she wouldn’t be able to choose between the two guys. There’s this one time when Chil Seong kisses her, and she doesn’t object to it, she even goes, ‘Hm, that was kind of nice and warm’, and she also doesn’t come out with her true feelings towards Poong even after he flat-out tells her he likes her but wants to keep a distance because he also knows that Chil Seong has feelings for her. I remember going like, ‘NO, WHY’ when she initially went, ‘okay, sure’, like, what? This is the point where you say, ‘I already rejected Chil Seong and I have feelings for you too, so please don’t hold back, we can talk to Chil Seong together’ or something. Anyways, I just found Sae Woo very hard to gauge. On the other hand I also really liked how easygoing she was, she never made a huge drama about emotional situations and she was very bubbly and quirky and I liked that. It was nice to have a female lead character who just kind of went with the punches without wallowing in self-pity. When she did have it tough, she just gross-sobbed it out, had a drink and got over it the next day.
The first thing that made me go ‘???’ was when she received that call, right after all hell broke loose on her wedding day. Literally, her father gets arrested, her husband bails altogether, her mom faints and then she even receives a phone call about terminal cancer from a doctor. Honestly, the terminal cancer call at that moment made me go, ‘really?😑 it’s going to be this level of stereotypical?’ There was literally no preceding clue that she might be sick whatsoever, so this was just super out of the blue and random. And then, the next moment she’s suddenly walking around town with her freaking horse while wearing her fencing mask. She eventually ends up at Chil Seong’s money-lending business as a last resort and uses the ‘I have terminal cancer’ card on him. Turns out, the cancer call is actually about her horse, not her. But the way this was revealed was also stripped of its potential ‘OOOH it was the HORSE’ effect. I don’t know how exactly it would’ve had the right effect on me, but the way it was revealed was just really anticlimactic and it didn’t even make me feel anything, like shock or relief that it wasn’t about Sae Woo herself. It just made me go, ‘wait… huh? oh, it was about the horse? oh, but… huh, okay…🤨’. Also, there was the fact that they started out with this running gag of narrating the horse’s thoughts but then also completely bailed on that. In the first couple of episodes (in which the horse also gets cured completely, so no further dramatic developments in that area either), the horse is often narrated, thinking about how much he misses Sae Woo and even going off to his neighbor horse about how much he and Sae Woo love each other, and he’s always waiting for her to come back. And then the whole horse is gone for the majority of the show, and Sae Woo only gets back to him once after her dad is released from prison, being like ‘ahh, sorry that I had to leave you alone for so long’. Damn straight, he didn’t appear for like 20 episodes, and they never gave him another narrated thought. So yeah, at least be consistent if you’re gonna add in fun elements like that, because now it just seemed random that they added it in at first only to completely drop it at some point.
For my next point, I have to move on to Sae Woo’s family and consequently, Hungry Wok’s main staff. We are introduced to three initially random people who all end up coming to Hungry Frying Pan/Wok for a job. There’s Chae Seol Ja (played by Park Ji Young), Im Geok Jeong (played by Tae Hang Ho) and Mrs. Jin Jung Hye (also played by Lee Mi Sook). They initially don’t seem to have any connection to each other or Hungry Wok, but we eventually find out that they are very connected. Seol Ja has a history with Chef Wang, in fact she’s the person who’s money he stole to run away to South Korea. They used to date when they were still both in China, and Seol Ja trained under him as a very high-skilled Cutting Part. Again, I don’t know if Seol Ja was actually supposed to be of Chinese origin, because it did seem like she had an accent. Anyways, after coming to South Korea and starting work at Poong’s new kitchen, she quickly deducts that Poong won’t be able to pay her that much and she’s swayed a couple of times by Chef Wang’s propositions to come work with him at Finishing Touch. She ends up remaining loyal to Poong.
Then there’s Geok Jeong (whose name, I believe, is used as a word pun several times because it means ‘to worry’ – I remember at least one scene in which Poong mentioned something about worrying and the shot changed to Geok Jeong as soon as Poong used the word ‘geokjeong’, lol). Geok Jeong has a limp, and therefore he keeps getting rejected for jobs. Somehow, he is recommended to work as a Noodle Part at Hungry Wok by Seol Ja, suggesting that they know each other. And then Mrs. Jin comes in, and while she’s initially taken on as a dish washer, she ends up showing more affinity with waitressing work. She has won some beauty contest in the past and she’s at least able to distract the customers from the idea that the restaurant is run by gangsters, so she manages to get a lot of people in. Apart from that, she’s a typical lady who clearly never had to work a single day in her life, and Poong lashes out on her for being clumzy and incapable more than once. Fun fact: these three people are actually Sae Woo’s family. That is to say – Mrs. Jin is her mother, and Seol Ja and Geok Jeong have been helping her out at the family house for a long time. I believe Seol Ja came to Mrs. Jin as soon as she came to Korea after Chef Wang ran away with her money, and both her and Geok Jeong have been loyal to her and Sae Woo’s dad ever since. The four of them live in the same house.
Now, the way they revealed that these people were part of Sae Woo’s household could’ve also been done much more effectively. I felt that, again, the ‘omg wait they’re all in this together?!’ effect it should have had was taken away by the slightly sloppy delivery they went for. Besides, even after revealing that they are all related in some way, to the end I still have no idea how Seol Ja and Geok Jeong know each other. I went from several different ideas to none at all. At first I thought Seol Ja and Geok Jeong were siblings, also because Geok Jeong called Seol Ja ‘noona’, but their surnames are different. It was revealed that Seol Ja came to Mrs. Jin’s house to ask her to take her on as household staff, but how she got in touch with Mrs. Jin or how Geok Jeong got taken on – I still have no idea. From what I gathered in the end, Seol Ja and Geok Jeong just both happened to work at Sae Woo’s parents’ house and became like aunt/cousin figures to Sae Woo (Seol Ja tells Poong at some point that she’s ‘like an aunt to Sae Woo’, but it’s never fully explained what their family dynamic is exactly. They just keep saying ‘we’re a family, we’re a family’, even when half of them aren’t even blood-related. So yeah, I found that a bit confusing throughout. Also, I don’t know if this was just me but before it’s even revealed that Sae Woo and Seol Ja know each other, Sae Woo is actually there when Seol Ja has her ‘test’ to apply for the Cutting Part position, but then later Sae Woo says something about how she didn’t know Seol Ja was hired there. That also made me go like, ‘huh, but they actually saw each other there, right?’ I don’t know, there were just a lot of cases in which characters had already met before but then later acted like they saw each other for the first time or something. For my own mind, I would’ve liked to get a bit more clarity on that. Because now it was like the writers themselves weren’t sure whether to make the fact that they all knew each other a big plot reveal moment or not. They kind of stranded somewhere in the middle, so the effect was, again, lost on me.
Also, I didn’t really see why they chose to cast the same actress for both Mrs. Jin and Chil Seong’s mother. As in, I don’t see the point. It would’ve made more sense to me if they’d actually linked those two women to each other in the story, because on pictures of Chil Seong’s mom when she was younger, she looked exactly like Mrs. Jin. They could’ve made them distantly related or something. But now it literally didn’t add anything, it didn’t have any meaning. They could’ve just as well cast a different actress for Mrs. Jin or Chil Seong’s mom. Not that Lee Mi Sook’s acting was bad or that I didn’t like seeing her as two completely different characters – it was definitely impressive how she performed the double role – but within the story it just didn’t make sense to me. I would’ve expected them to at least link the resemblance of Mrs. Jin and Chil Seong’s mom, or at least make a remark about how similar they looked, just like with Chil Seong and his dad. Now I just find myself wondering why they chose to do this without any explanation.
So yeah, all in all I identified a few loose ends (Dal Hee, Kang Ho, the HORSE – although at least he appeared one final time at the end) and some inconsistencies in encounters between people and how several pieces of important information were revealed in a pretty anticlimactic way. I just felt like they missed the right timing with some potentially effective plot twist revelations.
Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about Yong Seung Ryong because this bastard was involved in way more than he cared to admit and I also want to discuss his personality a little bit. In principle we first meet Seung Ryong as Poong’s boss at Giant Hotel, and we see that he’s making out with Dal Hee before we even know she’s Poong’s fiancée. Throughout the show, he’s basically a massive prick who looks down on Poong when he’s kicked out, feeling like the man because he gets the girl and Poong’s threats to take revenge are just silly noises to his ears. However, at some point he finds himself forced to acknowledge Poong’s skill as he manages to persuade the hospital staff that usually comes to Giant Hotel to come have some Chinese dishes at Hungry Wok, classic (basic) dishes that Finishing Touch doesn’t serve because it’s ‘below them’ (seriously, as a professional chef, how can you say any dish is below you?). In any case, they start losing customers to Hungry Wok because they serve the same dishes for only a tenth of FT’s price. And, you know, sometimes people just crave a good old familiar bowl of jjajangmyeon, jjampong or sweet and sour stir-fried pork. And then Seung Ryong starts helping Chef Wang in his attempts to sabotage Poong’s business, primarily by bribing the hospital director to eat at FT even when there’s already been a competition in which a hospital staff member had to choose between the two restaurants’ jjajangmyeon. Like, seriously, this guy only knew how to play foul. It is later revealed that it was none other than Seung Ryong who was actually responsible for what Sae Woo’s father was arrested for. If I understood correctly, he had a company called Ultra Construction, and he hired someone to take a huge loan from Mr. Dan’s bank to fund it, so that it later looked like Mr. Dan himself had made that shady donation or something. In any case, Chil Seong is onto his case and he’s basically working on that while Poong and Sae Woo focus on getting Hungry Wok into business.
I kind of got confused about Seung Ryong’s motives as the story progressed because suddenly he rented out Hungry Wok for himself and he even admitted in front of Chef Wang that he wanted Poong to come back to Finishing Touch, so now suddenly he was trying to get on his good side again? After that he just became more and more lame and powerless, even before Chil Seong dealt him the final blow of buying Giant Hotel’s estate. He went from this super influential and dominating scared-of-nothing character to someone who couldn’t do anything on his own. I had to laugh this one time when he was pushing Chef Wang to get rid of Poong’s patronage and he said that the success of Giant Hotel mostly lay in Finishing Touch. Shouldn’t you be a bit more worried about the faring of your hotel when it’s primarily reliant on the profit of its restaurant? Did these guys even know what they were doing or at what kind of place they were working?
In any case, Sae Woo’s father is eventually released from prison and Seung Ryong is prosecuted for fraud and a bunch of other illegal stuff. Chil Seong manages to ‘win’ Giant Hotel’s building in an auction, Finishing Touch now belongs to him. Chef Wang is kicked out (no idea where he goes, he also disappears after being dismissed) and Poong becomes the main chef and has to work with both the FT staff and his Hungry Wok people, which proves to be a whole different challenge in itself.
Seriously, I got so mad when they had that fallout in the FT kitchen in one of the final episodes. First of all, I didn’t even understand why Poong kept Sam Seon on in the first place after his blatant betrayal and zero show of repentence. Poong wanted to keep the lunch hours open for ‘normal customers’ who just wanted a bowl of jjajangmyeon for the same price as at Hungry Wok, so in that way they wouldn’t completely lose their old business. These customers were just as important as the FT regulars, and it wasn’t fair that they now all had to go eat at a hotel that charged ten times the price they were used to. At hearing this, Sam Seon just completely snapped at him and started lecturing him while the only thing he did was prove his own narrow-mindedness. Throughout the show, but especially here, I couldn’t help but think that the only thing everyone from Giant Hotel or FT has is pride. Nothing else. They don’t even care about the food they make, it’s only about their reputation and the amount of money they make. They seriously don’t want to make jjajangmyeon because they consider themselves to be ‘high-trained chefs’ who don’t ‘stoop to such a low and basic level of cooking’. How the heck do you even call yourself a chef with that mindset? Not that I can relate, but shouldn’t you have some basic respect for any kind of dish that you can make? Sam Seon’s outrage just didn’t make any sense to me. The only thing it did was prove to me that they don’t even care about the food and the feelings of the customers eating it. They feel so elevated above the level of ‘basic Chinese dishes’ that they don’t even show up on the first day when they are going to try the lunch hour deal out. What a bunch of pros – not. I just enjoyed it when they came back and realized they’d had a huge amount of customers who all emptied their bowls to the final bite. I guess they must have severely underestimated Poong’s patronage at Hungry Wok. They were all like, ‘uhh we can’t serve food during lunch hours for only 24 dollars, it’s below our pay rate’, but even if they charged only a tenth of their FT prices, with the amount of Hungry Wok customers that came during lunch, they actually made a whole lot of extra profit.
I really loved the part where Poong told Sam Seon that working at a hotel restaurant doesn’t say anything about your skills as a chef, just like working at a small, gangster-run shop doesn’t. What matters is that the customers finish their plates and come back for more. That’s what defines your skill as a chef. It just really made me feel like Poong, who initially used to be one of those FT chefs, really learned from his experiences at Hungry Wok, it really changed his view on cooking and serving customers and I think this statement confirmed his character development most of all.
Finally, I want to talk a bit about the personal relationships (both familial, romantic and friendly/platonic) in the story. There are many relationship dynamics, both emotional and obligational.
First of all, there’s the dynamic between the three main leads, Poong, Chil Seong and Sae Woo. Chil Seong falls in love with Sae Woo first, and after meeting her again when they start Poong’s revenge plan at Hungry Frying Pan, where Poong and Sae Woo are both dealing with their respective failed marriages, he gives her a lot of space. Sae Woo is aware of his feelings but lets him know several times that she’s not interested in him like that. Despite this rejection, Chil Seong refuses to become awkward around Sae Woo and they remain to be on good terms, even more so when he helps to get her dad out of prison.
On the other hand, Chil Seong proves his worth to Poong once and for all by literally risking his life in order to get Poong’s recipe notebook back from the Finishing Touch kitchen. After this, he’s officially gained Poong’s respect and Poong starts calling him ‘hyung’ and even ends up living at Chil Seong’s place above Hungry Wok. Because he knows that Chil Seong has feelings for Sae Woo and he doesn’t want to lose his friendship with him, Poong initially restrains himself in his own growing feelings for Sae Woo, even though things definitely appear to be working out between the both of them.
Poong and Sae Woo eventually start dating in secret because they don’t want to hurt Chil Seong’s feelings and Sae Woo also doesn’t want her family to find out since they don’t exactly see eye to eye with Poong, because of the way he treats Mrs. Jin in the kitchen. I personally found it really sad that Chil Seong found out about it the way he did, he just happens to see them kiss in front of the restaurant while they think no one is looking and it just made me go☹️. I wasn’t rooting for Chil Seong and Sae Woo per se, but he was such a good guy and I just felt bad that he had to find out this way.
On the other hand, he had more than enough stuff to deal with, starting with the discovery of the mystery lady being his mom, so maybe it was good that he had other things to focus on. That way he was able to take a bit of distance from everything that was happening at Hungry Wok.
Actually, I would’ve liked Chil Seong to end up with that veterinarian lady. There was this woman who he kept crossing paths with but he kept failing to recognize her for some reason and she kept getting agitated about that. After meeting by chance four times, also after he took Dim Sum to the veterinary hospital where she worked, she was like, ‘I don’t know what your deal is, but the next time we meet, I’m gonna assume this is fate so you better remember my name’, lol. I liked her spunk. I would’ve liked some sort of conclusion as to where his connection with her was going, but alas, we’ll never know.
Then, of course there’s the romantic relationship between Poong and Sae Woo, the one we all saw coming from the start but still developed quite naturally. I really liked their chemistry, actually. I was kind of frustrated that they didn’t just go for each other as soon as they knew each other’s feelings (seriously, when Sae Woo accepted that Poong wanted to restrain himself for Chil Seong’s sake I was like ‘WHY WOULD YOU SAY OK TO THAT?!😨’). But I really liked how Poong came to accept his own feelings for her so naturally, how he just didn’t know what to do with himself sometimes because he wanted to touch her so badly and the cozy scenes between them were really cute, just like their kissing scenes. (The scene where she uses her body to put out the fire on his uniform and he’s like, ‘Dang😳🔥’, haha.) I also liked how they kept the reference to that ‘your true love is right in front of you’ fortune cookie and how he ultimately uses that to propose to her, that was really sweet. There is no ‘conclusive’ confirmation in the form of marriage or whatever to their romance, but the show ends with them making out in the FT kitchen after he proposes to her and she responds with ‘Service/Good to go’, which was also kind of cute. I found their relationship dynamic quite interesting, especially because they start out as polar opposites personality-wise, but it really seems as if Sae Woo starts rubbing off on Poong at some point, and he visibly softens and becomes more affectionate towards her. There are times where they have to hide their relationship in the kitchen and he treats her quite strictly (causing him to be even less popular by Sae Woo’s family), but he always comes back to her afterwards with a ‘sorry I said that’ pouty face.
By the way, to this very moment I still don’t fully understand why Mrs. Jin was so extremely against their relationship. Like, she could’ve had a personal grudge against Poong for the way he treated her at Hungry Wok (although I have to admit she really wasn’t of much use there), but she just remained determined to disapprove of him even after seeing how much he cared for her daughter and she kept punishing him, even to the point of forbidding Seol Ja and Geok Jeong to join him at FT. Honestly, if I were Seol Ja and Geok Jeong, I would’ve just gone, there was physically nothing Mrs. Jin could do to stop them, so that in itself was also a bit exaggerated. Even Sae Woo’s father didn’t seem to mind as much as his wife did, so in the end it just became a bit childish how she kept trying to persuade him to stop dating her daughter. She also didn’t think about what Sae Woo wanted. Poong himself had already tried to persuade her not to work at FT because he worried it would be too much for her, but Sae Woo was the one who decided for herself that she wanted to keep working there because she’d sincerely come to love cooking and working with the wok. At some point I just really wanted Mrs. Jin to give in, because everyone knew she wasn’t going to keep them apart no matter how hard she tried.
As I mentioned before, I really liked Chil Seong’s gang, mostly because of their unwavering loyalty towards him. Chil Seong certainly found a trustworthy bunch, and it was admirable how firmly they stood by him in everything that happened. Even when they all were dealing with their own stuff, for example how Maeng Dal and Seol Ja got together and how Dong Shik found out his wife was having an affair, they were always there to have Chil Seong’s back, and I liked how they also became an indispensable part of Poong’s kitchen. It was so nice when Yi Man’s dish got approved for the first time and everyone just shot each other triumphant glances. They became a family of their own at Hungry Wok, and later expanded that to Finishing Touch, and in that transition they had the backs of all their fellow Hungry Wok members when they had to stand up against those self-assured FT pricks. I just really liked the bonds that were created once Hungry Wok became a successful business, and everyone that hated each other in the beginning started getting along better.
Before I go on to my cast comments, I want to make two final practical comments about the title and the poster for this series. Regarding the title, again there’s a difference between English and Korean. In Korean, the show is called something like ‘Greasy Melo’ and I think that actually fits the vibe of the show very well. It basically prides itself on its cheesiness, and the greasy is of course a reference to the cooking. On the other hand, I think Wok of Love is also very fitting, especially because Poong and Sae Woo literally fall for each other while he teaches her how to use the wok, and she even becomes ‘the ladle to his wok’ for a while after he injures his hand. So I think both titles are good as they keep both a reference to a part of the story and to the genre of the series as being a slightly cheesy melo-romance.
Regarding the poster, I initially had another image at the top of this post but I actually think it’s not as fitting for the series so I chose the one that simply features Poong feeding Sae Woo some (heart-shaped) food – as he does quite often in the series as well. I just want to make this remark because I saw someone comment on it in another review and I thought that person made a fair point. First of all, the other image features the three main leads, including Chil Seong, side by side. That in itself isn’t the issue, per se, but it shows Chil Seong in a way that suggests he’s also part of the kitchen staff, waving a kitchen knife, while in fact Chil Seong is the only person at Hungry Wok who is not primarily affiliated with the restaurant. He owns it, he occasionally comes to check on it and he sometimes helps out with serving customers when it’s really busy, but he never actually touches any kitchen utensils or ingredients, so depicting him as part of the kitchen crew like this is a bit misleading. Also, he only has the hairstyle he dons on the picture in the very final episode when he enters Giant Hotel as its owner for the first time. His characteristic gangster hairstyle is what defines him as Chil Seong, especially after Sae Woo mentions it makes him look like a gangster in episode 1. He has the same weird hairstyle throughout the entire show, so why suddenly depict him in this way, with an appearance he literally only shows once in the entire show?
I also personally think the way the image depicts Sae Woo in the middle, as the center, is a bit misleading and even a bit unfair. In all honesty, Poong should be featured in the middle as he’s the main chef and in charge of the kitchen, while Sae Woo is never anything more than a kitchen assistant, even at FT. Depicting her like this, in that confident pose as if she’s the boss, is also not entirely true to the story. Adding to that the way that Poong is on the side, just throwing some flour around with a sheepish smile on his face – all in all I don’t find that this image gives a very accurate impression of the three main characters.
Time for the cast comments!
As I mentioned in my introduction, this drama was recommended to me by my penpal who loves Lee Joon Ho, and I gladly took the chance because I’ve seen him before in Just Between Lovers where I really liked him. I was not disappointed. It was nice to see a different character from him, especially the more silly and cheesy bits, because he pulled it off very well. He definitely gave me butterflies in his romantic scenes as well, especially in the way he lowered his voice sometimes🫣. I personally think that Poong should be seen as the true main character here, even before Sae Woo, because it was his story that was explored the most, he’s the one we have to empathize with as he goes about his revenge plan. I also feel like he had the most character development out of everyone. I really liked Lee Joon Ho’s performance as Poong, and I’m excited to see more of him – in fact, there are a couple of his dramas on my to-watch list!
I hadn’t seen Jung Ryeo Won in anything before, but I know that she’s in at least one more show that’s on my watchlist because I recognize her face. By the way, not me gasping when I discovered she’s actually 9 years older than Lee Joon Ho! I wouldn’t have guessed that! She was 37 when this drama aired while Lee Joon Ho was 28. I mean, they established that she was older than him in the series and he also called her ‘noona’ there, but that was like a one-year difference! Anyways, I just mean to say that seeing their chemistry looked really natural and I kind of forgot about Poong being older than Sae Woo at times. I think Jung Ryeo Won did a really good job portraying Sae Woo’s eccentricity. I’ve seen reviews calling Sae Woo as annoying (one even described her as ‘the most annoying FL of all time’ which I find a bit exaggerated – still doesn’t beat Jealousy Incarnate for me🙃). I was actually relieved she didn’t get more annoying. Yes, I occasionally found it hard to gauge what she was truly feeling, especially when she was still going back and forth between Chil Seong and Poong’s advances in the beginning, but once she went for Poong, she went all the way. I liked how giddy she got at every display of affection and protection from Poong’s side and I personally think she has a very contagious smile, as well. Seeing her smile just made me smile in a natural cause-and-effect kind of way, lol. I’m really curious to see her in other shows, so I hope I can get to that one show on my list soon. Since I don’t have any other reference to her acting, I can’t say that much yet, but I liked the originality and quirkiness of her character, although I sometimes missed a bit of clarity from her. Then again, she just did what the script said, so I can’t really blame her for that. In any case, she was a fun female lead character, and I still find it interesting how there were differences in the ‘main character-ness’ of the main leads, lol. I liked her energy and I actually kind of liked having such a light and carefree female lead for a change.
I’ve only seen Jang Hyuk once before, in Fated to Love You where he also played a bit of an eccentric guy. His eccentricity there was way more exaggerated, so I was wondering how far he would go in Wok of Love, but I actually really came to like his character because of how much he held back. As in, he didn’t overdo it, Chil Seong was already eccentric enough the way he was without adding additional quirks to it. I actually really liked the depth they gave his character by focusing more on fixing his relationship with his mother and showing his professional business side rather than just having him uselessly watch from the side how the others dealt with Hungry Wok. They really made him into his own character, not making him become dependable on his part in Poong’s character development or in whether or not he would receive Sae Woo’s affection. I really liked that about him, and it made him even more likeable in the way he kept being a part of the ‘family’ whilst also going about his own business that stood apart from the restaurant feuds. I really liked Jang Hyuk’s performance and I think his portrayal of the softer sides of Chil Seong’s personality really helped in that. The last thing I needed was an already quirky character trying to emphasize those quirks more than necessary. In that, the way he would make those upside-down peace signs and the way he yelped ‘Sneezing!’ when he sneezed, or the way he loved quoting Nietzsche was enough. He was a very well-balanced character, one of the more layered characters of the series, and I felt for him throughout the entire story as he overcame his own issues by himself.
As I mentioned, I didn’t really understand why Lee Mi Sook was cast as two different characters who didn’t have anything to do with each other, but it didn’t take away from the fact that she acted very well. I mostly remember her from Jealousy Incarnate, but now I see she was also in Cinderella’s Sister (which feels like ages ago so I don’t recognize her from that but I assume she was the FL’s mother) and Temperature of Love (which I believe Sae Woo was even reading at some point, so that may have been a subtle reference). She definitely showed me a new side to her acting, especially as Chil Seong’s mother, and she was a nice addition to the cast. I just kind of hoped there’d be some sort of surprising link that would describe the resemblance between her two characters, or if someone would just make a comment about it because it was so obvious when looking at Seon Nyeo’s younger pictures. To pull this and then leave it unaddressed just didn’t sit right with me, lol. Maybe it’s my neurodivergence, but I just can’t deal with things like this remaining completely unaddressed. Usually when shows bring back a character from a previous season as a new character, there’s always some sort of explanation, or at least a mentioning of the resemblance (Doctor Who is very good at this). If they’re going to make it appear like a completely random thing, then why deliberately choose to cast someone in a double role? Anyways, I don’t want this to affect my cast comment to much so I’ll leave it at that. Lee Mi Sook did very well, although I kind of liked her more as Seon Nyeo because it was a type of character I hadn’t seen her play before.
I know Park Ji Young from Jealousy Incarnate, Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo and The Liar and His Lover, and there’s some more dramas with her on my watchlist, so I’m excited for those. This was the first time seeing her in this kind of role, as a more hands-on down-to-earth kind of lady. I also liked her accent, although I’m still not sure if that was supposed to suggest she was originally from China or that it was a different kind of Korean accent. In any case, although I admired Seol Ja’s loyalty to Mrs. Jin, there were times where I really wanted her to just do whatever she wanted. Why did she need permission to work at Finishing Touch, and why was the only solution to start working there for her and Geok Jeong to move out of Mrs. Jin’s house? As if it was that extreme a betrayal? Also, I really didn’t like it when she was actually debating on going to Finishing Touch, even after Chef Wang betrayed her like that in the past. I get that she needed money, but she really shouldn’t even have debated leaving Poong like that. I’m glad she decided to stay, and it was also kind of funny how, despite her faithful nature, money was always something that managed to sway her. I liked the scene where she got all excited because Maeng Dal received all the money that Chil Seong plastered his building’s walls with, but then completely lost it when Maeng Dal said he wanted to use most of it to help support other people, lol. They were a cute couple, although I find their chemistry a bit awkward at times. In any case, Park Ji Young is always a nice familiar face in K-Dramas and it was nice to see her and Lee Mi Sook act together again, as they also acted closely together in Jealousy Incarnate. It feels like quite a while since I saw her appear in anything, too, so that was nice. I hope to see more of her again soon!
I really like Tae Hang Ho. Besides his appearances in Pinocchio (which is from 2014?! I thought it was a much more recent show🙉), Hidden Identity, Oh My Ghostess, High-end Crush, Uncontrollably Fond, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Missing Nine, The Great Seducer, I’ve also seen him in some variety shows like Busted! and From The New World. He just makes me want to hug him, lol. He has such a nice energy, and despite his tendency to be more of a comical character, he always keeps it real. I remember I really empathized with his character in Missing Nine, and I also liked Geok Jeong, especially the time when he came with Poong to Finishing Touch and knocked a bunch of those guys out. He was basically a teddy bear who makes everyone forget how strong he actually is, with his limp and his twitching lip. It was also cute how Bo Ra developed a crush on him. As I didn’t expect to see him in this series, it was another nice surprise. Like with Seol Ja, I still would’ve liked him to be a bit more self-dependent and not just blindly follow Mrs. Jin’s restrictions, because that stood apart from how much they felt like they owed her. The only loose end with his character to me was that until the end I didn’t get any clarity on where he came from. How did he end up at Sae Woo’s family house, how did he meet Seol Ja? I suppose they met somewhere in the cooking field as she knew how good his skills were, but nothing was clarified. Still, I liked his performance.
In my watching experience, Jo Jae Yoon is always ever casted as obnoxious characters, so I found it really nice to see him as Maeng Dal here. In the beginning he did have some annoying tendencies, but he also grew as a person and I think his character may have had the most character development after Poong. I’ve seen him before in Blood, Descendants of the Sun, Fantastic, Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung, but I feel like he’s had a lot of guest appearances and cameos as well. This was the first ‘main’ side character role I’ve seen him in and I actually came to like his character. I’ve said this before, but sometimes when actors try to be funny, they tend to overdo because their sole purpose is to be funny while in reality, what’s the most funny is when people are funny without trying to be. Jo Jae Yoon has been on the edge of overdoing it several times, but here I actually liked how seriously Maeng Dal took himself, and in that he sometimes became even funnier because he wasn’t trying to be funny. Still following? Anyways, I just mean to say that, while I was a bit worried that he might become this really obnoxious guy, even whilst being loyal to Chil Seong, I was actually positively surprised by how Maeng Dal turned out. Yes, he was a bit annoying in his determination to obstruct Poong in the beginning, but he really made a change for the better, and that was only confirmed when he showed his compassion towards the people around him by announcing he was going to give all that money to support them. The roles I’ve seen so far of Jo Jae Yoon were kind of redeemed through Maeng Dal, so that was nice.
I hadn’t seen anything with Kim Sa Kwon before, but I think I will see him again in some later watchlist items. In any case, I’ve already talked about how much of a jackass Yong Seung Ryong was, so in that aspect the actor definitely delivered. As if he wasn’t already a big enough douche for showing no compassion towards Poong after taking his girl away from him while they were about to get married (and I honestly don’t believe Seung Ryong was planning on marrying Dal Hee, he was just having fun), the way he acted towards him -and Chil Seong, for that matter- afterwards just kept proving that he was a living scumbag of a man, all the more after we find out what he’s done to make Sae Woo’s family go bankrupt. Anyways, no hate to the actor, only to the character. I guess the fact that I found Seung Ryong so annoying had to do with how well the actor portrayed his douche-ness, so props to him for that, lol. It was kind of weird that Dal Hee suddenly disappeared, because I definitely expected her to appear more often in Seung Ryong’s company to provoke Poong even more. In any case, I’m probably going to see more of his acting and future watches, so then I’ll hopefully be able to give more feedback on his acting performance. For now I’ll just say he portrayed the arrogance and dominant attitude of Seung Ryong very well.
While I always like to see Im Won Hee in dramas as he’s such an underrated actor and capable of so much more than just being funny, it’s always weird to see him as a bad guy, haha. I really liked his role though, even though Chef Wang was insufferable, but he played him with such triumphant venom that I couldn’t help but applaud Im Won Hee for his versatility. For me, he falls a bit in the same category as Jo Jae Yoon, but he also redeemed himself for me here because he too took himself very seriously. I think the last things I saw him in were Melting Me Softly and Room No. 9, but I also know him from Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Move to Heaven, and undoubtedly some other guest appearances. It was really funny seeing him as a relentless chef who, despite his self-proclaimed high status as a professional chef still lowered himself to bring other people down in very immature ways. I was entertained by his character while simultaneously hating his guts, and that’s something that not all actors can pull off, so well done, Mr. Im Won Hee.
I kind of struggled with my morals here because I usually have nothing but praising words for Oh Ui Shik’s characters, and I still do, except that I really wasn’t prepared to hate his character so much😂. Sam Seon was such an unreasonable back-stabbing snake that I couldn’t even find it in myself to forgive him the way Poong did. Poong is a freaking saint. In any case, it was still very nice to see him and I guess he also has to occasionally portray different kinds of roles (not just friendly ones) to work on her repertoire so I can also see the admirable part in this performance. I’ve seen Oh Ui Shik in a bunch of series so far, Oh My Ghostess (which was his debut😯I didn’t know), Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, Circle, Fight For My Way, While You Were Sleeping, Are You Human Too?, Wife I Know, Romance is a Bonus Book, Touch Your Heart, True Beauty, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha and most recently in Crash Course in Romance. Lots of favorites in that list, and even more coming up on my watchlist. Oh Ui Shik is definitely one of my favorite steady actors who always deliver, no matter what their character is. In Sam Seon’s case as well, he felt completely justified in his actions, he wasn’t playing a bad guy while thinking of himself as a bad guy, and that made his performance even more realistic and, consequently, annoying because he was so in the wrong and he didn’t even see how petty he was being. Still, I’m always happy to see him and he definitely delivered again.
By the way, I just discovered that the director of this series also directed Suspicious Partner and A Business Proposal, two of my favorite shows! And I’m actually not surprised that the screenwriter also worked on Jealousy Incarnate, because for some reason I just expected there to be a link somewhere. Not just because both Park Ji Young and Lee Mi Sook were in it, because the story structure as a whole also kind of reminded me of it. I’m just glad they didn’t let Wok of Love play out the way Jealousy Incarnate did, because Jealousy Incarnate made my skin crawl and Wok of Love didn’t🙃.
I think I already briefly touched on it, but I just want to comment once more that in terms of food, this series is an absolute pleasure to watch. Seriously, every single episode made me crave jjajangmyeon and stir-fried pork, and don’t even get me started on that All Shrimp Festival🤤. The competitions between Hungry Wok and Finishing Touch may have been a bit immature, but I was not complaining because everything looked so. freaking. good. The combination of delicious-looking food and simultaneously learning more about kitchen business and how intense it is, how much teamwork you need to get everything to work properly, was very interesting and educating. As I said, my favorite scenes were when everyone was working happily together in the Hungry Wok kitchen, once they all learned how to work like a well-oiled machine they looked like they were having so much fun and they actually made the whole process from kitchen to table look a party.
All in all, I had a good time watching this, it was fun and light and it was nice to not have to be so emotionally invested in some really dramatic storyline. On the other hand, as I’ve elaborated, I did miss a little bit of depth in the overall plot, and there were some tiny sloppy details that could’ve been either clarified or solved better. But I’m still happy that I watched it. Now I will have to relay my thoughts to the friend who recommended it to me, haha.
I’m actually not sure yet what I’m going to watch next, and I haven’t had that for a while😆. I’m thinking of sliding in another series that’s been recommended to me before I decide on how to go on with my watchlist, I just want to switch it up a little bit. So yeah, it’s going to be a surprise for the both of us! I hope I was able to make this a worthwhile review to read, and I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to finish the next one in combination with my (suddenly) hectic daily schedule, but you’ll hear me from soon anyways.
Until then, bye-bee! x
