I have so many thoughts after watching the first two episodes of Bon Appetit, Your Majesty. For all of us Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo fans, we might finally have something to quench our thirst. Now, this show doesn’t have a leading cast of some 8 male leads, but it does have a K-pop idol as the female lead, who plays a character who travels back in time during the era of a tyrant who is known only for the harm he perpetrated. In that case, she was a makeup artist, but in this, she’s a Michelin-star chef who finds herself cooking for a king who was known to be a gourmand. On the other hand, there was Mr. Queen, in which a male chef woke up one day in the body of a queen in the Joseon period. However, what I find most interesting is how these shows portray the tyrants as misunderstood, and suggest that they have internalized trauma that contributed to their behavior. I don’t even want to get into the heartbreak that was Moon Lovers, but I do sense a pattern, though since I know nothing about the Joseon period and these kings, I just watch the shows as sheer entertainment, and that is what they are. But having said that, let’s get into the 160 minutes of the first two episodes.
Spoiler Alert
How Did Ji-Young End Up In The Joseon Dynasty?
Bon Appetit, Your Majesty episode 1 begins with a scene from the future, where Ji-Young is brought in front of a king, and he tells her she’s going to be his chef from now on. Everyone is shocked to hear that a woman is going to cook for him, but soon she breaks the fourth wall to tell us how she ended up in this situation. The story begins with Ji-Young winning a culinary competition in Paris, making her a top 3-star Michelin chef. This is because when her stove doesn’t work at the last minute, she uses a Joseon dynasty technique to sear her steak, making her dish stand out. She’s delighted to tell her father about it on the phone just as she’s about to leave Paris to go back home. Her father tells her she’s going to witness a solar eclipse on her flight. On the flight, Ji-Young uses the tube of gochujang she carries in her purse to spice up her in-flight meal. When the eclipse begins, there’s an announcement, and the man next to her accidentally drops his hot coffee onto her and the bag in which she’s carrying a book from the Joseon period for her father. She rushes to the washroom to clean it up and reads a romantic line about “returning to me,” just as the eclipse is taking place. Suddenly, she’s going in circles and lands in a trap in the Joseon period, but she obviously doesn’t know where she really is.
The king is on a hunt, despite it being an inauspicious day (an eclipse back then, too). He finds a fox and goes after it, but the arrow releases Ji-Young’s trap. She tries to run when she realizes the man is going to continue firing at her, but he catches up to her on a cliff. The king’s been told that if he hurts the sentiments of the ancestors by missing the rituals, he will be attacked by a “gwinyeo,” or a female ghost. This is what he imagines Ji-Young is, but he’s run out of arrows. Ji-Young manages to stay alive, but loses her bag to a branch a little way off the cliff’s edge. They’re both standing at the edge while she’s trying to save herself from who she thinks is an actor pretending to be a king. However, suddenly, he’s shot by an arrow in the chest and takes her along with him off the cliff. She wakes up, but she realizes she needs to stop the bleeding from his chest to save him. She does so using some Vaseline in her pocket. He wakes up and then tries to use a knife on her, thinking she’s trying to kill him, though she’s just saved his life. She manages to show him her knife skills, telling him she’s a “chef,” before knocking him out and tying him up. She drags him along to find somewhere to drink water, and they end up finding a house in the middle of nowhere. The king tells Ji-Young that nobody should be living in the forest; they are his hunting grounds, but she walks into the house and even takes some clothes because hers are wet and dirty from everything that’s happened.
A young girl named Gil-Geum is in the house, and when Ji-Young hears a sound coming from it, she goes to check. Gil-Geum tries to beat her up with a broom, calling her a thief, but Ji-Young has had enough chaos for one day and is surprised to see another person acting crazy because they think it’s the Joseon period. However, hearing Gil-Geum, she starts to realize she might’ve actually travelled back into the past. Gil-Geum is starved, though, and so is Ji-Young, so the latter promises to make the former a good meal. While gathering things to cook and looking at the equipment she has on hand to cook with, Ji-Young’s fears become more apparent.
She decides to make a gochujang butter bibimbap with all the beautiful ingredients Gil-Geum has picked herself, and then adds the butter she saved for later in her trench coat and the tube of gochujang. She wakes up the king, who makes her taste it first, of course, and she’s still questioning his brain capacity. She finds it delicious and then gives him a bite, but it instantly makes him steam up because it’s too spicy. The same for Gil-Geum, because they’ve never experienced such a taste before. But Gil-Geum says she still wants to keep eating because it’s delicious after the spiciness wears off. The king also gives in, and when Ji-Young holds the spoon up to him (did they have spoons then?), he’s reminded of his mum feeding him and tears up. The first episode ends with the soldiers finding the king and burning down Gil-Geum’s home while the “traitors,” i.e., the two women, are washing up in the river nearby.
How Does Ji-Young Save The Women?
Episode 2 begins with the two women being imprisoned. They’re soon taken to a group of women who are being split up based on how “young and beautiful” they are, to be inspected by the “Chaehong” inspector. This man is Im Sung-Jae, a man known as the treacherous subject in the future, who brought women to the king to manipulate him. Ji-Young knows a lot about history, specifically because she’s the daughter of a history teacher. Ji-Young says she’s 27 years old, so she’s immediately spared, and Gil-Geum follows suit even though she’s actually 18. These women are put in captivity again, while the others are taken away to be inspected, but Ji-Young makes a deal for them when she learns that all the kitchen maids ran away. Ji-Young tells the governor that she’ll whip up a fantastic dish for his guests if he promises to let these women go. He tells her that his guests are no ordinary guests, and always make a fuss, no matter what they get to eat. She’s ready for the challenge.
Ji-Young uses the sous vide technique to cook the meat, while using natural ingredients from the region for the side ingredients. She’s going to serve steak in the Joseon period. What she doesn’t realize is that this is going to be insulting to anybody looking at their dish, because it’s literally just cuts of meat. Im Sung-Jae doesn’t even bother eating the food before dismissing it as an insult. Moreover, he tells the governor of Gyeonggi that he’s going to take his granddaughter into the Chaehong. The governor unsheathes his sword, but his son stops him from making a grave mistake. He suggests they bring out the women who cooked the meal and blame them for it. Ji-Young tells the men that they should taste the food before dismissing it. They will get a taste of nature from the area if they just have a bite. It does have a shocking effect on Im and his father, but they lie, saying it’s just boiled meat. The governor tastes it himself and calls Sung-Jae out for lying, saying he only wants to take his granddaughter away. But this is when the king shows up and asks to taste the food himself. He thinks he will only spare Ji-Young if it’s better than the bibimbap from earlier. His mind is blown by the meat, and he can taste everything that’s been used to make the different bits of the dish. There’s an MSG joke somewhere in there, too. Here’s when things are revealed. Turns out, Yi Heon, the king, was a tyrant who launched two bloody purges in his lifetime. It’s because his mother was killed, and he was very sentimental towards her. The show makes it seem like the whole Chaehong thing is specifically because of how much his mother’s death affected him. This is his revenge on the governor, taking the man’s granddaughter away. Ultimately, Yi Heon wants this man to suffer for aiding in his mum’s death, so he wants him to live a life of suffering. He calls him a criminal who committed blasphemy against his king.
We then see a sweet relationship between Sung-Jae and Yi Heon, which confused me a little bit, and the former asks if he can take the king’s place with the ladies, since the king isn’t in the mood (yikes). On the other hand, Yi Heon decides to take Ji-Young and Gil-Geum back to the palace with him, but they manage to escape, thanks to the governor’s son keeping his promise to let them go if the meal matches the guests’ standards. The girls rush to get Ji-Young’s bag, because she realizes the book is her ticket back home, 500 years into the future, which she’s told the king about, by the way. He finds them quickly enough, and she tells him that she just needs the bag because the book will help her go back 500 years into the future. He uses the bag as leverage, because she says she’ll do anything he wants if he simply gives it to her. Meanwhile, there’s some weird story with the queen, Kang Mok-Ju, but I didn’t quite understand it. She’s conversing with a ghost? Or is he a real person? I’m a bit confused about what’s going on there. She’s heard about the assassination attempt but knows the king still lives. The “ghost” tells her that she should captivate the king to make him lose himself by bringing up his mother, making him more curious about her.
At the end of Bon Appetit, Your Majesty episode 2, Your Majesty, Yi Heon returns to his wife and tells her he wants to show her something, all excited. Ji-Young is immediately intimidated by the queen, who apparently had Yeonhuigun wrapped around her finger and caused all sorts of tyranny. The king doesn’t even hesitate to grab Ji-Young by the chin and make her face him in front of the queen, but tells her that Ji-Young’s purpose is not that of the rest of the women who are generally brought to the palace. He claims she’s going to cling to him to save her life.
