Sometimes I need my TV to be simple, warm and cosy. And what could be more cosy than the setting of a small-town restaurant with storylines about found family and sweet romance? That’s the vibe of Tastefully Yours (ENA 2025) – mostly. Unusually short for a K-drama (10 episodes of one hour each) the story gets to the point without repeating itself and ends satisfactorily.

Han Beom-woo (played by Kang Ha-neul from When the Camellia Blooms and Misaeng) is an executive at Hansang, “Korea’s top food conglomerate”, and is head of a one-star restaurant in Seoul called Motto. He’s a money guy, with no interest in the restaurants that he invests in, and therefore no qualms about destroying small businesses when they no longer serve his needs. His brother Han Seon-woo runs a two-star restaurant in Seoul also owned by Hansang.

Hansang’s founder and president is Beom-woo’s mother, who plays her two sons against each other, ruthlessly demanding the near-impossible and showing so little warmth it’s hard to believe these three people are meant to be related to each other. What is clear is the pressure both sons are under to get three stars by any means necessary.

The stars here are a fictional replacement for Michelin stars. Either they couldn’t get permission to use the Michelin name or decided not to try. But the fictional counterpart is a French company that updates its guide once per year, featuring restaurants all over the world, with the top rating being three stars. It’s a very clear facsimile.

Beom-woo’s modus operandi is to find small restaurants that make one dish exceptionally well, buy them out with a contract that signs over their recipes to Hansang Group, shut them down and hand the recipes to his head chef at Motto. He seems to get pleasure from duping chef-owners into losing their restaurants and little-to-no-pleasure from his own restaurant. He has no respect for his head chef Jang Young-hye (Hong Hwa-yeon) – who in fairness does come across as a bitch, but also yearns to be recognised for her craft.

The above is covered in the first 10 minutes of the first episode. For a K-drama with overall gentle vibes, this has a fast-paced set-up. Beom-woo’s hunt for the perfect version of a dish for Motto takes him to Jeonju – a relatively small city in a rural area famous for ancient buildings and gastronomy. Here he visits a tiny restaurant in a back street run by chef Mo Yeon-joo (Go Min-si from Hello, My Twenties).

Yeon-joo has worked hard to achieve her dream of owning her own restaurant but it seems it might be short-lived as she is losing money fast. She is a perfectionist who only buys the highest-quality ingredients and has only one table for customers as she runs the place alone and can’t keep up with more. She’s great at the chef part, but has little business sense.

In walks Beom-woo, ready to con her with big talk about investment, but her kookiness and genuine love for food disarm him. It’s clear that if he can just move past his asshole tendencies, he actually has knowledge and skills that Yeon-joo sorely needs. And they have instant chemistry.

So yes, it is another story of a bad guy’s redemption, and love for a woman is involved. But I don’t think this is a case of him being “saved by true love”. Beom-woo’s family recognise that he has been floundering in search of a project or role that truly suits him, and here it is.

What helps Beom-woo finally feel a sense of belonging is the friendliness of the small city. Even arch rival business owners in the local neighbourhood are friends in other contexts. They all help each other out when it counts. People flip from blazing rows to bear hugs over a night of drinking. Which there is a lot of in this show. Also, there are non-Koreans in this! There are some recurring Japanese and French characters and a few foreign tourists as well. Very rare for a K-drama.

Tastefully Yours has a decent comedic supporting cast, especially Jin Myeong-sook (Kim Shin-rok) and Shin Chun-seung (Yoo Su-bin of Crash Landing on You and Start-Up) – who initially work at a local gimbap restaurant in Jeonju. It has some fun set pieces such as a food truck contest. Plus there’s a beautiful episode that could have been taken straight out of Midnight Diner, where the characters hunt for a dish that an older chef with dementia is longing for but can’t describe.

I will admit that as often happens in K-dramas, the storylines around Hansang Group with their toxic family dynamic and corporate shenanigans got too over-the-top for me. But this was more than made up for by the central friendships, the sweet romance and of course the exquisite food.