I love a TV show that centres food, so the K-drama Chocolate (JTBC 2019–2020) sounded ideal. It’s about a doctor and a chef who reconnect as adults after meeting briefly as children. It’s a sweet and surprisingly moving story. With lots of delicious-looking food.

Lee Kang (played as an adult by Yoon Kye-sang) is raised in the small seaside town of Wando. His mother runs a restaurant, his father died when he was a baby. They’re happy, but one day his rich grandmother shows up and announces she wants him to come to live with her in Seoul.

Next time we meet Kang, he’s abandoned his dream to become a chef and is working as a doctor for the hospital his grandmother’s company owns. He’s constantly pitted against his cousin Lee Joon (Jang Seung-jo, from Snowdrop) and picked on by his aunt and uncle. He seems grouchy and difficult with everyone except his room mate and best friend Kwon Min-seong (Teo Yoo).

Moon Cha-yeong (Ha Ji-won, from Secret Garden) spent much of her childhood being pushed to become an actress but when we meet her as an adult she’s now a chef. She’s also living with PTSD, as a survivor of the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse.

Cha-yeong repeatedly bumps into Kang and immediately recognises him as the kind young boy who gave her a meal in Wando when her parents were starving her for an audition. Kang, though, doesn’t recognise her – not even when she starts dating his friend Min-seong.

Much of this series takes place at a hospice providing end-of-life care. Which means in between the cheesy bits there are some sad parts too. The head chef there, Han Seon-ae (Kim Ho-jung) has Alzheimer’s, which adds another layer of sad but touching. As a topic I unfortunately know a little about, I thought it was handled very well.

Overall, this is a very generous story. Most initially “bad” characters are at least partially redeemed. Food is a thing of healing and creating family. The initial chaebol-lite drama nonsense quickly becomes background D storyline, with the warmer Cha-yeong and the hospice in the foreground.

There are a few episodes where the chefs try to figure out the exact meal that a dying patient is craving. It reminded me a lot of the Japanese novels The Kamogawa Food Detectives and The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai – but with the added limit of time running out. It’s a sweet, wholesome concept with a lot of room for variety.

I must say the romance storyline honestly dragged for me. We know from the opening scene of episode one where it ends up, but we have to put up with Kang misunderstanding and being rude for a long, long time before he thaws. And there are so many slo-mo flashbacks, sometimes just minutes after they first happened. Honestly, if the story could have just skipped to the part set at the hospice, I think it would have been stronger.

But I did like this on the whole. Especially the food. It’s well acted, and strikes a decent balance between light and serious.