I’m a sucker for a romance based around food, and I love Korean and Japanese food, so Gimbap and Onigiri (TV Tokyo 2026) seemed like a good bet. A Korean woman studying in Tokyo strikes up a friendship – and then romance – with a Japanese man who cooks at a small diner. They bond over food, and the relationship helps them both move past stumbling blocks in their lives.

Rin (played by Kang Hye-won) is studying for a master’s in animation but at the start of her final year, she is falling behind her peers and struggling to find somewhere to live. Her mother is nagging her to move back to Korea and work as an art teacher but Rin dearly wants to stay in Japan. Though it’s unclear why as she seems lonely, with only one friend in Tokyo.

Taiga (Eiji Akaso) is clearly a good cook and is valued by his employer, though he’s had no formal training. His family are hard on him about what they see as an unskilled part-time job. But while working he’s happy and popular, if a little too shy to see how liked he is.

So they’re both insecure, and working unsociable hours that make it hard to have much of a life outside work/university. When Rin stumbles on the diner and they start talking, it seems like a perfect match.

And initially it is mostly frothy and light. They bond over food. Taiga starts adding Korean twists to his cooking and his boss likes the innovation (as well as being amused at this obvious sign of his employee falling in love). And he helps Rin find somewhere to live. They have cheesy Kdrama-style moments like getting caught in a rain shower.

Though Rin speaks near-fluent Japanese and has been in Japan over a year at the start of the series, there are still some cultural differences and language problems. Which I did find interesting, though it wasn’t always clear if all these problems really were cultural or if they were specific to these two people. And the series definitely doesn’t go into the history of the two countries or social attitudes about Korean people in Japan. (There are some hints of mistrust/snobbery, but for the most part it felt like Rin could have come from anywhere, the important part is that she’s not Japanese.)

It was a really sweet and interesting set-up – but for me it didn’t live up to the early promise. Rin quickly gets very jealous over Taiga and he is really bad at communicating. The misunderstandings quickly pile up and get frustrating, and to be honest if this had been longer than 10 episodes I probably would have abandoned it.

I did appreciate that in some ways this show is more realistic than most Kdramas. It’s made clear that from fairly early on in their romance, Rin and Taiga are sleeping at each other’s places and having sex. The world they live in feels like a real city neighbourhood, with grimy bits and dodgy people. There are tourists from all over the world, as well as the diner’s regular locals.

But I think the writers’ attempts to throw obstacles at the relationship wound up making the lead characters – particularly Rin – increasingly hard to like. When actually what was interesting to me was that this is a story about two people figuring out what to do when they face stumbling blocks to their original dreams.

Honestly, by the end I wasn’t rooting for the couple to stay together, I was rooting for their careers to work out.