BLISS RATING: ★+
“Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.” – Alan D. Wolfelt
There is no easy way to say this, so I am just going to say it. This series is awful and a complete waste of time. It had potential and the actors are handsome enough (with an ensemble cast of incredibly good-looking performers), but the story was lame and unbelievable with a less than stellar ending. When you have the food as the main star of a series, you know you are in trouble. If this was a BL, the L was missing from it.
It is a story about a college student named Aek (Mark Siwat) who hails from a more rural area in Thailand. He has grown up cooking with his mother and grandmother his entire life and has a natural affinity for cooking even though he has not been formally trained. As a food delivery courier for a side job, he picks up an order from a restaurant named Im-Aue Restaurant. By chance Chef Aue (Zung Kidakarn) gives him an order and wistfully Aek can identify all of its seasonings by their unique smell. Impressed, Chef Aue is enamored with this young man’s abilities and offers him an assistant chef position. Thus, their strange odyssey as a couple begins.
Their journey to affection, if you want to call it that, is marred by slowness and utter denseness. Honestly, watching paint dry would have been more interesting than the dawdling connection between these two. They would stare at each other inordinately long. Talk in cryptic tones with a monotone affect and mostly expressionless or with quirky smiles. For Aek to have not known Chef Aue was attracted to him (or at the very least interested in him) was incredulous and simply not believable. Even Helen Keller would have sensed their connection to one another!
Therefore, when Aue does confess his attraction to him in a deeper fashion, Aek resorts to incredible anger and rage and states a relationship will never happen and he only thought of him as a ‘big brother’ in such a fashion as to denigrates the feeling. None of that is true of course and it rings hollow. When in a desperate and utterly stupid move, Aue kisses him, Aek resorts to physical violence. I completely understand why Aek might have been scared, frightened, or even mortified that someone is interested in him sexually and kissed him without his permission. But to resort to physical violence was unjustified. And to claim that you did not know his feelings, that is just not so. You did know but you chose to NOT want to know because it meant that you would have to deal with your own feelings for him. All quite understandable. But to take the approach that he did was cruel, heartless, hurtful, and overly dramatic. And to use physical violence onto another individual because that person simply kissed you was excessive and completely unnecessary.
I have stated over and over that this type of physical behavior in BLs should never be shown as a way of dealing with situations that could easily have been resolved in other non-violent ways. For me, Aek is not a very likeable individual and tends to treat people who try and help with contempt and distain. He is an individual who never seems to know who or what he is or frankly what he wants. He is pensive, withdrawn, and mostly seems to exist in his own little world. He adores and worships his mother, which is noble, and does everything he can not to displease her.
Yet, he has notions of his mother’s reactions based on erroneous perceptions and in a real sense is a little boy in a young man’s body. His mother finally realizes that and tells him to be himself and that she already knew how he feels about Aue and how Aue feels about him. If it is okay with mother, it is ok for him. For me, he was a very sad figure.
Chef Aue, on the other hand, has a whole host of his own issues to deal with. He seems hesitant of his own abilities, unable to be himself, and is continuously comparing himself to others. His unresolved issue with his former girlfriend haunts him mainly due to his inability to deal with it head on. It is obvious that he is smitten with Aek from the beginning and pursues him by giving him lots of support and attention but always with an underlying tone of hesitancy. He honestly never clearly states his intentions until it is too late. And Aek reacts negatively with justification because of his constant hesitancy in being clear with his messages of love.
Throughout all this bantering about, the story fills in with the preparing food, which frankly irritated me. If I want to watch how to cook what was obviously fabulous cuisine, I can You Tube that. It just diminished the story; not enhanced it.
If you are familiar with how movies and series are thought out, then you will understand the concept of a storyboard. That is what this series was. It was like watching a storyboard with live actors but no action. I have watched countless and endless series and I have never seen a series directed like this one. It has actors stare endless at each other. There were insufferably long pauses as if waiting for a scene to fade out or for someone to say their next line. The actors appeared robotic and so one-dimensional that even their emotional scenes seemed stilled. The characters never appeared to be more than 2-dimenshional to me. The dialogue was hesitative and banal. I never ever bought the connection between Aek and Aue.
And the contrived connection between pastry chef Prem (Pamm Setthanan) and Aek’s roommate Vich (Toon Atirootj) was even less believable. There was no chemistry or connection although they made such an adorable couple. Please note my criticism is not due to bad acting but to bad direction. Nobody talks in stilled monotone tones to each other while professing to like each other. It sounded more like a reading for a rehearsal or a recital for a high school play. I simply did not understand and apparently could not appreciate the directional style of making the characters appear and act so monotonal and robotic. Hence, it was like watching a live storyboard but nothing more.
I live in Southern California, and we have every summer a unique show called the (Laguna Beach) Pageant of the Masters in which they have famous art works come to life. They take a famous piece of art and before your eyes they turn live people into that world famous painting or artwork. Performance art, literally. It is a wonder to behold. But after the arrangement, the pieces disband, and they move on to the next opus. That is what this was but not as poetic or artful as that. All we got were snippets of people with little character development filled in between with endless shots of cooking or preparation of dishes while the next scene was set up. The characters were all but devoid and their development moved at glacial speed or moved along at a snail’s pace.
Who really S.T.O.L.E. the series? This was easy to name. The food. The food preparation and the stunning dishes. They were literally mouth-watering. But an inordinate amount of time was spent watching individuals cutting and preparing food. It was interesting to watch (I learned a lot of new techniques in food preparations) but it simply got tedious after a while, and I ended up fast-forwarding through a lot.
I have been harsh of my review of this series because it was a waste of tremendous talent. The actors and actresses were all so underutilized. The story was tediously boring with hardly a believable connection between anyone. Stilted acting. Too many stares, Too much waiting to fade. The main characters were basically presented as unrelatable. Aek was pompous and a bit arrogant and kind of stuck on himself. Aue was timid, indecisive, easily manipulated, and so unsure of his own talents. And in the end, he accepts Aek back into his life as if nothing happened and Aek’s behavior was acceptable. This is yet another example of his daft thinking and inability to deal with the realities around him effectively. It was simply hard to empathize to their reality as they never flourished. While the other couple were cute and adorable, their innocence and child-like behaviors and interactions were bizarre.
I could have understood this if they were high schoolers, but they were not. They talked to each other about their connection as if they were reading from a scientific paper. I honestly was completely bewildered by these two and saw no connection let along chemistry between them. There was not a hint of sexual tension between them at all. (In fact, there was not even a hint of sexual tension between Aek and Aue).
I get that these stories must evolve and fit into the confines of the culture and standards of the country producing them. But this is supposed to be some sort of love story; then show us something that makes us feel like there is love here. Not a storyboard of what love looks like two-dimensionally.
I did not enjoy this series at all and is one of my least favorite of anything I have watched this year. NOT because of bad acting. But because of a very poor almost incoherent story, bad direction, and the presentation of the characters as one-dimensional and stilted. Sad. It had so much potential. There are so many worthy BLs out there that tell significant stories with tremendous acting, and believable and relatable characters. Sometimes with barely shoestring budgets. Yet this one with all its resources fell completely flat.
For those that enjoyed this series, I understand as I have my own passionate loves that others might see as perplexing, and I am not trying to throw cold water on your own personal favorites. However, for me, this series, I felt absolutely nothing.
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