Yoona's New Netflix Drama Is Outlander Meets The Bear — And It Might Be 2025's Best K-Drama

Korean pop culture basically showed up to 2025 and said: we run this now. K-pop is everywhere, K-movies like KPop Demon Hunters are making noise, and now Netflix has a new K-drama hit on its hands with Bon Appetit, Your Majesty. It is glossy, funny, occasionally brutal, and yes, very hungry.

The setup

Im Yoona (Girls' Generation/SNSD) plays Yeon Ji-young, a 21st-century chef on a flight home from France after winning a culinary competition. Instead of a heroes-welcome latte, she gets tossed back to the Joseon Dynasty and straight into the palace kitchen. Her new boss? King Lee Yi-heon (Lee Chae-min) — a mercurial ruler with a taste for power and impossibly perfect food.

Their first meeting goes badly. Ji-young mouths off before she realizes the guy she is challenging is the king, and he very quickly considers making her head optional. Her escape plan is simple: cook so well he cannot kill her. It works, almost too well. He installs her as his personal chef, forbids her from leaving the palace, and slaps on some high-stakes rules: do not repeat a dish, and never serve anything that does not thrill him. Every meal is a cliffhanger — with knives.

Inside baseball: not your usual K-drama adaptation

Most big K-dramas these days trace back to a manhwa (Korean comics) pipeline. This one breaks the pattern. Bon Appetit, Your Majesty is adapted from Park Guk-jae's web novel Surviving as Yeonsangun's Chef. If you track industry trends, that is a notable pivot — web novels are increasingly feeding the drama machine, and this is a textbook case.

How it plays

At its heart, it is a star-crossed romance wrapped in a time-travel fantasy and plated like a prestige cooking show. The comedy cuts the tension without dodging the darkness of the era. Food is treated with reverence: characters actually talk about flavor, texture, and technique, so you feel the craft — not just the montage.

The real history under the hood

The series is set in the Joseon Dynasty, which ran from 1392 to 1910 — a favorite sandbox for K-dramas. The wild card is the king. Lee Yi-heon is loosely modeled on Yeonsangun, one of Joseon's most infamous tyrants. Like his real-life inspiration, the drama's king lost his mother to execution as a child and grew into a ruler who punished anyone tied to her death, silenced critics with prison or execution, and kept women brought to the palace for his pleasure — a practice the show depicts in its first two episodes and keeps referencing.

History footnote: Yeonsangun ruled nearly 15 years before officials and nobles deposed him. His younger brother took the throne; Yeonsangun died two months into exile. The series fictionalizes the details, but it keeps the ruthless edge — exactly the way Ji-young labels him in the early episodes.

Numbers do not lie

Launched Aug. 23, Bon Appetit, Your Majesty climbed to No. 2 on Netflix's Top 10 non-English shows. It pulled 8.1 million views over the latest weekend — a huge jump from its 3.5 million-view premiere weekend, up by 4.6 million. That is the kind of leap you do not see unless word of mouth is cooking.

Who is behind it, and who is who

Direction comes from Jang Tae-yoo (also romanized as Chang Tae-yoo), the hitmaker behind My Love from the Star. In Korea, the show airs on tvN and streams globally on Netflix. It is even listed as TV-PG, which is wild given the palace politics, but here we are.

• Im Yoona as Chef Yeon Ji-young
• Lee Chae-min as King Lee Yi-heon (often shortened to Lee Heon)
• Kang Han-na as Kang Mok-ju
• Choi Gwi-hwa as Prince Jesan

Release plan

There are four episodes out now on Netflix, with two new episodes dropping each week. Pace yourself; the show will not.

So, is it worth your time?

Short answer: yes. It is a clean blend of romance, fantasy, historical drama, and sharp comedy, delivered by a cast that knows exactly when to lean into the bit and when to let the moment breathe. The food is shot and described like the main character, which it kind of is. If Outlander and The Bear had a time-slip palace baby, this would be it — only with more knives, more kimchi, and a king who is one bad dish away from ending your career and your life. Fun!