29/09/2025
Bon Appetit Your Majesty Ep. 01 -
Course No 1 Gochujang Butter Bibimbap
Episode 1 of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty begins during the Joseon period. A woman named Yeon Ji-young is taken to King Yi Heon, where the guards ask the king to sentence her to death. However, they are surprised when the king appoints her as the head chef of the royal kitchen. Ji-young inwardly thinks that she needs to survive long enough to go back home.
Ji-young then begins to explain how she got here. A flashback takes us to a French cooking competition taking place in the year 2025. Ji-young is one of the participants whose stove stops working in the last five minutes of the competition. She simply creates a makeshift stove from rice straw and finishes cooking just in time.
The task was to cook a royal meal and she has made a venison steak dish from King Yi Heon’s reign during the Joseon era. The dish wins her the competition, which means she will now be the head chef at a Michelin 3 star restaurant! After the competition, Ji-young shares the good news with her father on the phone. He then tells her that a professor friend of his in Paris is sending her a book from the Joseon Era, for her to deliver to him.
Ji-young receives the package and then gets on her flight back to Korea. However, a passenger spills coffee on the package. Ji-young rushes to the toilet to try and fix the damage on the book, which she sees is an old recipe book. She reads an inscription on the back where the writer wishes for his loved one to come back to him.
At the same time, a solar eclipse is going on outside. This makes the book begins to glow and Ji-young finds herself sucked into a vortex that drops her in the middle of a forest. She lands in an animal trap and ends up caught in a net, hanging from a tree.
Meanwhile, King Yi Heon is on a hunt in the forest and shoots a deer. Chang-eon, the chief eu**ch, warns him about the rebels who attacked him in the forest the last time but Yi Heon doesn’t seem concerned. Back in the palace, his grandmother Queen Dowager In-ju and Yi Heon’s consorts worry about the king being on a hunt during the solar eclipse, since that time period is generally spent on a ritual.
Elsewhere in the woods, Ji-young wakes up in the net and panics. Yi Heon is chasing a fox when his arrows pierce the net and lets Ji-young out. Yi Heon comes by her and thinks she’s a gwinyeo (a female ghost). He’s about to attack her with his sword when a rebel, hiding in the woods, shoots an arrow at the king. It hits the mark and both, Yi Heon and Ji-young fall off the cliff into the water below.
Ji-young wakes up on the shore, next to Yi Heon who is bleeding and unconscious. She ties up his wound but when he wakes up, he attacks her with a knife again. In the midst of a scuffle, she ends up knocking him out again. She ties him up and leads him through the woods, trying to look for a way out.
We are then introduced to Kang Mok-ju, Yi Heon’s junior consort, whom the others seem to blame for the king’s erratic behaviour. She wonders why the king hasn’t returned yet. A flashback to 7 years ago shows her in prison for killing a nobleman that her mother sold her to. Prince Jesan offers her a deal in exchange for her loyalty. At present, the prince and his team discuss the king’s disappearance.
Yi heon and Ji-young continue to argue as they walk through the forest. They come across a small set of empty huts in an area that Yi Heon has evacuated in order to expand his hunting area. Ji-young recalls a tyrant king named Yeonhuigun who had this policy but she doesn’t realise Yi Heon is the same person. She also mentions Yeonhuigun’s chaehon practice, for which women from all over the country were brought to the palace.
Suddenly, Ji-young finds a girl hiding in the house. She turns out to be one of the previous inhabitants of the place. Ji-young explains her situation and agrees to cook dinner for them all. She uses the ingredients in the house to cook a bibimbap along with the butter and gochujang she still had in her coat pocket. Both Yi Heon and Gil-geum find it spicy at first but soon grow to enjoy the taste. In fact, the meal makes Yi Heon think of a memory with his mother and even brings him to tears.
After the meal, Ji-young and Gil-geum head out to look for the cliff where she left her bag. On the way, they stop by a stream for Ji-young to wash her hair. This is where Gil-geum tells Ji-young that she is in the Joseon Dynasty. In the meantime, Yi Heon’s men find him and he sends them out to look for Ji-young. Episode 1 of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty ends with his men finding Ji-young and Gil-geum by the stream.
