Junho
Seo Poong
Overview
Chef Seo Poong was once a star chef and worked at the best Chinese restaurant. His popularity faded and he eventually wound up working at a small, failing Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, Doo Chil-Seong is the owner of a building. He is an ex-gang member and he was in jail for 5 yers.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 38 episodes
- First aired
- May 7, 2018
Cast
12 people
Reviews
6 min readA Restaurant Where Everyone Is Running a Debt
I kept thinking, while watching Wok of Love, that the show understands something most glossy food dramas don’t: a kitchen isn’t just a place where meals are made. It’s where people hide, posture, flirt, fail, and try to look busier than they feel. latestnetflix.com's take is that Park Seon-ho’s 2018 series begins with the familiar smell of sizzling oil and then steadily lets in the odor of exhaustion.
What looks, at first, like a breezy romantic comedy about chefs and gangsters around a shabby Chinese restaurant gradually reveals itself as a story about second chances that may or may not be deserved. That uncertainty gives it its charge.
The show arrived in the middle of a long wave of Korean series that use food as both setting and emotional language, but Park isn’t interested in the polished fantasy of elite dining. He’s after the liminal spaces: the failing restaurant, the building owner with debts and scars, the disgraced chef whose talent can’t quite protect him from humiliation. In that sense, the series sits closer to workplace melodrama than pure rom-com, even if it keeps trying to wink its way back toward sweetness.
I’m not sure it always balances those impulses cleanly. Sometimes the comedy lands a beat too late, or the emotional turns are a little too obviously engineered. But I’d argue that the friction is part of the point.
These people are improvising. So is the show.
A lot of the central conversation around Wok of Love has to do with tone: whether it can really be both scrappy and sentimental, both a food show and a character study, both a romance and a small-scale redemption tale. That tension is visible in the way Park stages ordinary spaces. The kitchen is often crowded with elbows and steam; the camera doesn’t float above the action so much as wedge itself into it.
When the show wants to be funny, it uses bodies more than punchlines — a shoulder bump, a delayed reaction, someone freezing mid-task because the room has gone socially awkward. When it wants to sting, it lingers just long enough for us to see what’s been withheld. There’s a modest intelligence here.
Not flashy. Better for it.
Lee Jun-ho, who by this point had already built a reputation beyond his idol beginnings, plays Seo Poong with a very particular kind of wounded vanity. He doesn’t enter scenes as a broken man; he enters them as someone still annoyed that the world hasn’t noticed how damaged he is. That’s a useful distinction.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A spirited 2018 culinary romantic comedy drama spotlighted primarily by reviewers for Junho's performance."
Audience reception around Wok of Love focuses heavily on Junho's leading turn in the restaurant-set drama. While [latestnetflix.com]( read is that the production primarily appeals to devoted K-drama followers, viewer discussion circles examine how its eccentric culinary tone and character chemistry hold up across the series.
What viewers praise
- Junho's Lead Role Drama reviewers zero in on Junho's performance as a primary attraction for audiences checking out the series.
Common complaints
- Acquired Taste for the Tone The series' balance of food-centered drama and stylized comedy prompts divided reviews among casual drama audiences.
Recommended for
Followers of Junho exploring his television work Fans of food-themed Korean romantic comedy dramas
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsJunho burned his wrists until the wok stopped looking like a prop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aZZ24oFPM
Lee Jun-ho did not want to mime Chinese cooking. Before SBS put Wok of Love on Mondays and Tuesdays at 10 p.m., starting May 7, 2018, chef Kim Jung Rae drilled the 2PM singer for a month on knives, prep, and a heavy pan over live flame 
, . Soompi later ran Kim's verdict. Junho "initially struggled with working with a wok in front of a fire," then looked "as comfortable with it as real chefs are." He also flooded the set with questions about how a chef thinks, not only how a chef moves . In a joint interview he said he had no choice but to learn hard, because pretending was the one thing he refused . latestnetflix.com's take is that Jang Hyuk, playing the ex-gangster who owns the dining room, watched him toss the pan and called the timing perfect .The English title is a pun. The Korean one, Gireumjin Mello, is blunter. Greasy melodrama. Hot oil, and a romance that sticks to the pan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRwenRT_sxQ
Hungry Wok sits across from a six-star hotel kitchen that dumped Seo Poong after a conspiracy. Doo Chil-sung, Jang's loan-shark-turned-restaurateur from the Big Dipper gang, opened the shop so his crew would have legal jobs after prison. Jung Ryeo-won's Dan Sae-woo walks in as a bankrupt heiress who once took a 300 million won wedding check from her father and now lives on jajangmyeon , . Writer Seo Sook-hyang, the Pasta and Don't Dare to Dream hand, built a triangle around the stove. SM C&C produced 38 episodes of about 35 minutes, two a night, after Korean ad-break rules split the old 70-minute hour . Kim even sold the couple as hardware. "In Chinese cuisine, the wok and ladle are inseparable," he said, picking the scene where Sae-woo cooks for an injured Poong as the one that explained them . SBS's first teaser already had Junho in a tall white toque, steam in the lens, knives moving faster than the plot .
A summit and a World Cup ate two weeks of dinner.
The series was booked for 40 episodes. SBS compressed it to 38 after three preemptions. News from the June 12 Singapore summit, then FIFA matches on June 18 and 19 . Nielsen still climbed. Nationwide numbers sat in the mid 6s most nights, then jumped to 9.3 percent on June 26 and again on July 2, tying the peak , . Soompi noted that during World Cup cancellations, Wok of Love was the only drama in the slot that actually aired that July 2 . The finale landed July 17. Im Won-hee, as rival hotel chef Wang Choon-soo, took Best Supporting Actor at the 2018 SBS Drama Awards. The three leads were nominated and went home without the trophy . Netflix later boxed the run as a limited series about a star chef reforming a shoddy Chinese restaurant staffed by former gangsters .
The gossip on set was not a leaked salary. It was whether an idol from a boy group could turn a wok until a working chef stopped flinching. He could. Football still stole two nights, the episode count shrank, and the restaurant ended up on streaming menus anyway, oil and all.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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