냉장고를 부탁해 is back!!
There's a new season of 냉장고를 부탁해 (Please Take Care of My Refrigerator/Chef & My Fridge on Netflix) subbed in English and GAH I forgot how much I love this show. They did a "season 1" on Netflix that was just a selection of episodes awhile back (it was 4 seasons and 254 episodes, Netflix I guess just chose a sampling; there used to be more English subbed eps on Viki but idk if those are still available to watch for free or not). That original series started in 2014 and ran until 2019, and now there's a "season 2" because there's been a revival of the show in South Korea after the success of Culinary Class Wars (there are TONS of spoilers for CCW in this show, do not watch until you've finished Culinary Class Wars if that is a thing you care about).
So, this is a cooking competition show. WAIT COME BACK—
It's a cooking competition show, but it's very different from what we've been led to expect in that genre, especially the USian deathmatch shows where there are money prizes and you have to decide who to root for based on how much the shitty system we have in this country has fucked them over. It's also different from Culinary Class Wars. I'd say it's closer to Iron Chef, but it's even lower stakes than that.
See, this is more in the "Korean variety show" vein of entertainment where there's a mostly fixed cast and the focus isn't "who's The Very Best" but "who cooks most like what the show's guest wants". The set-up is that there are 8 chefs/cooks and 2 hosts, who are more or less fixed (chefs can be absent depending on their schedule, but not because they get "eliminated"). Every show (which is usually split into 2 episodes because this gets LONG), there are also 2 different celebrity guests, usually actors, singers, that sort of thing.
What they do is they bring the refrigerators from the guests' homes (or the contents if the refrigerator is built in to the home), and pair up the chefs to compete against each other using only the ingredients in said fridges (I believe there is a pantry of some standard ingredients like salt and stuff but it's super basic). There are 2 "cook-offs" per guest, each based on a theme request the guest chooses (for example, "something to help me recover after a concert" or "a dish that will get my kids to like vegetables"). The "gimmick" here is this: Each cook-off must be completed in 15 minutes.
Which is wild to someone like me who takes forever to prep and cook. But the thing is, while this show does take the cooking bits seriously, it's more based around talking and the way everyone interacts with each other. The hosts do keep track of stats and stuff and if you win you get a star, but these numbers aren't something you actually see on screen or anything. There's a lot of mostly good-natured teasing that really highlights the personalities of the cast and makes it a really fun show to watch over time as you get to know the people.
Even though it's technically a "competition" show, they have a kind of "it's not that deep" mentality towards it that really appeals to me. For example, if a chef goes over the time by like, 2 seconds, they don't get immediately disqualified or anything. And sometimes the chefs who aren't cooking yet will even help the chefs who are in the cook-off do tasks like whipping egg whites (they call this "UNICHEF" 😂). Everyone benefits from this over time, it's not seen as "cheating" (the cook-off chefs still do 97% of their prep work themselves) and it's just another way the show kind of takes the bite out of the teasing and the competition and highlights the friendship aspect of things.
I mentioned "if you win" earlier, the "winning" is just based on the guest the chefs are cooking for pressing a button to choose their favorite. There's no score sheet or anything, it's basically just vibes. Which honestly, openly making the choice completely subjective (as opposed to "inherently subjective masked as objective and enforcing arbitrary standards"), combined with having nothing tangible on the line, makes everything about this show so much less stressful and more enjoyable than other cooking competition shows. Like, occasionally they'll ask to see if the other guest would have voted differently but it all comes down to personal taste and they respect that.
The episodes are long and each show is a two-parter so be aware if you want to check it out. When I first saw the new season pop up, I started the first episode just to get it in my queue and it trapped my husband and me on the couch for hours lmao (aka the first 2 eps). The "competition" part is emphasized more this season, with the chefs who were on Culinary Class Wars on one side and the chefs returning from the original series on the other, but it's still pretty light-hearted, even when they're making fun of each other. And as a cooking aficionado and food enjoyer, the food always looks tasty and often gives me inspiration in my own cooking (I learned a lot by watching the first season Netflix had!).
P.S. I mention Culinary Class Wars here several times because it's the context for the revival, so I might as well share my opinions on that show here: I couldn't get past the first episode. First of all it's a cash prize/elimination situation, so I'm already not into it; secondly I thought it was boring and not fun; and to top it off, Ahn Sung-jae, one of the judges, transliterates his name as "Anh Sung-jae" which.
OK this is probably another blog post but in short, "Ahn" is widely accepted as the transliteration of Korean "안". Why does this matter? Because "Anh" is a common part of Vietnamese names and it's pronounced completely differently. Vietnamese people with "Anh" anywhere in their names (and remember, our alphabet is romanized, we don't use a character system so this isn't transliteration, it's HOW IT IS SPELLED) commonly get that part of their name misspelled as "Ahn" by English speakers in the US who can't tell "us" apart and think that the spelling rules of one Asian language apply to every other Asian language. I have had to put up with this my entire life and I don't appreciate the waters being muddied further for no damn reason.
so yeah, not only do I personally find the show unappealing enough that I don't want to watch the whole thing, that microaggression appearing in every single episode makes it so I can't even put it on as background noise because I will never not be angry about it.