#restaurant romnace

[absolutebl]

Hello, live the work you do here. I especially like to read your trash watch alongs. I am following unforgotten night through your posts only.

It's just been months since I got into bl. But I remember watching one a couple of years ago and I dnf it . I don't remember what it's name was. If you could help me with the title, I'd like to revisit it and see what has changed with my new perspective and experience with BL.

It was thai. It was a restaurant setting. The seme was a chef and the uke was probably in school or college and maybe part-time working at the restaurant. That's all I remember.

oh I love a challenge. The Magic Spreadsheet of Doom is always easier to activate when you have setting.

However I don't think I need it, since restaurants are my favorite. I think you're thinking of 2021′s Bite Me. And apart from the food, it was really very much NOT good.

However in case I am wrong here are all (I think) of: 

Thailands’s R&B (restaurant & beverage) BLs

I Am Your King 2 2019 3/10 Youtube - Early love triangle about a cafe boy caught between two brothers, mostly not good because the wrong brother wins. Has no connection to the original I Am Your King. 

Love Area 2022 (2 parts) 3/10 GaGa - It wasn't as boring as Bite Me, but it wasn’t actually good, either. This started out as Thailand tackles love triangles pulp style, but in part 2 lockdown changed everything. Valen & Kaitoon dropped some great kisses but traded off crazy hair and makeup in a scene-by-scene whiplash that was clearly pickups done months after lockdown, and the second lead vanished. It was... surreal. Side dishes jumped up screen time but tackled mental health... badly. A fantastic new queer side character was randomly introduced, June, who was the best thing to happen to BL linguistics in 2022 but had nothing to do with the rest of the cast, show, or plot. What a mess. In the end, I didn’t know what I was watching, and neither did it.

Love Next Door 2 2014 4/10 movie GaGa - One of Thailand’s early very high heat pieces, it’s odd, but sexy I guess? Also some unexpectedly decent queer rep. (Part one is the same lead character early on in his life discovering he is gay with the sex worker next door but not really relevant to this story.) 

Evening Cafe 2021 5/10 YouTube - Cafe setting with no heat and no kisses (almost Chinese in this regard), but a decent lead pair, about a boy who works in a cafe and the new employee who has a crush on him. That’s it, whole story.

Love Advisor 2021 6/10 microfilm YouTube - Set in a cafe but not about cafe workers, this is an actor’s piece, more like a one act stage performance about friends to lovers and miscommunication.

Bite Me 2021 6/10 Viki - Thailand gave us Korean style slowly simmering ultra soft and sweet BL only at a Thai length so the pacing was… not good. Slower than molasses and full of insane subtext, long gazes, missing dialogue, abrupt mood swings, and one very pretty kiss. It curdled around episode 8, the sauce split, and there was no saving it. It did have some of the best food porn I’ve seen in my life, and i watch cooking shows. It was beautiful, the leads were decent, it should have right up my alley, and yet… it left me with a feeling of disaffected ennui - bland and boring and unsatisfying. 11 courses of tasty tasty pacing issues. 

What Zabb Man! 2022 8/10 YouTube - Star Hunter's WZM was better than we had any right to expect, with decent pacing and a foodie theme threaded through the narrative as both love language and plot driver. Basically CEO falls in love with a street vendor’s food, recruits him to work in his hotel, falls in love with him, and that’s the beginning. Class struggles! Kitchen drama! Papaya pounding (not a euphemism)! Chef poaching (not literally)! Spicy scenes (yes both kinds)! It’s all so delicious. 

La Cuisine 2022 710 GaGa - A sweet and somewhat pure show, and like the Thai desserts it features, perhaps requires too much patience for a layperson. Because of the pacing and the focus on a bad girl character, I did dock it. But if you like stuff in the Oxygen vein, then this show is for you, and far better than most Thai BL pulps. That said, I suspect that I enjoyed it more than many would. Full review. 

Coffee Melody (Pavel my love) 2022 airing right now on Viki

So far only the pulps have tackled foodie romances for Thailand, I’d love to see GMMTV do one. 

Perhaps that’s what Moonlight Chicken will be? 

The other places that do a lot in and around the food industry are Korea (Jealousy is My Guest, One Last Order, My Sweet Dear, The Tasty Florida, Ocean Likes Me, To My Star). They tend to have been rated better in general than the Thai ones, sadly. 

(source)