I feel like a lot of people's daily lives could be made better by sitting down and watching a new season of my favourite show on Netflix, K-Foodie Meets J-Foodie.
The name is the only thing terrible about it. A series originally made for Korean TV, it stars Yutaka Matsushige (Solitary Gourmet) and crooner Sung Si-kyung, with every episode following largely the same format: these two guys go to a restaurant (usually one they're a fan of or have some kind of history with), eat some food, talk about the food (and the culture surrounding it), knock back a beer or two and just...hang out.
As pedestrian as that sounds, it is great. The show doesn't care about production values or fancy graphics or expensive restaurants (though its HD close-ups of steaming ramen are mouth-watering). Its only focus is on these two bros talking about food in a very normal, albeit very enthusiastic way. Despite the pair's culinary credentials--Solitary Gourmet is a long-running food show and Sung has a whole YouTube channel devoted just to eating food--it's all very down-to-Earth, the series preferring to show you a graphic close-up of a man slurping soup followed by his moans of delight, than try to artfully describe the flavour like a professional critic.
I am not denigrating food critics here, just saying that this casual approach matches the show's style and its hosts perfectly. Outside of the spotlight they're just...two guys. They've got eccentricities, favourite foods, one drinks and the other doesn't, one goes silent eating yakiniku and the other hates it when he does that. It might use the word "foodie" twice in the title, but this is a show defined by a blossoming friendship, a cultural exchange between two men and two nations so close and yet in many ways far enough apart that a series like this constantly contrasting the two makes for such interesting television.
Where a lot of reality TV treats its stars as attractions in a human zoo, this show feels more like an invitation to a lovely day out, the camera often set so close to these men that you hear their slurps and feel them shifting in their seats. In a way that I think falls just on the healthy side of parasocial, K-Foodie Meets J-Foodie makes you the third cast member on the show, privy to every little secret and conversation, no matter how mundane.
Another cool thing about K-Foodie Meets J-Foodie is that, a few tourist traps aside, most of the places the pair visit aren't Michelin-starred or global names you might have seen on an Instagram reel; they're just cool little noodle places or BBQ joints they've been fans of, grew up with, lived near or heard about from friends. The series does not care one bit for our modern obsession with virality and THE BEST, instead falling back on older vibes--again, to match the hosts perfectly--like simply checking a place out because you heard it was good.
It's just such lovely, simple, feelgood television. There's no marketing here, no ads, no agendas, no grabs for attention or desperate claims of greatness. It's a show about nothing but friendship and food, two of the best things on the planet.
