I have a confession. I’m a food porn enthusiast. I believe it started somewhere when I was in elementary school with only 10 channels and I had a choice between golf, fishing or Julia Child. I love that woman, and her book ‘My Life in France’ is a great read that I recommend to anyone who’s moved overseas and feels like a fish out of water. Anyways, I really started to get interested in food more when I turned 13 and started to do a lot more of the cooking at home. We also had gotten cable television around that time and I became obsessed with the food network. Not surprisingly my favorite late night show became the original Japanese Iron Chef. You never knew what they were making or what ingredients would be used. To this day, having tried a lot of unique foods, I still think I couldn’t bring myself to eat half of what they made – fish ice cream?

Flash forward to my early days of drama watching circa 2007, which I will always unofficially consider to be the year of the food drama. There were a lot of great dramas that came out that year but this was the year of Bambino and Sweet Relationship. There’s just something about a super attractive guy making amazing mouth watering food in a kitchen – or at least it looked mouth watering, I’m not really sure, since I never could try any of it. But it got me hooked – and as I got out of the dorms and into my own kitchen I began to start watching dramas when I cooked. As for cooking while drama watching, I’ve found that personally there’s really no better motivation to cook amazing food than to watch a drama where amazing food is being cooked. I think it helps that I love to cook various types of pasta and there’s a lot of dramas that take place in “Italian Restaurants”

Speaking of pasta, I might need to follow this Top 5 up with an exercise drama list 😉

While I didn’t include all of the food related dramas I’ve seen, here’s a list of my top 15:

15. Rolling Love (Taiwan)

14. Fermentation Family (Korea)

13. Delicious Gakuin (Japan)

12. Happy Michelin Kitchen (Taiwan)

11. Feast of the Gods (Korea)

10. Nobunaga No Chef (Japan)

9. Osen (Japan)

8. Fondant Garden (Taiwan)

7. Smiling Pasta (Taiwan)

6. Pasta (Korea)

5. Bambino (Japan)

4. Hungry (Japan)

3. Flower Boy Ramyun Shop (Korea)

2. King of Baking, Kim Tak Goo (Korea)

1. Sweet Relationship (Taiwan)

The Bloopers: