General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Recipe for Farewell (오늘은 좀 매울지도 몰라)

Recipe for Farewell (오늘은 좀 매울지도 몰라, literally It May Be a Little Spicy Today) is a 2022 South Korean Watcha original drama series about a husband who learns to cook for his wife, who is dying of terminal colon cancer. Directed and written by Lee Ho-jae and starring Han Suk-kyu, Kim Seo-hyung, and Jin Ho-eun, it adapts the autobiographical essay of the same title by the humanities writer Kang Chang-rae, who cooked for his own wife through her illness.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Watcha original series, 12 episodes, released December 1, 2022 to January 5, 2023; directed and written by Lee Ho-jae¹
Source	Essay 오늘은 좀 매울지도 몰라 by Kang Chang-rae, published April 20, 2018 by Munhakdongne²
Cast	Han Suk-kyu as Kang Chang-wook, Kim Seo-hyung as Jeong Da-jeong, Jin Ho-eun as their son Kang Jae-ho¹
Festival premiere	World premiere in the On Screen section of the 27th Busan International Film Festival (2022); running time 129 minutes, four of twelve episodes screened³
TV broadcast	Re-aired on Channel A from February 7 to March 14, 2023 as six TV-size episodes⁴
Reception	Held a 4.5 rating on Watcha's user rating system through its run and ranked first in inflow contribution among all Watcha content for six consecutive days⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1

A modest apartment in present-day South Korea. At the start, Chang-wook (Han Suk-kyu), a middle-aged translator and lecturer, is estranged from his wife Da-jeong (Kim Seo-hyung) and lives apart from their teenage son Jae-ho (Jin Ho-eun). Then comes the diagnosis. Da-jeong has colorectal cancer, and treatment begins to strip away the ordinary pleasures of eating. One day she asks, almost apologetically, for a simple dish, and Chang-wook realizes that in decades of marriage he has never once cooked for her.

So he starts. Badly. A botched omelet. Vegetables cut to the wrong size. A broth that tastes wrong, and Da-jeong eating a little of it anyway because what she is tasting is the effort. Each half-hour episode centers on one or two dishes, such as japchae, an omelet, or pork noodles, chosen from the roughly 60 foods in the original essay, and each dish becomes a small argument, apology, or confession that the family cannot make in words²⁰.

The series widens past the couple. Jae-ho, sulky and distant in the way teenagers are, watches his father fail at cooking and slowly starts to appear in the kitchen. Da-jeong, who spent her life feeding the family, must now be fed, and the reversal humiliates and comforts her in equal measure. Chang-wook narrates the episodes in a quiet voiceover, reading the lines of the original essay over scenes of chopping, simmering, and waiting for hospital results.

The scene people remember is the one where Da-jeong can no longer eat, and Chang-wook cooks anyway. By the final stretch of the series her illness has advanced to the point where food is no longer nourishment, and every meal Chang-wook prepares risks being one she cannot swallow. The series stages it without music and without tears: he makes the dish with the same care as in the first episode, sets it down, and she manages only a taste. He does not break down. He washes up, writes down what worked and what did not, and plans tomorrow's menu. The show's whole argument is in that gesture: cooking is not about the eating, it is about the caring, and the caring does not stop when the eating must.

The ending is the one the title promises. Da-jeong dies, offscreen and undramatized, and the series refuses to wallow. Chang-wook and Jae-ho are left in the apartment, cooking for themselves now, following the recipes she liked. The last episodes are about grief as a daily chore: setting the table for two, tasting a dish, and knowing she would have found it too salty or just right. The food, as the director said, is the main character, and it outlives her²⁰.

Characters

Chang-wook (Han Suk-kyu) is the husband and narrator, a writer who has outsourced every meal of his life and now learns to cook from scratch for a dying wife. Han plays him dry and undemonstrative, a man whose love arrives as grocery bags and written recipe notes rather than speeches.

Da-jeong (Kim Seo-hyung) is the wife, facing terminal colorectal cancer with practicality rather than pathos. She corrects her husband's seasoning even when she can barely eat, and Kim's performance was singled out by critics as the heart of the series²¹.

Jae-ho (Jin Ho-eun) is the teenage son, caught between resentment at his parents' world collapsing and a growing, awkward tenderness for both of them. His arc is the quietest in the show: he learns to cook too, in his own time, in his own way.

Interpretations and controversies

There is no controversy to speak of. The series was mostly praised for exactly what some viewers found difficult: its restraint and slow pace, with little plot and no melodrama. Critics called the avoidance of tearjerker excess a virtue; some general audiences found the lack of events a matter of taste²².

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The series adapts Kang Chang-rae's autobiographical essay and non-fiction book of the same title, which recorded his own experience cooking for his wife through her terminal illness²³^•²⁴. The drama expands the essay by giving full scenes to Da-jeong and Jae-ho, whose perspectives the book does not contain²¹. No sequel has been made.

The source essay

The essay grew out of a real domestic crisis. Kang Chang-rae, a humanities writer and former publishing planner whose previous books include Advertising with the Humanities (2009) and The Spirit of Books (2013), had a wife of thirty years fall ill with cancer, and until then the only dish he could make was ramen. He began keeping notes on the food he prepared for her, and the notes, together with about 60 recipe memos and his reflections, were compiled into the book published by Munhakdongne on April 20, 2018.⁷^•⁸^•²

The book's subtitle describes it as "a husband's kitchen diary setting the table for his departing wife."⁹ The title comes from a small remark: the author once put too many cheongyang peppers into a dish and said today's meal might be a little spicy. The book review in Dong-A University's library notes that behind this casual phrase lies the deep uncertainty of caregiving, when nothing about the patient's condition from one day to the next can be promised.¹⁰ In a 2018 interview with the Hankook Ilbo, Kang said his wife had died the previous year, and that caring for her had taught him he was a man who cried easily; he used six sheets of tissue during an hour-and-a-half conversation.¹¹

The drama adaptation

Story and characters. The series follows Chang-wook, a middle-aged translator and humanities lecturer whose estranged wife Da-jeong is diagnosed with terminal colorectal cancer and gradually loses the ability to eat. Having never cooked beyond ramen, he begins preparing her meals, starting with simple dishes such as bean-sprout soup and fried rice and working up to demanding ones like braised aguja and sea cucumber soup. The couple's high-school-age son Jae-ho and his friend Yeo-jin form the second strand of the family story.⁷^•¹^•¹²

The adaptation keeps the essay's husband-as-narrator form: it opens with the same line as the book, about bean sprouts and spinach having no special relationship, and weaves the essay's sentences into Chang-wook's narration. What it adds are the perspectives the essay left largely unwritten, those of the wife, who winds down the publishing company she ran, and of the son, so that the story becomes one of three family members who had each run ahead alone learning to look back at one another.⁸

Direction. Lee Ho-jae, born in 1973 and trained in film directing in the United States, won new-director awards at the Baeksang Arts Awards and the Daejong Film Awards for his debut feature Operation (2009) and later directed Robot, Sound (2016). This series was his first OTT series as director.³ In interviews he said he wanted to avoid what he called "the exhibition of suffering," building Da-jeong not as a wilted flower but as a person who does not display her pain, and he treated food as each episode's protagonist, noting that the original essay is organized around recipes and that his hardest task was drawing out the stories between the dishes.¹³

Production and release

The series was produced by Acemaker Movieworks and Beyond J for Watcha.³ Before its streaming release it received a world premiere at the 27th Busan International Film Festival in the On Screen section, where four of the twelve episodes were shown as a 129-minute presentation; the festival's program note described the drama as calm and plain, comparing its taste to a carefully simmered doenjang stew.³

Two episodes were released per week on Watcha beginning December 1, 2022, with the final episodes on January 5, 2023 at 5 p.m.⁸^•¹³ Filming took place partly on Jeju Island, with location support from the Jeju council at Gwakji Beach and the Daejeong area, and the final episodes, in which Chang-wook accepts the farewell from his wife, were shot there.¹⁴^•¹⁵ The series was later re-edited into six episodes and broadcast on the cable channel Channel A from February 7 to March 14, 2023.⁴

Reception

Viewers responded strongly to the two leads. The series held a 4.5 rating on Watcha's five-point user scale from its first release onward, ranked first among all Watcha content in inflow contribution for six consecutive days, and was described in Korean media coverage as the highest-rated Korean drama on the platform.⁵^•⁶^•¹⁶ Reviewers singled out Han Suk-kyu's narration and cooking scenes; the director rated his on-set cooking above the actor's own self-assessment of "good" on the Korean su-mi-yang-ja skill scale, and Han said his real-life experience included making kimchi and side dishes.¹³^•¹⁷ Kim Seo-hyung said playing a terminal cancer patient recalled her father, who died of lung cancer, and that the role let her understand him fourteen years after his death.¹⁸

The drama also drew medical and institutional attention: the magazine of Jeonbuk National University Hospital ran a feature on the colorectal cancer depicted in the series, noting that about 50 percent of people with a direct-line family history of the disease may develop it, and used the drama's plain, low-salt cooking as a frame for discussing meals shared with the seriously ill.⁹ Internationally, the series has been made available on services including Kocowa and OnDemandKorea in regions such as the United States, Canada, and Europe.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Korean contemporary drama › Romance and melodrama series › Romance melodrama miniseries › Tearjerker melodrama series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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