Bon appétit, your majesty: how real royals have changed the way we eat

King Sejong is perhaps Korea’s most celebrated monarch, remembered as much for his intellectual patronage as for his humanitarian spirit. His reign oversaw seismic advances in culture, science and governance: the creation of Hangeul, the Korean alphabet; the invention of tools like the rain gauge; and innovations in astronomy and defence. But Sejong’s vision was never just academic—it was deeply pragmatic. He believed literacy and practical knowledge were the twin foundations of a resilient state. His attention often turned to the plight of farmers, vulnerable to famine and erratic harvests.

That concern bore culinary consequences. Sejong commissioned the Nongsa Jikseol (Straight Talk on Farming, 1429), Korea’s first comprehensive farming manual. More than a guide to ploughing fields, it was a manifesto for food security. By standardising agricultural practices and promoting climate-appropriate crops like soybeans and hardy grains, Sejong ensured sustenance beyond the rice bowl. Soybeans, in particular, became the backbone of Korea’s culinary survival, thanks to their adaptability and capacity for preservation. Through fermentation, they were transformed into jang—doenjang, gochujang, ganjang—flavourful pastes that doubled as nutritional reserves. Sejong didn’t just shape an alphabet or an empire’s philosophy. He engineered a culinary legacy that still sustains the Korean table.

Emperor Qianlong presided over the Qing Dynasty at its zenith, ruling for six decades before taking the rare step of becoming an emperor emeritus. His reign was defined by cultural grandeur: he was a poet with tens of thousands of verses to his name, a meticulous calligrapher and an obsessive art collector who sought to catalogue and safeguard China’s heritage even as he expanded its borders through sweeping military campaigns. Yet Qianlong was not merely a patron of the arts or a strategist of empire. He was also a master of image. His Southern Tours, opulent journeys through Jiangnan, were political theatre designed to charm the Han majority, proving the Manchu sovereign’s cultural fluency and magnanimity.

This mastery of symbolism extended to the dining table. The legendary Manchu-Han Imperial Feast was the edible embodiment of Qing inclusivity. Though later retellings of a 300-dish marathon are likely embroidered, the principle was authentic: the heavy, game-rich traditions of the Manchu palate were paired with the delicate seafood, intricate knife work and refined sauces of Han cuisine, especially from Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

To dine at Qianlong’s court was to taste the empire’s vast geography, from roasted venison to river crab in Shaoxing wine. The feast was less about indulgence than politics—a culinary treaty binding conquerors and subjects at the same lacquered table. Qianlong’s personal connoisseurship sealed the legacy: he recruited master chefs from across the provinces, canonising regional specialities as imperial standard.

Akbar the Great ruled over a Mughal Empire that stretched from the Himalayas to the Deccan, and unlike many conquerors, he sought cohesion not only through arms but through policy. His doctrine of Sulh-i-Kull, or universal peace, along with the abolition of the jizya tax on non-Muslims, positioned him as a ruler of religious tolerance. In the Ibadat Khana, his House of Worship at Fatehpur Sikri, he hosted debates between Jesuit priests, Hindu pandits, Jain monks and Muslim scholars. He practised an intellectual experiment in pluralism that was as radical as it was pragmatic. This openness was not confined to theology; it was also ladled into the cauldrons of his court.

The Ain-i-Akbari, the chronicle of his reign, describes the emperor’s kitchens in almost scientific terms: vast operations where food was not only prepared but innovated. Out of these kitchens emerged Mughlai cuisine, a deliberate synthesis: Persian techniques like the perfuming of dishes with rosewater or saffron, the layering of rice and meat that gave rise to biryani and the nut- and cream-enriched gravies of korma were integrated with the spice-forward and dairy-based traditions of northern India. Later in his reign, Akbar’s engagement with Jain thinkers nudged him toward periods of vegetarian eating, which reshaped menus at court and modelled restraint to his nobles. 

See more: Power breakfast: how the first meal of the day sustained, supported and strengthened royals and leaders

When the teenage Emperor Mutsuhito ascended the throne in 1867, Japan was still bound by the centuries-old restrictions of the Tokugawa shogunate. Within his reign, later enshrined as the Meiji Restoration, the country reinvented itself at breakneck speed: feudal domains were dismantled, Western-style institutions introduced and Japan emerged as an industrial and military power. But modernisation was not just about steel or bureaucracy; it extended to the Japanese body itself, which reformers believed needed remaking to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West.

For over a millennium, Japanese diets had been shaped by Buddhist prohibitions that discouraged consuming four-legged animals. While the cuisine celebrated seafood, beef was taboo. In 1872, Emperor Meiji staged a calculated break with this past: he publicly consumed beef, a gesture designed to shock the nation into reconsidering its habits. Newspapers amplified the event, framing it as part of Bunmei Kaika (“civilisation and enlightenment”). It was reportedly the government’s campaign to align Japan with the industrialised world. Soon, gyūnabe, a beef hotpot dish, became a symbol of progress, sold in urban restaurants that celebrated modernity as much as they sold flavour. By lifting his chopsticks, the Meiji era transformed not only court custom but the Japanese palate itself.

Reigning for seven decades, Thailand’s King Bhumibol was more than a monarch—he was a nation builder, an engineer of both waterworks and identity. Known as the “Development King,” he spent much of his reign travelling Thailand’s countryside with a camera slung around his neck and a sketchpad in hand, diagnosing the challenges of rural poverty. His Royal Development Projects, numbering in the thousands, targeted soil erosion, irrigation, reforestation and crop diversification, reshaping the agricultural backbone of the kingdom. The king’s practical streak—he once designed a rainmaking technique now patented by the UN—earned him near-mythic status as a monarch who tinkered with science to secure his people’s survival.

The palace kitchens may have seen his occasional experiments, but Bhumibol’s most profound culinary legacy lay in the fields and on the global stage. His backing of improved jasmine rice strains cemented Thailand’s reputation as the world’s rice bowl. He encouraged the development of domestic coffee and tea cultivation, reducing reliance on imports and carving out new livelihoods in the north. And in the early 2000s, his tacit blessing of the government’s Global Thai initiative propelled Thai cuisine abroad to an unprecedented scale. Under the program, restaurateurs received training, loans, and a coveted Thai Select certification, ensuring pad thai, tom yum goong and green curry arrived on foreign tables with consistent quality. In effect, Thai street food became a polished diplomatic envoy, carrying the kingdom’s flavours into nearly every global capital.

Queen Victoria reigned for more than six decades, presiding over the height of the British Empire and embodying an age of industrial power, moral discipline and imperial confidence. Her personal life, famously marked by deep mourning after the death of Prince Albert, never diminished the symbolic pull of her court, which became the gravitational centre of Victorian culture. At her table, the empire itself was on display: sugar from the Caribbean, tea from India and Ceylon, pineapples from colonial hothouses and spices routed through London docks. 

Her appetite for Indian cuisine was especially transformative. After the arrival of Abdul Karim, her Indian secretary and confidant, curry and pulao became fixtures on the royal menu. They were prepared in softened, courtly adaptations—curry à la reine, for example, was less searing than its subcontinental counterpart, but no less radical to the British palate. By savouring these dishes with regularity, Victoria nudged them from curiosity to fashion, making Indian food not just acceptable but aspirational in upper-class Britain. From Windsor Castle outward, curry travelled into pubs, homes, and ultimately, into the DNA of British comfort food. Remember the film Victoria and Abdul and its famous mango scene? There is some truth to it. 

Queen Victoria’s dining room became an instrument of cultural fusion. What began as a royal preference evolved into a national taste, laying the groundwork for Britain’s enduring love affair with Indian cuisine.

Few rulers embody the paradox of genius and grotesque excess like Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. History remembers him for the Great Fire of Rome, for his artistic pretensions as a lyre-playing performer, and for the gilded splendour of the Domus Aurea, a palace so lavish it shocked even jaded Roman sensibilities. His reign was parts pageantry and terror, establishing a template of imperial indulgence that unnerved senators and enthralled the masses.

In cuisine, Nero’s name became shorthand for decadence. He was, after all, a royal with a sybaritic disposition. Roman elite dining already revelled in exotica like fermented garum, peacock tongues and honey-soaked dormice, but Nero elevated conspicuous consumption to spectacle. His near-obsessive love for asparagus was emblematic: it is said that entire “asparagus fleets”—fast-moving ships—were reportedly dispatched to rush freshly harvested spears from coastal farms and river estates directly to his table before they could wilt. That a fragile vegetable warranted a naval operation illustrates how food was weaponised as a symbol of power.

For Nero, taste was never divorced from authority. The logistics of serving asparagus at its peak ripeness—an act reserved for the emperor alone—reinforced his supremacy. Like the Domus Aurea shimmering in gold leaf, his meals were less about nourishment than about announcing to the world that nothing, not even the seasons, could restrain imperial appetite.

As the formidable power behind the Qing throne, Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for nearly half a century. Her tastes, habits and lifestyle became symbols of both authority and excess. While often criticised by reformers as emblematic of decline, her court displayed unmatched splendour—especially through cuisine. Cixi’s imperial kitchens employed over 150 chefs to prepare lavish daily meals, often numbering more than a hundred dishes per sitting. She was known to indulge in delicacies such as bird’s nest soup, shark fin, and seasonal produce sourced from across the empire, brought in via intricate supply chains.

Dining was central to her image as sovereign, reinforcing hierarchy and control through ritual and indulgence. However, these meals were rarely finished; the extravagance lay in their sheer abundance. By turning the dining table into an empire in miniature, Cixi embodied the grandeur—and the unsustainable opulence—of the late Qing court.

Known as the Sun King, Louis XIV was not only the architect of Versailles but also the orchestrator of a new culinary theatre. He elevated French court dining into a ritualised performance, where even his daily meals, the Grand Couvert, were consumed in public as courtiers observed. At Versailles, banquets dazzled with sugared sculptures, intricate pastries and exotic fruits like pineapples grown in specially heated orangeries.

Eating became an extension of monarchy itself, with protocol dictating everything from the order of dishes to who could hand him a napkin. For this infamous royal, food was not merely nourishment but a spectacle of abundance and global reach, supplied through colonial trade and elaborate hothouse cultivation. His patronage of French cuisine helped turn it into the model of refinement for European courts. And, by transforming dining into pageantry, Louis XIV used cuisine into propaganda, feeding not just himself, but the myth of absolute monarchy.

Louis XV inherited Versailles at the height of its symbolic power, a palace where dining was showmanship as much as sustenance. Though his reign is often remembered for political complacency and court scandals, Louis himself was a curious gourmand, unusually hands-on for a monarch. He famously slipped into the royal kitchens to cook and was fascinated by the chemistry of food, mirroring the obsession of the Enlightenment with science and experimentation.

Louis XV helped elevate chocolate and coffee from exotic novelties into staples of French court life. He made a ritual of drinking hot chocolate daily—sometimes prepared by the king himself—a habit that spread through the aristocracy. His patronage of colonial goods ensured that Versailles set the tempo for Europe’s taste for new luxuries, tethering gastronomy to empire.

As a Habsburg princess transplanted into Versailles, Marie Antoinette arrived with Viennese sensibilities that clashed with French court formality. Much of her public image, from extravagant gowns to indulgent dining, became political ammunition during the Revolution. But in private, she often ate more sparingly than the stories suggest, preferring simple broths and breads over the excesses staged for her.

Her true mark on gastronomy lay in dessert culture. While she may or may not have uttered the words, “Let them eat cake,” she introduced Austrian pastries like the kipferl, an ancestor of the croissant. She also popularised sugar-laden confections as central to aristocratic performance. At Versailles, sweets weren’t merely afterthoughts but towering spectacles, entremets that blurred into architecture. Under Marie Antoinette, the court’s obsession with sugar and pastries set a template for European dessert culture that lingers in patisserie windows today.

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