The true story about the fictional king in ‘Bon Appétit, Your Majesty’

Name swaps

In Bon Appétit, Your Majesty, we see King Yi Heon as an imperious but secretly vulnerable ruler who enjoys court feasts and, eventually, the affections of a time-travelling chef.

In reality, though, Yeonsangun, the king, presided over Joseon with an iron fist. By not using his name, the drama avoids the baggage of official annals that describe him as paranoid, vindictive and wildly cruel. For screenwriters, this swap allows space for fantasy: a tyrant who can be softened by love, an insatiable palate for good food and plot twists. Interestingly, King Yeonsangun’s personal name was the similarly sounding Yi Yung.

Family trauma made relatable

In Bon Appétit, Your Majesty, Yi Heon’s childhood scars, including the loss of his mother, palace conspiracies and whispers of betrayal, underpin his volatile temper and loneliness.

This backstory echoes the real king’s history. Yeonsangun’s real mother, deposed Queen Yun, was executed when he was young, having been asked to drink poison. He was raised to believe another woman was his birth mother, only to discover the truth years later. That revelation haunted him, and historians often cite it as the seed of his rage and instability. By leaning on this trauma, the drama humanises him but doesn’t chain itself to fact.

Tyranny with glitter

Drama writer fGRD brands Yi Heon as oppressive, seizing women for his court, silencing scholars and ordering executions, but always in a way that heightens the palace intrigue and feeds the melodrama. The cruelty is balanced with spectacle: lavish hunting grounds, decadent feasts, food contests that border on fantasy.

Likewise, Yeonsangun really was feared. He shut down schools, confiscated lands and carried out purges against officials who displeased him—the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty record brutal punishments and a climate of terror. Yet where the real Yeonsangun was almost wholly monstrous, Netflix gives Lee Heon flickers of redemption, opening space for viewers to both fear and swoon.

Romance, food and fantasy

At the heart of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty is an improbable romance: a modern-day chef who time-travels to Joseon, dazzling the king with dishes that challenge tradition and ultimately soften his heart. The kitchen becomes the drama’s battlefield and love language.

This is where the show goes off the rails. As far as historians know, no chef from the future ever cooked for Yeonsangun (and no romance of this flavour is recorded). But in Joseon court culture, food was political: every royal meal was symbolic and closely tied to order. In a sense, the drama exaggerates a truth: that at the royal table, lives, reputations and kingdoms were always at stake.

On-screen, it looks almost decadent: a king seated before a forest of lacquer trays, each topped with jewel-toned banchan, steaming broths and gilded delicacies. Netflix’s Bon Appétit, Your Majesty has audiences swooning over its sumptuous palace spreads, but the truth is, these royal banquets aren’t a screenwriter’s invention. They were real, ritualised and absolutely central to how Korea’s Joseon dynasty projected power.

A stage, not a supper

For a Joseon monarch, every meal was a performance. Known as sura, the royal table was less about indulgence and more about optics. A king’s meals, sometimes numbering dozens of side dishes, arranged with Confucian symmetry, signalled stability, prosperity and the cosmic order of the court. To dine was to govern; the king’s chopsticks were as much instruments of statecraft as his seals.

The women behind the kitchen doors

While Bon Appétit, Your Majesty drips with drama, the real palace kitchens were equally high-stakes. The suragan or royal kitchen was staffed by sanggung, women trained in the art of cooking, presentation and survival. Each dish was supervised, tasted and occasionally poison-tested before reaching the king. One name still resonates: Han Hui-sun, the last surviving royal chef, who carried palace recipes into the 20th century and ensured that court cuisine didn’t vanish with the monarchy.

The ritual of royal meals

The Joseon king never dined alone, nor casually. Foods were seasonal, metaphorical and coded. Lotus root slices embodied purity, pheasant promised vigour and pine nuts offered longevity. Every dish, from kimchi varieties to delicately stewed meats, was a message: to the court, to foreign envoys, to the heavens themselves. Even the way bowls were placed on the table followed a strict choreography, with rice and soup positioned like planets around the sovereign sun.

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Netflix gloss vs reality

And yet, reality was not always so cinematic. While the show revels in slow pans of lacquer and steam, real Joseon kings sometimes found their meals tedious. Accounts suggest that monarchs often ate quickly, overwhelmed by the endless formality. Feasts were for convention, not for pleasure. In some cases, the king’s appetite was less important than the table’s symbolism, and food was consumed by attendants or redistributed to the court after the monarch had finished.

In today’s South Korea, Yeongjo is remembered as both reformer and tragic patriarch, but his meals linger in the culture’s imagination. To sit at his table was to witness a kingdom in miniature. And in Netflix’s polished frames, audiences glimpse a truth he would have appreciated: that the act of dining can be power and fantasy all at once.

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