It’s like a 13-year-old moon-eyed school student wrote the script for the 2021 Korean mini-series “The Tasty Florida”. Grown men behave like teens, they are either sunny like an excited puppy, or sulky like a spoiled baby. It has only 8 episodes, barely 10 minutes long, but it’s hard to keep your interest up after the 5th one. But if you want to watch a bunch of handsome men that look like K-pop idols serve food and flirt around like they are in still in middle-school – stream it.
The protagonist is college freshman Hae Won (Cha Woo Min), who arrives in Seoul and falls into the arms of the good-looking Eun Gyu (Kim Yoo Hwan), who happens to be running a rooftop Chinese restaurant in the same building Won is going to live in. Eun Gyu’s restaurant is called ‘Tasty Florida’, and it’s popular with the locals because the four men who run it are total eye-candies. So both men & women flock to ‘Tasty Florida’ to take selfies with Eun Gyu and the other boys.
That’s really the only strong point of the drama – it has a bunch of gorgeous men facing the camera. In-fact, everything is aesthetically pleasing about the show – the actors, the locations, the food, the props, etc… But the content is blander than boiled veggies. The actors do what they are told, and because that’s not much, it’s not like anybody stands out for their acting talent.
It’s awesome that Korea is churning out gay romances, but this one is too old-school/boring, with the done to death “two best friends fall in love with the same person” plot. While other mini-series in the same genre are entertaining and too short, ‘Tasty Florida’ feels slow and long-drawn, even though it’s only 8 episodes long, with each being only 10-11 minutes in duration.
It’s a 5/10 from me. Sorry, but even the tasty-looking men couldn’t keep me invested in this series. (You can stream it on WeTV or Viki)
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