Title: 大使閣下の料理人 Taishi Kakka no Ryōrinin
English Title: The Ambassador's Chef
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Year: 2015
Episode: 01
Cast:
- 櫻井翔 Sakurai Shō
- 剛力彩芽 Gōriki Ayame
- 大倉孝二 Okura Koji
- 加藤成亮 Kato Shigeaki (加藤シゲアキ Kato Shigeaki)
- 竹中直人 Takenaka Naoto
- 広末涼子 Hirosue Ryōko
- 西田敏行 Nishida Toshiyuki
SYNOPSIS
Osawa Kō used to work as a sous chef specializing in French cuisine at a first class hotel in 2013. A colleague informed him about the opportunity to work as the official residence chef in Japanese embassies located in foreign countries.
Two years later, Kō is the official residence chef the at the Japanese embassy in Vietnam. His assistant Le Thi Lan is half-Japanese and half-Vietnamese.
REVIEW
Taishi Kakka no Ryōrinin is about chefs who work at Japanese embassies located in foreign countries. In 2015, Osawa Kō is the official residence chef for the Japanese embassy in Japan, and he is working for Ambassor Kazuya Kuraki.
I was looking forward to watching the drama because I love food and cooking, as well as international relations and foreign diplomacy. This should have been right up my alley, so to speak, but I must say that I didn't like it all that much. Well, to be fair, the cooking scenes were somewhat entertaining.
I don't understand how the production defines diplomacy. Surely, it doesn't involve publicly criticizing another country's ambassador and his chef for not cooking a national dish properly. I would also think that it doesn't include issuing a cooking challenge to another country's ambassador and his chef about who makes better dishes when it comes to their national cuisine.
Even though Kō's specialty is French cuisine, it doesn't make sense to imply that he can make better French cuisine compared to the French ambassador's French chef. Of course, I acknowledge that it is entirely possible that Kō is the better chef.
However, if a Japanese chef is deemed by an impartial judge to make better French cuisine compared to a French chef, that would just result to the French ambassador and the French chef losing face. I mean, I don't think anyone would want that to happen.
Furuta Seīchi: According to the book Diplomacy by Harold Nicolson, there are seven qualities of a diplomat: truth, accuracy, calm, modesty, loyalty, good temper, and... patience.
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大使閣下の料理人 Taishi Kakka no Ryōrinin
