Bon Appétit, Your Majesty episode 12 review — Course Nº 12 Hwanseban — A feast of love and ruin

Scene from Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Image via: Netflix
Scene from Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Image via: Netflix

Bon Appétit, Your Majesty ends its first season with a table set for heartbreak and triumph. The twelfth episode, Course Nº 12 Hwanseban, serves a banquet of betrayals, desperate gambles and love that refuses to die even when time itself turns hostile.

Palaces fall like overcooked sugar. Friendships burn down to bitter ash. Yet amid the wreckage something tender survives. This finale refuses easy comfort, but it rewards every moment of investment with a story that’s as flavorful as it is devastating.

Betrayals simmer into tragedy

The great coup in Bon Appétit, Your Majesty finally erupts, every simmering intrigue brought to a rolling boil. Plans long whispered in dark hallways burst into open combat. Allies turn enemies in the blink of an eye, and friends who once broke bread together draw blades instead.

The palace becomes a pressure cooker. Every secret that’s been marinating all season spills out, hot and dangerous. The kitchen of destiny turns into a war room, recipes for survival replaced by tactics and sacrifice. When the king declares,

“Power you cannot control is nothing but poison,”

it’s not just a warning to his enemies, it’s a judgment on everyone who ever believed they could master ambition without paying its price.

Watching the mighty stumble over the weight of their own hunger is as thrilling as it’s devastating. Each betrayal lands like a knife cut through something once tender, transforming shared history into a battlefield of survival.

The king’s painful journey through time

Through it all, the king remains a paradox: imperious, wounded, almost villainous and yet heartbreakingly human. His power has always been plated with arrogance, but underneath lies deep grief and a desperate desire to protect what matters.

His path to the future’s never explained. Bon Appétit, Your Majesty lets that mystery ferment, like a sauce whose recipe dies with its chef. We don’t know what bargain he made with time or what pain he endured to cross it. What matters is that he arrives.

Ji-young wakes in a sterile hospital room, stripped of the palace but not of memory. She rebuilds a life around food, trading royal feasts for the quiet craft of cooking. The show lingers on her resilience, her choice to keep moving even when everything she loved has been ripped away.

When the king finally walks into the restaurant where she works, it’s less a fairy-tale reunion and more a dish served after years of marination, complex, smoky with grief and impossibly alive. He’s still a man shaped by power, with old-world manners and an ache that never left, but here he stands, proof that love can survive even when time refuses to explain itself.

Scene from Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Image via: Netflix
Scene from Bon Appétit, Your Majesty | Image via: Netflix

A future flavored with uncertainty

The final scene in Bon Appétit, Your Majesty doesn’t grant easy sweetness. Some faces at the restaurant feel familiar, as if reincarnated; others might simply echo ghosts. The show never clarifies. It lets us viewers taste uncertainty, a deliberate choice that keeps the aftertaste lingering long after the credits roll.

What’s certain is that survival came at a cost no feast can erase. Laughter exists, but it’s salted by everything lost along the way. The future holds hope, but it’s a hope tempered by grief, a meal cooked with tears as much as joy.

An unforgettable finale for Bon Appétit, Your Majesty

This finale of Bon Appétit, Your Majesty isn’t a sugar-glazed happy ending. It’s a layered course: tragedy braised until tender, love reduced to its deepest flavor and just enough hope to make the pain worth swallowing.

Bon Appétit, Your Majesty closes with an emotional complexity rare in romance-driven dramas, a story that lets its characters suffer, fight and still find each other across the impossible. It’s messy, magnificent and unforgettable.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 tragic banquets devoured in the name of love.

Edited by Beatrix Kondo