Happy Noodle (2013)

Story: An aspiring, happy-go-lucky man (played by YSY) leaves Korea in search of his father in Hanzhou. He got recruited to work at the Hanzou Noodles Restaurant; a place with 100 years history as the best noodles restaurant in China. This sets the story of family feud, business struggles and human greed as this young man grow in his skill as a noodle chef and mature in his life perspective. Along the way, he found love. I categorise this story as in the same genre as Baking King, Kim Tak Gu. To be fair to the story, the storyline is different than Baker King's, though the genre is the same and instead of bread, we have noodles now. True to Chinese style of drama, each character has their own story and they are well explored. In the middle of the story, things dragged a bit but not too much. The story is told in an acceptable pace.

Acting/Cast: 10/10 for the experienced cast and acting. Despite the language barrier, everyone did well with expressions and their acting. YSY is dubbed but there are times when they allowed his real voice come true when speaking in Korean is needed. There's also another character in the drama who is a Japanese and occassionally, they allowed his voice to come through too; for the Japanese speaking parts. Being a veteran in CDramas, I do not mind the dubbing and multi-lingual premise of the acting, though I can understand how some ppl might find the dubbing annoying. Second male lead's a hottie as well and I spotted a few more hotties in there (for those of you who value aesthetics). The female lead is pretty and contrary to the noisy annoying chinese actress syndrome, hers is a very solid, mature character- no unneccesary screaming and shouting.

Music: Mediocre but suited for each scene.

Rewatch value: The part that hold me back from giving it a high rewatch value is the sheer number of episodes this drama has. 40! It is not one for a quick rewatch. It does not have memorable scenes that you will want to keep rewatching as it is more of a WHOLE drama than a SNIPPETS drama. Although YSY is the male lead, everyone gets almost equal air time and their stories are told well.

Overall: This is somewhere between 7 and 8. I decided to give it an 8 because despite its often tauted image as being "same as Baker's King, only China version"; the storyline is actually quite different. Good on YSY for landing himself a good chinese drama! I love all the scenic places in Hanzhou.... makes me want to visit Hanzhou! The restaurant and houses were all so grand looking! All in all, an ok drama if you are in the mood for a family, pseudo-melo (at certain parts) type drama.

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