Hmmm… I smell that something good is cooking! And it’s none other than a Taiwanese drama being deliciously concocted with perfect eye candy leads in Wu Kang Ren (as Ting En) & Ivy Shao (as Wei Qing) in “The Perfect Match”.

Title: The Perfect Match
Native Title: 極品絕配
Country of Origin: Taiwan
Airing Date: March 3, 2017 – July 14, 2017
Episode Count: 18                  

Hope you can join me and my recapping journey with SETTV’s latest yummy offering!                                                                                                                    

Look at that opening sequence, such cute leads!

We got introduced to Wu Kang Ren’s character already, Michelin-starred chef Huo Ting En who owns La Mure, a menu-less restaurant with curry lobster as his main specialty.

If we have a Michelin chef, we also have a night market master in Ivy Shao’s character, Wei Qing.

Ivy’s so pretty *_* she gained my love all because of “Back to 1989”, such a beautiful drama *cries*. Anyway, she said this line while browsing through their family’s recipe journal.

Oh trust me, boy. Night market food is the bomb! His friend sent him the post about Wei Qing being his economical version.

Our female lead being so bad-ass carrying (an obviously empty) gas tank haha! If only her character was this cool in “Back to 1989”.

Enter funny and ke ai night market dance scene! They surely want this to be a trend in Taiwan. Looking forward to seeing this when I get to visit their night markets again haha!

La Mure’s head chef fell ill so the restaurant owner and top chef had to take over in preparing a VIP dinner.

Turns out that Ting En prepared food for his own blind date set up by his mom… Surprise!
It will be interesting to see that our second female lead is a renowned food critic and not the typical close friend who’s been in love with the lead this whole time (unless that is the upcoming plot twist lol).

After that very awkward dinner, Ting En’s bodyguard/best friend brought him to the night market to see his economical version. Apparently, the night market isn’t a very delicious place to our male lead’s stream of memories and we will soon find out why.

He was ready to leave until a voice caught his attention. Enters *flashbacks*. It reminded him of something not-so-good regarding his sister… (yup, not some past lover!)

And so Ting En decided to try the night market version of La Mure’s specialty.

I’ve never tried any night market curry yet but I’m pretty sure that it couldn’t be as bad as how he described it!

The curry tasted way too bad for Ting En that he took over Wei Qing’s night market stall just to prove to her that his curry is the greatest.

And now we got a longer flashback scene between Ting En and his sister. Apparently his sister left home to be with a man that their family did not approve of. She asked Ting En to teach her how to make curry. Ting En rejected her request by telling her that she will most likely not return home anymore if he teaches her.

Cooking challenge! Count us in.

Ting En willingly accepted her challenge and let her taste his signature dish.

Aaaaand the kitchen had to be cleared out because our female lead is ready to recreate Ting En’s signature dish!

Okay, maybe not so ready yet? She admits that what she did was different from his curry but still similar… Waaa?

You go, girl! But you will do ANYTHING? Ting En will say yes to that for sure!

Anything including bringing sacks of ingredients from the truck to the kitchen… but girl can literally handle anything!

It also includes blind taste testing all kinds of curry and having to arrange them all in order according to the sequence of tasting them. I’m actually curry-ous (see what I did there haha!) about how Sri Lanka’s curry tastes like!

Just when it was her time to arrange the difference jars of curry in order, suddenly an earthquake came into the picture.

OTP’s first very close encounter all thanks to the random earthquake haha!

Wei Qing wrote a contract to seal the deal that he will be training her. All for the love of curry! I love these two already!

Oooohh now we know that it was all about the baking soda! A great tip from the master.

Mark her words!

This will be very interesting as we could early on see that Ting En is the current curry king.

They’re celebrating the fact that Wei Qing was able to challenge Ting En and even if she lost, she ended up being his apprentice. Still a winner!

Currently writing her food critique on Ting En’s La Mure. Not sure if our second female lead fell in love at first sight with La Mure’s dishes or with the chef (?)

To answer my question, it’s most likely both because who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who cooks such great dishes, right?! But wait, I don’t think Ting En’s going to see your text message, girl…

And so we end the pilot episode with a half-naked Ting En wondering where he had left his phone… Ta-da!

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First Impressions:

• I loved how the first episode focused on our main leads, no unnecessary or cliche story lines SO FAR.
• Both of our main characters have a deeper purpose for going into the culinary path. Ting En is doing it for his sister while Wei Qing is doing it for her dad which could really drag the story out.
• Speaking of his sister, I’m curious to see how or where she is now.
• Not a fan of the second leads so far, can they please not dwell on their lives unless they could really make it interesting… I hope this drama could change how I look at Ben Wu since his role in “Love Cuisine” (2015) pissed me off so much.
• I super love Taiwan’s night markets so I hope they could focus on the night market scene more than Ting En’s La Mure. So many cooking dramas focused on fine dining cuisine already so it’s about time to show Taiwan’s gastronomic delights in their night markets.
• I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming episodes because Ivy Shao and Wu Kang Ren seemed to have a lot of chemistry *squeals*.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post as I didn’t feel like any time was wasted (either for drama-watching or sleeping) in blogging about this drama. So do you have any plans of watching “The Perfect Match” or are you already watching it? Any thoughts so far? Please feel free to share them below.