Coffee Prince 1st Shop

I recently got hooked on a Korean drama called Coffee Prince and I have to admit I really enjoyed the show. Coffee Prince runs the whole gamut from funny to sad to happy and all the characters have great chemistry together (good casting/acting). I thought the story was great and it never felt like the show was dragging on. Coffee Prince is basically about a hard-working, cheerful girl (Go Eun Chan played by Yoon Eun Hye), who’s mistaken for a man. In order to keep her job she keeps pretending but she and her manager (Choi Han Kyul played by Gong Yoo) fall in love with each other. This obviously gets complicated for both since she’s pretending to be male.

The show apparently was very popular in Korea and has propelled an already popular Yoon Eun Hye (YEH) to a new level of stardom. It’s currently airing right now on Sino TV on weekdays at 7pm if you’re in NYC with Time Warner Cable. I don’t know about other localities - check your local listings if interested, but it’s 1/3 through already. This TV version is dubbed in Mandarin and contains excessive commercials because they chop each original full hour episode into 2 so there are literally about 30 minutes of commercials. The voice acting with the Chinese dubbing is kind of crappy and takes away from the show. I definitely recommend viewing the series with its original Korean dialogue and using subtitles if they’re available in your preferred language.

You can buy the official Coffee Prince DVD with English subtitles over at YesAsia.com:
Click here to buy The 1st Shop Of Coffee Prince DVD w/ English Subtitles

I pretty much finished the series this week while I was sick (still sick but getting better). This show was so enjoyable and fun to watch that I find myself wanting to watch it again. It’s better than most US TV shows I’ve watched. I don’t know, maybe it’s because of my Asian culture, but the style of this kind of show resonates more with me than American television.

Yoon Eun Hye (who has no makeup for most of the series) is cute as a button on this show - not just her looks but her whole character’s behavior. I’m probably going to check out her other work as well.