A webtoon-based drama that went on to get a Japanese remake. What made this story travel beyond its own borders.
On the surface it is a young man avenging his father, but what actually fills the screen is the specific grind of running one small restaurant. A bad location, a kitchen that cannot keep staff, revenue that swings on a single rumour — these drive the plot. Because these small problems block the protagonist far more often than the grand revenge does, it reads closer to a workplace drama than a genre piece.
The webtoon leans on the protagonist's narration to state his convictions directly, while the drama converts much of that into confrontations between characters. Changing medium translated 'explanation' into 'collision'. That is why readers who came from the webtoon and viewers who came from the drama often remember the same character differently.
Someone trying to grow a shop against a conglomerate trying to stop them is legible anywhere. The conflict needs almost no cultural setup, so subtitles alone are a low barrier. A Japanese remake relocating the setting to Roppongi worked precisely because the skeleton of the story is not tied to one neighbourhood.
Jo Gwang-jin, who created the original webtoon, also wrote the drama's screenplay. With the creator handling the adaptation, the main arc and the characters' personalities match the original, while, as noted above, the way they are expressed was reshaped for the screen. It was directed by Kim Seong-yoon, known for Love in the Moonlight, and stars Park Seo-joon and Kim Da-mi. Because it brought characters already popular on the webtoon platform into live action, casting and how faithfully the looks were recreated were talking points before it even aired.
One way to enjoy the show differently is to follow the protagonist's bar as a business. Where to locate, what menu to compete on, whom to hire, and how to respond when a bad reputation spreads each arrive as a problem episode by episode. Much of it is exaggerated or compressed for dramatic effect, so it is no manual for starting a real business. It is, however, a decent survey of the kinds of problems a small shop runs into, and the fun lies in how each character responds to them true to their own nature.
Had it been only one man's revenge story, it would have grown monotonous quickly. Instead, a major strand is how people with very different backgrounds and circumstances gather at the bar one by one and become a team. Characters who had not found a place in society each gain a role inside the shop, and that gives viewers a reason to root for them quite apart from the revenge goal. Skip the episodes that explore individual supporting characters and the importance of the team's bond does not really land. On a first viewing, it can help to treat the whole team, rather than the protagonist alone, as the lead.
Roppongi Class, made in Japan in 2022, moved the setting from Seoul's Itaewon to Tokyo's Roppongi and kept the backbone of a small bar against a giant restaurant company. Watching both shows how the same story is translated through a different society's speech, workplace culture and sense of personal distance. Rather than ranking one above the other, it is more rewarding to compare what the universal structure of the original is, and what each version added or trimmed.
The first few episodes are spent building the characters' pasts and can feel slow. The pace picks up once the restaurant opens and the rivalry begins — going in aware of that early rhythm changes the impression considerably.