The Taste of Us

A break-up leaves Leung Leung (Mason Fung) adrift in his own flat, a freelancer who loves singing and eating and who decides that the way to prove he can still keep himself is to let out the spare room. The tenant who answers is A Chi (Zeno Koo), obsessive about cooking, and nothing about the two men's temperaments matches. What closes the gap is dinner. Also in the picture is Jessica (Carmen Ngai), Leung Leung's former girlfriend, and around the edges sits the ordinary business of rent, routine and the work of feeding another person.

Food is the programme's main language rather than its decoration. Dishes mark stages of familiarity, apology, comfort and celebration, and the bond in the middle of it stays deliberately unsettled, sitting somewhere between flatmates, friends and something the show is in no hurry to name. Every episode is titled after what gets cooked in it rather than after a story beat, so the published episode list reads as a menu, and episode five is the only instalment built around a single item, a dark chocolate mille feuille cake. Each instalment then closes on a full step-by-step recipe guide, which is the format's real trick: the drama and the cookery programme occupy the same twenty-one minutes.

TVB made it for TVB Plus, channel 82, its home for lighter and shorter formats, and pitched it publicly as a cooking show with a romance running through it rather than as a drama-slot title; TVB USA calls the format a combination of micro drama and light variety, which is the commercial frame that let a food programme put a male pair at its centre. A celebrity chef served as culinary consultant, designing recipes to match each episode's plot and standing in for the actors' hands in some of the cooking shots, while Zeno Koo brought real kitchen experience to the part, having worked in restaurants and trained at a culinary academy before taking it. Ten episodes ran from 12 August to 8 September 2024, with the theme song Will You Be My Lover written and composed by C Jun and performed by Christy Yao, who is not in the cast. It arrived three years after ViuTV's Ossan's Love, in a period the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Centre for Cultural Studies records as otherwise belonging to independent makers and fan organisers, and TVB later carried all ten episodes internationally on its own TVBAnywhere service.