This story is one rollercoaster of a ride. And...I don't know, the longer I stick around the more nauseous I get. Okay that's a bit too unfair. When the story sticks to its core, the things described in its very title, it's actually pretty good. Dungeon. These are SUPPOSEDLY the second attraction of the story, and honestly? I'm okay with it. The settings and the monsters are kinda sorta 3D assets and special effects but they are employed well enough not to be distracting. The action scenes looks decently flashy. And all the bells and whistles you expect from this story, INITIALLY, things like guilds and ranksand status windows and so on and so forth... They are pretty okay too.

Food Truck. This is the main deal of the story, SUPPOSEDLY, and yeah it does its job really well. I'm not sure if the foods drawn here are 3D assets or not, but they look nice, and the food preparation scenes are also pretty detailed for a semi-cooking story. It has plenty of variety especially if you're looking for Korean food.

Boss. The management side of this story are pretty barebones, but the leveling up aspect does fill my brain with cortisol. The combination of RPG system and food truck results in an interesting set of abilities and traits, and it's fun to see how the story plays around with the boundaries it has set, INITIALLY.

Aside from all that, the story is also warm. The story knows the specific core of this particular power fantasy--namely, to have your ordinary-looking being immensely appreciated, not just financially but also socially and emotionally--and it INITIALLY does a very good job sticking to it. This story may not reach the heights of Japanese slow life subgenre and iyashikei, but it's getting so much closer than a lot of OI manhwas. And throughout the story's various arcs, the narrative also exhibits an admittedly wild amount of variety, moving from one arc to another in such a wild swing it's as impressive as it's disorienting.

Ji-eun, the MC, also fits this story, at least INITIALLY. She's a plucky ordinary girl who faces the obstacles in her new life with nothing more than determination and an optimistic can-do attitude. I haven't seen a lot of characters like her outside manga, and it's refreshing to see how these kinds of characters thrive in manhwa's generally more dramatic narrative.

And the story, at least INITIALLY, knows enough to develop the world outside Ji-eun. I've been reading quite fair bit of Hunterverse BLs lately, and I do think that the side characters here have more presence than some of them. Because the narrative doesn't really focus on the actions, per se, these side characters get to be fleshed out in conjunction with Ji-eun's food. The way they enjoyed their food and the way they acted around Ji-eun enriches their character and that, in return, enriches the overall narrrative. SUPPOSEDLY.

But yes. Notice all the SUPPOSEDLY and INITIALLY? I said all that because at some point...the story lost its way.

It's a problem of scale, really. Here, if you want to know the tl;dr, I implore you to look at the second image. It's THAT particular kind of escalation.

Even from the very start, from like the second or third arc, the narrative already positions itself in a 'let's do a guild raid to an unknown dangerous level' story arc that, in other stories, would have been done midway through the stories AT LEAST. And then it just keeps escalating.

>! There's a cosmic rivalry between gods and spirits. There's reincarnation. There's multiple timelines. There's trauma and child death and interguild rivalry and assassination and body hijacking and on and on and on. Later, Ji-eun uses her food truck like a tank / bulldozer / Truck-kun, driving madly and slamming it upon monsters after monsters. And new NPCs appear too alongside each of these plots, each carrying their own drama. Some of these NPCs are also positioned rather close to Ji-eun, almost as if the narrative is setting a reverse harem.

This is all from a story that starts from opening a food truck in a dungeon.

And to this, I'm feeling...

Imagine being in an All You Can Eat buffet with only one plate. You see a lot of things you like but space is very limited so you end up grabbing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and at the end you have a plate stacked full of mutton curry, orange chicken, sashimi, pasta alfredo, tteokbokki, with salsa on top and a slice of brownies at the corner of the plate. The flavor palette ends up a mess, and before long everything just blurs into a mishmash of SOMETHING that has no coherence nor harmony.

Every now and then the story DOES remember that it's meant to be a heartwarming cooking manhwa. And when those moments happen, the warmth returns. But more and more of the narrative are spent to explore the story's unnecessarily complicated mythos, and the story strays even farther from the basic premise.

Furthermore, the increasing number of NPCs muddles the cast. More and more supporting characters begin to disappear from the story, especially the ones from the early chapters. At some point this even occur to the ML (who already has a thin presence in the narrative). Again, at some point there's an attempt to set up a (maybe) love triangle but the problem is that neither parties are developed enough for that to mean anything. And the narrative seemed to notice that as well because that plotline quickly gets sidelined.

The only silver lining in this chaos is the fact that the narrative consistently keeps Ji-eun strong and resolute. Her growth from start to finish is undeniable and immaculate.

But at present, everything else feels like a mess.