A street bar in one of Seoul's most colourful neighbourhoods becomes the battleground for a very personal war in Itaewon Class, the 2020 Korean drama directed by Kim Seong-yoon. At its centre stands Park Sae-ro-yi, a man with a criminal record, a stubborn sense of justice and an ambition far larger than his means.
What is Itaewon Class about?
Itaewon is the kind of district where every doorway opens onto a different world, and that is exactly where Park Sae-ro-yi chooses to plant his flag. Freshly out of prison and with little to his name, he opens a small restaurant-bar and gathers around him a crew of outsiders who, like him, have been written off by everyone else. What begins as a scrappy business venture quickly becomes a confrontation with a far more powerful adversary, a figure whose reach extends across the whole food industry and whose history with Sae-ro-yi is deeply personal. The series tracks the slow, often painful climb of this unlikely team as they try to turn an improbable dream into something real, while loyalties are tested, romances tangle and old wounds refuse to close. Running roughly seventy minutes an episode, it gives its ensemble room to breathe, letting the friendships inside the bar matter as much as the rivalry outside it.
About the cast
Park Seo-jun and Kim Da-mi head the cast, supported by Kwon Na-ra, Yoo Jae-myung, Ahn Bo-hyun, Kim Dong-hee, Lee Joo-young and Ryu Kyung-soo. Kim Seong-yoon directs, steering a large ensemble through a story that balances romance with the grind of building a business from nothing.
Context & significance
Released in 2020, Itaewon Class belongs to a wave of Korean dramas that found large audiences well beyond Korea, and it remains one of the more widely recognised titles of its year. Its genre listing reads simply drama and romance, but the show spends a great deal of its energy on themes of class, revenge and self-made success, with the restaurant business serving as the arena where those themes collide. The Itaewon setting, a district known for its mix of cultures and nightlife, gives the series a distinctive texture that sets it apart from dramas set in corporate towers or suburban homes. For viewers new to Korean television, it is often recommended as an accessible entry point because its underdog structure is easy to follow even across a long season.
Watching Itaewon Class on Ktime
Itaewon Class is available to stream on K-Time; the page you are reading is free, and watching the episodes requires logging in to a K-Time account. K-Time serves the Persian-speaking diaspora with a fully Farsi interface, so browsing the catalogue and queueing the next episode feels natural for Farsi readers even when the series itself is in Korean.