Even a Michelin 3-Star Chef Couldn't Handle Elementary School Lunch

It takes a lot to rattle a Michelin three-star chef. Ahn Sung-jae — one of Korea's most decorated culinary figures and a judge on Netflix's wildly popular Culinary Class Wars — has cooked for heads of state and earned his stars through years of rigorous, exacting work. But on Sunday's episode of tvN's After-School Ms. Taeri (방과후 태리쌤), he met his match in the form of an elementary school cafeteria.

"I don't think I can ever do this again," he said after helping to prepare lunch for the students of Yongheung Elementary School in Mungyeong, South Chungcheong Province. It was the kind of comment that prompted laughter from the cast — and a moment of genuine relatability from one of Korea's most intimidating culinary figures.

What Is After-School Ms. Taeri?

After-School Ms. Taeri is a variety show on tvN starring actress Kim Tae-ri, known internationally for her roles in Twenty-Five Twenty-One and Mr. Sunshine. The show follows her and a rotating cast of celebrity co-teachers as they run an after-school program at a real elementary school, participating in everything from cooking clubs to sports days to school field trips.

The premise works because Kim Tae-ri brings genuine enthusiasm to the classroom dynamic, and the guests she invites tend to be people who are not typically placed in situations where children can humble them. Ahn Sung-jae was a perfect fit for that role — and he delivered accordingly.

The Chef Who Declared Retirement

Sunday's episode was the second part of the school's autumn sports day (운동회) arc, filmed at the Yongheung Elementary School grounds. The day involved a full slate of traditional Korean field day activities — relay races, tug-of-war, team games — alongside a special meal prepared with the help of the celebrity guests.

Ahn Sung-jae took on the task of helping prepare the school lunch, working alongside the cast with the kind of precision one might expect from someone who runs a world-class kitchen. What he did not anticipate, apparently, was the scale and the chaos of feeding an entire school's worth of children in a fixed time window.

"I'm usually meticulous when I cook," he said on camera. "But this is the limit." He declared himself "retired from the whale teacher role" — a recurring nickname on the show — and the admission became the episode's most quoted moment online.

Chef Ahn Sung-jae rose to mainstream fame through Culinary Class Wars, where his poker-faced judging style and exacting palate made him one of the show's most compelling figures. Watching him genuinely overwhelmed by a school cafeteria — a context where the standards are different but the volume is unforgiving — was, by any measure, an unexpected form of entertainment.

The Blind Cooking Showdown

The sports day episode also featured a cooking competition between two of the show's regular cast members: Choi Hyun-wook and Gangnam. Both prepared dishes and presented them to Ahn Sung-jae in a blind tasting format — he was literally blindfolded — in what the show playfully called the "mushroom house" (버섯집) challenge.

Choi Hyun-wook, a rising actor who appeared in Twenty-Five Twenty-One opposite Kim Tae-ri and has since built a strong following through variety appearances, went up against rapper and entertainer Gangnam in what turned out to be a genuinely competitive matchup.

When Ahn Sung-jae lifted his blindfold and announced his verdict, it was Choi Hyun-wook who took the win — a result that prompted a good-natured reaction from Gangnam and considerable delight from the students watching on.

Why the Show Works

Part of what makes After-School Ms. Taeri effective is the combination of its main cast's warmth and the inherently unpredictable nature of working with real elementary school children. Kim Tae-ri, who spent years navigating the emotional demands of prestige drama roles, appears genuinely at ease in the school environment — patient, curious, and unafraid to look undignified.

The guest rotation allows the show to bring in figures like Ahn Sung-jae, who carry a specific kind of public gravitas, and then put that gravitas in situations designed to dissolve it. A Michelin-starred chef struggling with school lunch duty is not a spectacle of failure — it is a recognition that expertise in one arena does not transfer automatically to another, and that there is something genuinely difficult and underappreciated about the people who feed children every day at scale.

Ahn Sung-jae's "never again" quote will likely circulate well beyond the show's regular viewership. It is the kind of moment that travels on social media precisely because it is both funny and unexpectedly sincere — a reminder that the most composed professionals in any field are still, in the right circumstances, human.

The episode aired Sunday, March 29, on tvN. After-School Ms. Taeri airs weekly and is available on streaming through Tving.

Fan Reactions and Online Buzz

The episode generated significant discussion online shortly after it aired. Clips of Ahn Sung-jae looking frazzled while preparing lunch, and his frank admission that he was at his limit, spread across social media platforms in Korea. Many fans noted the irony with particular affection: here was a chef whose restaurant requires reservations months in advance, physically unable to keep up with the demands of feeding a few dozen elementary school students.

"This is actually really comforting," one viewer wrote on an online community board. "Even the best chef in Korea looks like us when he's out of his element." Another noted that the segment offered an inadvertent tribute to school cafeteria workers — the real professionals who manage this challenge every single day, without cameras and without a Michelin reputation to fall back on.

For Choi Hyun-wook, winning the blind taste test was a small but satisfying moment. He has been one of the more surprising variety personalities to emerge from the current generation of Korean actors — genuinely funny, self-deprecating, and competitive in the right context. His victory over Gangnam, a veteran entertainer with considerable competition experience, gave the episode a clean narrative arc.

Kim Tae-ri's Growing Presence in Variety

Perhaps the quieter story of After-School Ms. Taeri's run has been Kim Tae-ri herself. Best known for dramatically intense roles in series like Twenty-Five Twenty-One and the historical epic Mr. Sunshine, she has been something of a revelation in this looser, more spontaneous format.

The show has allowed her to demonstrate a warmth and playfulness that does not always come through in dramatic roles — particularly with the actual students, who treat her with the comfortable familiarity of someone they know from school rather than someone they recognize from a screen. That dynamic is not easy to manufacture, and it has given the show a texture that sets it apart from other celebrity-in-school variety formats.

Whether or not Ahn Sung-jae will accept a future invitation to return remains an open question. His parting declaration — "whale teacher retired" — played more like a negotiating position than a final answer. For now, the episode stands as one of the season's most memorable: the Michelin chef who met his match in a school kitchen, the actor who beat the rapper in a blind taste test, and a variety format that continues to find genuine human moments in unlikely places.