'Black and White Chef' Star Yoon Nam-no Confesses He Had Only $60 in the Bank at a Friend's Wedding

Chef Yoon Nam-no walked into a recent YouTube reunion with chef Park Eun-young carrying a long-overdue apology: he had signed the guest book at her wedding and sat down for the meal without leaving a single won in the gift envelope. The reason, he explained, was simple. His bank account held 80,000 won.

The confession came in a video published on the 3rd by the YouTube channel Studio Slam, titled Eun-young Comes to Repay a Favor. The moment Yoon saw Park on camera, he opened with "I'm really, truly sorry," and then laid out what had happened. He was preparing to open his restaurant Notre at the time, and the startup costs had cleaned him out. "I wrote my name down, but I couldn't leave the gift money," he said. "I genuinely had no money. My account had 80,000 won in it because of the Notre opening."

Park's reaction landed somewhere between disbelief and retroactive irritation. "You couldn't give it because you had no money?" she said, then added that she had, in fact, been bad-mouthing him ever since. "I saw you arrive. I saw you eating."

Yoon confirmed, without any attempt to dress it up, that yes, that was exactly what happened. He then handed over a belated gift and explained his thinking: he had not put in a large amount of cash, but wanted to buy her something useful for the home instead.

The two chefs went on to swap stories about favors they had done for each other in the past. Yoon brought up a laptop Park had given him around the time of his restaurant opening. He recalled that she had noticed his staff writing everything down in notebooks and found it inefficient. She recommended a specific model and asked if he wanted her to buy it for him. He said yes immediately. The next day, she showed up with a laptop worth over one million won. "She's a real one," Yoon said, using an expression that loosely translates to someone who acts decisively and without fuss.

Yoon Nam-no became a widely recognized name through Netflix's Black and White Chef: Culinary Class Wars and JTBC's Please Take Care of My Refrigerator. He has been open recently about the financial scale of opening Notre, disclosing a loan of roughly 600 million won to cover startup costs. The 80,000-won wedding story fits neatly into that picture: a chef building toward something, not yet there, trying to keep a friendship intact in the meantime.

Yoon and Park first crossed paths through television work and have stayed close since.