BTS’ Jin leads V and Jimin through a traditional Korean cooking session in a new Vogue video released one week after ‘ARIRANG’ debuted at No. 1.
One week after ‘ARIRANG’ debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with a record-breaking 641,000 equivalent album units, the biggest opening week for any group since the chart adopted its current measurement system in 2014, BTS found a quieter way to mark the moment: by making noodles.
On Friday, March 27, Vogue published a video featuring Jin, V, and Jimin gathered in a kitchen to prepare janchi-guksu, a traditional Korean noodle soup historically served at celebrations, and misugaru, a sweet powdered-grain beverage. The timing is not incidental. Janchi-guksu translates loosely as “party noodles,” and after a week in which BTS held a massive comeback concert at Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon from the Guggenheim art museum, and appeared at a Spotify fan event in New York City, a celebration was entirely in order.
Jin in Charge, Chaos in the Kitchen
Jin, widely regarded as the most capable cook among the seven members, was installed as head chef with V and Jimin assigned as his sous chefs. The arrangement held in theory. In practice, V spent a significant portion of the session tossing noodles into the air while draining them, cheering himself on with each toss. Jimin, meanwhile, developed a singular fixation: sugar. He continued adding it to his misugaru well past any reasonable culinary threshold, ignoring Jin’s other instructions in the process.
“You have to be able to chew it,” Jimin said, before pressing Jin to sample the heavily sweetened drink. Jin, to his credit, conceded that it tasted fine. “I told you it’s good!” Jimin declared. “This is the Busan style. More sugar than you think you need.” V’s later response, a dry “Who used all the sugar?”, drew one of the video’s bigger laughs.
Despite the chaos, the trio finished the meal successfully, taking turns photographing their completed dishes before sitting down together.
A Cultural Moment Dressed as a Cooking Show
The casual domestic warmth of the Vogue clip lands with particular weight given everything surrounding it. ARIRANG, the group’s first full-length studio album since 2020 and their first group project in nearly four years, opened with 532,000 in pure album sales, the largest sales week for any group in more than a decade, surpassing One Direction’s Midnight Memories in 2013. The physical campaign alone, spanning 17 vinyl variants and nine CD editions, drove 208,000 vinyl copies sold, the largest vinyl sales week for a group in the modern era.
V briefly contextualized the album’s meaning during the kitchen session, describing ARIRANG as a record that “expresses our intent to mark a change.” That phrase, offered casually between noodle tosses and sugar pours, carries more weight than its setting might suggest. The album’s title draws from the centuries-old Korean folk song associated with themes of separation and perseverance, and its arrival follows the members completing South Korea’s mandatory military service. The BTS World Tour ‘ARIRANG’ is scheduled to begin April 9 in Goyang, South Korea, with North American dates launching April 25 in Tampa, Florida.
The noodles, ultimately, got made. The album already rewrote the record books. Both feel, in the orbit of BTS’s current moment, entirely expected.
