It’s tough being in high school especially when students who are born with a dirt spoon as opposed to those born with a golden spoon have to endure bullying. Lee Seung-cheon is a teenager in the former category while his classmate Hwang Tae-yong is in the latter category.
Hwang Tae-yong’s father is a comic illustrator who can barely make ends meet and always has loan sharks harassing the family. His mother and sister fend off the loan sharks while the father hides which makes Hwang Tae-yong really angry. He works part-time in a convenience store and is constantly bullied at school by the better off students.
Lee Seung-cheon lives in a mansion with his calculating tycoon father and stepmother who is a gold-digger. One day, sick and tired of his family’s poverty, Hwang Tae-yong comes across a street vendor who is called “Granny” who offers him the chance to change his life. If he buys a golden spoon, he can change his lot in life by taking on the identity of another person. The condition is that he has to eat in the chosen person’s house 3 times using the golden spoon.
Somehow he manages to pull that off, even going so far as to barge into Hwang Tae-yong’s house the 3rd time and gobbling down the food despite having earlier being kicked out by Hwang Tae-yong’s father. All of a sudden, everyone recognises him as Hwang Tae-yong while the real Hwang Tae-yong has become Lee Seung-cheon.
Na Joo-hee is another of their classmates, she’s a rich girl who has been expelled from a UK boarding school and therefore joins their class. She is the fiancee of Hwang Tae-yong (an arrangement between their fathers). She gets to know Lee Seung-cheon while working at the same convenience store and later they meet as classmates.
The villainess (one of them anyway) in the drama is Oh Yeo-jin, yet another classmate who has used the golden spoon to change identities with a rich girl when she was much younger. The rich girl then became Nara in a poor family and subsequently died so Oh Yeo-jin takes her place forever.
According to Granny, Lee Seung-cheon can choose to remain the other person forever or revert back to his real identity within a month, a year or ten years upon assuming the identity of the other. To do this, he only has to use the golden spoon to eat once in his former home.
Upon assuming Lee Seung-cheon’s identity, Hwang Tae-yong actually feels happy that he has a mother. Hwang Tae-yong’s mother has died and he has a distant/cold relationship with his father who calculates everything in dollars and cents. Hwang Tae-yong has suppressed memories of a shooting incident that occurred in New Jersey, USA when he was a small child. He can only remember snippets of what happened and whenever those memories come floating back, he is traumatised.
Lee Seung-cheon is living it up as Hwang Tae-yong as he enjoys the luxuries of the Hwang household. However he remains worried about his real family’s situation and almost gives the game away that he isn’t who he is in several incidents. Lee Seung-cheon can’t play the piano at all but Hwang Tae-yong is an expert so one day when Hwang Tae-yong goes back to his (real) house as Lee Seung-cheon, he starts playing the piano and it’s the piece of music he always plays, much to the astonishment of his stepmother.
Because of pressing debts, Lee Seung-cheon’s father works as a construction worker and is severely injured. That’s when Lee Seung-cheon regrets having his new identity and wants to go back to being his real self. He was so shaken by his father’s injury that he rushed to the hospital and called his father “Father” but to his shock, Hwang Tae-yong’s father is there behind the curtain. He explains it away by saying that he thought Hwang Tae-yong’s father was the one injured.
Lee Seung-cheon reverts back to being his real self by eating once in his real home with the golden spoon. It’s not long before he gets caught up in his family’s never-ending poverty problems and once again, he uses the golden spoon to eat at Hwang Tae-yong’s house and becomes the rich lad again.
