Bookinfo with custom DNS not working

Hello all! I have a problem that i’m facing for about one week and i just can’t figure it out.
Here is the thing:
0. I have an AKS (Azure) cluster with 3 nodes and Istio installed simply with istioctl install --set meshConfig.accessLogFile=/dev/stdout. Everything works good
kubernetes version 1.18.10 and istio version 1.8.0

  1. If i deploy bookinfo just like here everything works, i find the external IP for istio-ingressgateway (type LoadBalancer) and i can curl <EXTERNAL_IP>/api/v1/products or access it in my browser and everything works.
  2. I’ve made a DNS entry in Azure for book.example.com - <EXTERNAL_IP> and i can verify that it’s correct with dig/ping/host/etc. Also i’ve modified the gateway and the virtualservice for bookinfo like this:
diff --unified k8s-manual/istio/istio-demo-gateway.yaml k8s-manual/istio/test-gateway.yaml 
--- k8s-manual/istio/istio-demo-gateway.yaml	2020-12-10 15:18:35.000000000 +0200
+++ k8s-manual/istio/test-gateway.yaml	2021-01-12 22:10:47.000000000 +0200
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
       name: http
       protocol: HTTP
     hosts:
-    - "*"
+    - book.example.com
 ---
 apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
 kind: VirtualService
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
   name: bookinfo
 spec:
   hosts:
-  - "*"
+  - book.example.com
   gateways:
   - bookinfo-gateway
   http:

In short, everything that i’ve changed is the host info.
Now if i test with curl, everything works:

curl book.example.com/api/v1/products
[{"id": 0, "title": "The Comedy of Errors", "descriptionHtml": "<a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Comedy_of_Errors\">Wikipedia Summary</a>: The Comedy of Errors is one of <b>William Shakespeare's</b> early plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play."}]

I can even see the the access logs from istio-proxy:

kubectl logs -f productpage-v1-6987489c74-6td6v -c istio-proxy
[2021-01-12T20:35:11.100Z] "GET /api/v1/products HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" 0 395 2 1 "10.10.0.4" "curl/7.64.1" "baa2e80b-2227-4707-8a1e-98abffb06616" "book.example.com" "127.0.0.1:9080" inbound|9080|| 127.0.0.1:35354 10.10.0.127:9080 10.10.0.4:0 outbound_.9080_._.productpage.default.svc.cluster.local default

But if i enter this url in my browser i get book.example.com took too long to respond.
Istio-proxy logs are empty, the request does not even gets to it.
I’ve tried multiple browsers on my laptop, from my phone and even with online page checkers. It does not work and it’s killing me.

What can i do? What am i doing wrong?

Anyone? Please? It is really driving me crazy.