8 CookingThemed Anime To Watch (& 7 To Skip)

8 Cooking-Themed Anime To Watch (& 7 To Skip)

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1 8 Cooking-Themed Anime To Watch (& 7 To Skip)

The best anime on this list will leave your mouth watering for more. Most of the worst aren’t “bad,” just bland, but a few can leave a bad taste!

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The obsessive relationship between Japanese anime and food is nowhere as apparent as in the subgenre of cooking-themed anime shows. These shows usually combine a number of other anime tropes, like attendance at an elite (culinary) high school, dreams of running a restaurant or bakery, epic fights, and of course, an abundance of food that will make your mouth water.

Most of these anime are pretty fun, but not all are worth the effort to watch. The best types of cooking anime do more than just titillate your visual tastebuds – some offer actual helpful recipes, insightful cooking tips, and hilarious or compelling storylines. The worst of this list are not all “bad,” so to speak. They’re mostly just bland, but beware: a few will definitely leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Updated by Brianna Albert on August 15th, 2020: Cooking-themed anime received a significant boost with popular anime such as Shokugeki no Soma. Delicious food, wonderful vibes, and colorful animation are usually the core recipe for a great cooking anime.

While some cooking-themed anime can contain an outrageous amount of reactions, there are bundles of them that have wholesome, and even informative, insight on how to cook. However, that does not mean every cooking-themed anime is the right one to watch. Sometimes, it may even be worse that one expected. Here are 8 cooking-themed anime to watch and 7 that may not be that well-written or directed.

15 Skip: Gourmet Girl Grafitti

Gourmet Girl Grafitti is a cooking anime. Or at least, that is what it says on the box. Ryou Machiko, a middle schooler, wishes to become a good cook because of what her late grandmother told her. The problem with the series is not the “cute girls doing cute things” trope, but the fact that it does not focus on the cooking as much as it should.

The story is non-existent, and even if it is there, it is predictable. This one is probably best to skip if one is in store for good storytelling.

14 Watch: New Cooking Master Boy

The first series, called Chuuka Ichiban, first aired in 1997. However, fans can also try to watch the newest version that was released in 2019. The series follows Liu Maoxing, a boy who wishes to become the best cook in all of China.

As the son of “Fairy of Cuisine” Pai, he wishes to follow his mother’s footsteps and aims to become the best chef in the world.

13 Skip: Toriko

Toriko was a shounen anime that flew under the radar for a lot of shounen fans for an appropriate reason. The series takes place in a world where hamburgers and mountains make up the landscape, and where the main character, Toriko, is a Gourmet Hunter who fights against various thingsーeven food itself.

While the animation and battles are both good quality, it is often mediocre and not fit to be a “cooking” anime.

12 Watch: Ristorante Paradiso

When Nicoletta leaves her grandparents’ countryside home, she heads to Rome to work at her mother’s restaurant. Although Nicoletta does not get along well with her mother as she abandoned her when she was small, she decided to work at Casetta Dell’orso, a restaurant filled with older men, all with glasses.

This anime may be directed towards older women, but it is a slice-of-life that contains fantastic meals and good life lessons.

11 Skip: JK Meshi!

JK Meshi tells the story of three high school girls named Reina, Ryouka, and Ruriko, who have mastered the art of making concise and straightforward dishes. Whenever they get distracted or have nothing else to do, they do what they call “JK cooking” and make some simple dishes. However, this anime falls flat on everything, making it a less than average anime to watch.

The meals the girls cook are uninteresting, the characters are all dull, and they even made an in-universe joke about how bad the anime was while it was airing. Not to also mention the fact that it is only 3 minutes long.

10 Watch: Yakitate!! Japan

Japan has a fascinating history with bread. Ever since Portuguese sailors introduced bread to Japan in the 16th century (the Japanese word for bread, “pan,” derives from the Portuguese “pão”), Japanese baking has obsessively worked on its bread and pastry game. The nation innovates with fluffiness, fun fillings, and sweet, creamy textures.

Yaki-tate!! Japan highlights the spirit of this bread enthusiasm by following a young aspiring baker Azuma Kazuma, as he quests to give his country a national bread of its own, a “Ja-pan.” Azuma’s special superpower is that he has unusually warm hands, which allows him to make dough ferment faster. The show is also surprisingly insightful about the tricky process of making yeasted bread.

9 Skip: Pan De Peace!

Sadly, not every bread-based anime can be as good as Yakitate!! Japan. Pan de Peace! is based on a 4-panel manga series about four girls who just really like bread. The anime adaptation is short – each episode is only 3-minutes long, and there are 13 episodes total – which does not leave much room for character depth, cooking content, or anything at all. As one reviewer on Anime Planet put it, “It’s ok. Almost felt to me that Asahi Production…picked it up to give their new employees a chance to draw. Also being a small studio they aren’t able to make the most beautiful scenes.”

8 Watch: Food Wars!: Shokugeki No Soma

No list about cooking anime would be valid without the enthusiastic recommendation of the absurd Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma. Everything about Food Wars is both completely ridiculous and absolutely wonderful. Protagonist Soma Yukihira enrolls in an elite culinary school on the orders of his restaurant-owner father, whom Soma dreams of one day besting in cooking prowess.

Replete with innuendo-laden fan-service moments where characters experience near-sexual “foodgasms,” Food Wars has got everything you want from anime: dramatic shonen action, daddy issues, competitive high school dynamics, and delicious descriptive edible creations every episode.

7 Skip: Fighting Foodons

Calling Fighting Foodons a “cooking anime” is like calling Die Hard a “Christmas movie” or John Wick a “dog movie.” But to its credit, Fighting Foodons does contain plentiful food puns and its terrible 4Kids English intro had one of the best uses of Jacques Offenbach’s “Can-Can” that 90s kids might still remember.

From an era where Pokémon’s influence permeated everything, Fighting Foodons is about food monsters that battle it out in culinary combat against an evil Glutton Empire. The hero’s Foodon roster includes anthropomorphic dishes called Fried Ricer, Burnt Meatballs, Hot Doggone-It, and Shrimp Daddy. The show has some unfortunate regional cuisine stereotypes on display, so unless you are the type of person that likes watching slow-motion train wrecks, avoid this food monstrosity at all costs.

6 Watch: Ben-To

Now here is some food fighting that anyone can get behind. Ben-To does not feature much cooking, but it does include epic fight sequences over delicious food at bargain prices. Ben-To is all about the battle for the tastiest, half-priced bento lunch options at the grocery store.

Main character Yo Sato gets caught up in a grocery bento brawl and ends up joining an underground food lover gang to train for these ultimate showdowns. As one reviewer on MyAnimeList wrote, “It’s Fight Club with Lunchables.” It’s also definitely self-aware of its own ludicrousness, as all good anime should be.

5 Skip: Bonjour♪Sweet Love Pâtisserie

In the match-up between the next two bishonen-laden, reverse harem anime about girls running their dream bakery and romancing lots of boys, Bonjour Koiaji (Sweet Love) Pâtisserie is the one to skip. The story is exactly what you would expect: nice girl enrolls into a pastry academy where she meets several cute boys with distinct personalities. Bonjour’s unremarkable rating may be due to its short, 5-minute per episode runtime and the fact that the series was based on a mobile game. Being based on a game is not itself a negative, but there are so many better cooking games out there. Overall, Bonjour Sweet Love Pâtisserie is, unfortunately, much like a plain puff pastry – light, airy, and filled with nothing of substance.

4 Watch: Dream-Colored Pâtissière

Yume-iro Pâtissière also does not offer much new to the bishonen romance genre it inhabits, but many fans love it for its beautiful music and nice step-by-step guides to all the pretty pastries that protagonist Amano Ichigo makes. Otherwise, it’s your pretty standard reverse harem anime with shojo romance flavors, where Ichigo struggles in an elite dessert chef school but finds help from the cute guys around her.

Overall, Yume-iro Pâtissière is a very sweet, wholesome anime aimed toward younger audiences, packed with cuteness and tasty tarts. As any chef would tell you, it’s okay to make something simple as long as it’s well-executed.

3 Skip: JK Meshi!

The show’s title, with “JK” short for “joshi kousei” (high school girl) and meshi meaning “cooked rice/meal,” could have easily stood for “just kidding.” As many scathing reviewers note, it’s not clear what the creators were intended with this short, 4-minute (seeing a trend?) episodic series, but what they cooked up was not particularly compelling. Shoddy animation and uninteresting narratives led one reviewer on MyAnimeList to write, “JK Meshi is an anime with almost no existent story, bland forgettable characters, and poor art/animation that a 10-year old can do better with his eyes closed.” The backlash might be a bit harsh, but it’s better to save yourself the pain of discovery.

2 Watch: Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast For Spirits

Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi (Afterlife Inn Cooking) makes the watch list for having a relatively different setting than most of the other cooking animes out there. The show explores supernatural elements from Japanese Shinto traditions and a magical fantasy realm, telling the story of a young girl dealing with the death of her grandfather.

Aoi Tsubaki meets an ogre who claims her late grandfather owed him a debt that she must pay with his hand in marriage. She refuses the ogre’s proposal and works at a Bed & Breakfast to repay the debt. A somewhat overfamiliar Beauty and the Beast storyline gives way to cooking recipes and slice of life narratives with beautiful animation and amazing music.

1 Skip: Honkai Impact 3rd: Cooking With Valkyries

Cooking With Valkyries is a skip for committing all the sins of the previous skippable shows: it has a short episodes that don’t provide much depth for characters (one whole minute of its 6-minute episode time is entirely the musical intro) and it is mostly a marketing ploy for a popular mobile game known as the Houkai Series. The entire anime series can be found on YouTube, but while the recipes at the end of each episode are nice touches, neither the food nor narrative content offer anything spectacular.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/cooking-themed-anime-watch-skip/

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