Isekai / reincarnation / fantasy mangas have been huge these past couple of years. There are many interesting mangas with various topics and themes out there, but “cooking” is one theme that I can’t get behind.
I love cooking mangas in general. I’ve read Mister Ajikko, Chuuka Ichiban, Yakitate Japan, Shota no Sushi, Oh! My Konbu, Shokugeki no Soma, and many more. In these mangas, no matter how ridiculous it gets, it is usually based on real world ingredients. The final product is often exaggerated but the flavor is something I can actually imagine. I’ve actually attempted to make some of them and read about others who have done the same.
But this is often untrue for cooking scenes in fantasy mangas. For example, cooking is a major part of Drifting Dragons. They would make dragon meat dishes that are similar to real world dishes and go into details about how it tastes. In Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill, Mukoda would make real-world dishes but isekai monster meat, and how great they taste. But… so what? No matter how much you describe the taste to me, I don’t know and will never know how a dragon or orc taste.
I’m not saying those mangas are boring. I actually really enjoy both Drifting Dragons and Campfire Cooking, but I just can’t get into the food part of it. I would probably enjoy them even more if they glossed over the food and spend more time on other things.
Poor Dungeon Meshi getting called out here… However it’s one of the best series’ I’ve read for years and I would highly, highly recommend it - I love all the insane food it somehow invents. And in fact it somehow remains the focal part of the story, despite the ridiculous twists it takes.
I didn’t hear about that one until after I started avoiding isekai cooking mangas. I’ll give it a shot.
I can tell you now, if you start reading it, the story will go places you could never guess! Great manga, lots of likeable characters and a fun story.
Seconding Dungeon Meshi. Actually one of my favorite mangas right now, with an anime by Trigger coming up. Much like a good meal it is incredibly well put together.
I think cooking could be a good way to help describe the culture and socioeconomic conditions of an Isekai world. (I.e. if a famine occurred in a kingdom, the various dishes in that kingdom could highlight the differences of it as compared to a neighboring country). But yeah, as an Isekai solely about cooking may not be terribly interesting
I weirdly like the setup of Isekai Shokudou because it uses this “restaurant” as a melting pot for all the different cultures of this other world to come together and interact with each other. Well setup aside the show doesn’t do a whole lot with it either and it ends up being kind of very boring. I wish they’d do something more impressive with their concept instead of using it as a base for an episodic slice of life show :/
I have two objections to this, although I’m not the biggest fan of cooking manga (I don’t really seek it out), first about unknown taste and second about mixed taste. Both are kind of interconnected.
This unexpectedly ended being kind of a large answer.
So for unknown taste, I might not know how a dragon tastes, BUT, I also don’t know how a turtle tastes. But I can enjoy reading a cooking manga where they cook a turtle into a soup and I even kind lf imagine how it tastes like. There are also many descriptors yhat are vaguely useful, like sour, tender, etc that coupled with the image hives a rough idea regardless of how wrong it may be in actuality.
Second is when they make their fantasy ingredients contradtable to IRL ones or a mixture of other two ingredients. It is the same as when people tell me frogs taste kind of like Chicken, if you told me a dragon had stiff meat due yo all the muscle and that it tasted kind of like a hard bird meat, I would completely believe it and wouldn’t detract , now if it says it tasted like a gorilla we come back to completely unknown flavours and imagination has to do some heavy lifting.
At the end if the day I think we can appreciate some of the beauty in fantasy food, taking heavy inspiration on IRL dishes but with twists that sound delishious.
While making this point I was constantly thinking about dungeon meshi and toriko, the first utilizes fantasy tropes appropriately to subvert your expectations and make unexpected but reasonable flavours out of fantasy beasts (also dome of the cooking methos are hilarious, like for the trap chest at the beginning). Then you have Toriko which used a lot of fantasy fruits that are mixed of what we have, like it’s not that difficult to imagine what a caramel melon would taste like.
At the end of the day, I don’t think fantasy cooking is that much worse, but the authors do need a lot more creativity to pull it off.
To finish, here is an analogy, It’s kind of like fixtional sports manga (although not 1 to 1) most people wouldn’t seek out reqding sport manga based on rules that were though by the author but that no one had ever played, those sports tend to have inconsistencies on rules, sometimes they aren’t fun to watch, they can be unintuitive, etc. Those are inherent problems that these works face that normal sports manga don’t because of the simple fact that sports have been developed across many years by a lot of people into something people enjoy, also the familiarity is an aspect that boosts enjoyment. But those being inherent problems doesn’t mean fictional sports in media are bad. They do require a lot of creativity and thought, especially if the author is gonna focus on them or else you get a shitty sports like quidditch.
PD: love that more manga discussions are creeping into the community, I lowkey hate [DISC] posts being so frequent, although I fo understand the necessity to keep things alive, but most people aren’t keeping up with more than a few manga and that makes it so there isn’t much discussion to be had unless the community grows to a large enough point that you have people reading everything.
Valid points. I was also thinking why the something like magic doesn’t bother me the same way. It doesn’t exist in the real world so I can never experience them, but I enjoy watching a hero blast off magic way more than I would if he made some exceptional dish from monster meat. I think some of it comes down to personal preference. Cooking/food just isn’t as interesting to me when it doesn’t use real world ingredients.
I also read Toriko and I thought it was an ok fighting manga, but I did not enjoy the food prep/eating parts. I just want them to go back to fighting lol
No matter how much you describe the taste to me, I don’t know and will never know how a dragon or orc taste.
You think that’s bad? I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life and I’ve no idea what any meat tastes like. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying cooking in Anime And Manga.
Campfire Cooking for the most part seems to provide pretty solid “this tastes like this other thing” examples, like orc meat tasting like high quality pork for example. You don’t have to really stretch your imagination much for those dishes most of the time, since the flavor is usually “the best version of X meat you’ve ever had”.
Also you can pry my Isekai Izakaya “Nobu” from my cold, dead hands.
I feel like the reason why plenty isekai series add cooking is simply because it’s relatable to a lot of people, so it’s a decent filler. There are some cases where the manga revolves around food, but even if they’ll never taste dragon meat or similar, well, the author won’t either! So you’re free to interpret it as you like. And readers can still try the recipes out, using RL ingredients, just to get a feel. (That’s what I did with banbanji, from Campfire Cooking. I definitively didn’t use rock bird, just some plain chicken.)
Then there are cases like Cooking with Wild Game, where the food itself doesn’t matter that much; what matters is how the characters use it to relate to each other. Like Asuta and Ai doing swapping the gender roles of the forest people, as she hunts and he cooks. Or how his cooking is lifting up the forest people, things like this.
I strongly dislike cooking fillers in isekai mangas lol. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but it’s typically when the group camps out while traveling to a new town. The protagonist would make some modern dish with isekai ingredients and blow everyone elses’ minds. It’s an overused troupe that rarely adds anything of value to the story. There are other isekai troupes that I’m tired of (e.g. pages of random skills) but cooking fillers is a pretty bad and frequent offender.
Isekai Meikyuu de Harem Wo has a good example of cooking filler. All that Michio prepares is fantasy equivalents of RL dishes, just so the girls say “sugoi” and “oishiiiii”. And it goes as you say, it doesn’t add to the story.
I hear ya on the other overused tropes. Kumo Desu Ga is perhaps the only one that I’ve seen that actually uses the “pages of random skills” shtick for anything interesting (in the fight against Araba, to show that both were overpowered monsters - you aren’t really supposed to read the full pages for either Araba or Kumo, I think).
And since we’re speaking about overused tropes: 90% of the romance tropes in isekai (actually manga in general) feel overused and stale. Like:
- [MC bumps on girl, and both fall on the floor]
- [MC] Are you OK?
- [Girl] Yes, I am. Wow you’re so nice, I’m in love with you!
- [MC keeps running away while the girl keeps chasing him]
For me it’s the biggest offender, because I love well-made romance. At least Cooking with Wild Game is handling this decently enough - it’s a slow burner but you do see some progress between Asuta and Ai.
I always thought of cooking in cooking manga more as a plot device, rather than something specific to eat. Although Tis Time for Torture, Princess certainly made me prepare a few dishes.
Still, what about Gensou Gourmet? It goes in an entirely opposite direction - each dish tries to be as far away from a normal/realistic/earth dish as possible. There’s no pretense of orc meat being a pork substitute at all. I feel like it really helps to develop the fantasy world atmosphere. Also Sylphin is a treasure.
Tis Time for Torture rarely uses fantasy ingredients so it’s fine to me. This one I’ve been following.
Gensou Gourmet is the type that I have no interest in. Only read 2 chapters but the story or characters did not appeal to me. The food aspect I cannot relate to.
Just started reading Dungeon Meshi and I think they did it right. Instead of constantly focusing on the dish itself, it’s more about the adventure and how food/cooking help them along the way.
I agree, to some degree. I do enjoy reading about people bonding over dinner, but the specifics of the recipes does not interest me at all. Collection of ingredients can be fun though, as well as unlocking new ‘technologies’ for better cooking, or getting buffs from the cool meals.
Yeah, people describing tastes that don’t exist isn’t great, but what bugs me more is that somehow the most dangerous monsters generally taste the best. Are you telling me that these tough-as-shit orc and dragon muscles are gonna taste better than those cows bred specifically for the purpose of optimizing tastiness? I’m not buying it.
