Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma

Episode 4

It's amazing how certain foods can transcend cultures. This week's episode of Food Wars! opens with Soma finding his way to the (creepy) dorm where he'll be living only to be faced with an impromptu cooking challenge, which frankly he should be expecting at this point. Not having brought his own ingredients, he's forced to make do with whatever's in the Polar Star Dorm kitchen. Naturally he whips up something spectacular – in this case, a Japanese rendition of one my grandmother's dishes, salmon patties. Soma calls his mackerel burgers, but apart from the fish and the sides, it's step-by-step my family's recipe. This gave this episode the feeling that I suspect Japanese viewers got from Soma's preparation of the egg and rice dish for Erina – warm, comfortable familiarity. It made the point that food is about more than simple consumption; it's about emotions and feeding the soul as well as the stomach, something which for me had not previously really solidified. Underneath the insane amounts of competition and the fanservice, Food Wars! does have a point to make about food.

This fourth episode largely serves to introduce the other students Soma will be living with at the Polar Star Dorm, a collection of wacky misfits who all have some sort of quirk...or happen to be Megumi Tadokoro, the unfortunate girl who had more of Soma's nasty squid experiments fed to her last week. While the cast is generally amusing, this episode felt much more cliché-ridden than the first three, with standard jokes about walking in on someone in the bath and a group of students we've met before in a show about producing food rather than cooking it, Silver Spoon. There are some interesting things about them, such as Isshiki's habit of being naked under an apron or contacting his dorm-mates in creepy ways or the fact that Yuki names her livestock when she's planning to eat them, which is generally a no-no among farmers I know. But ultimately Soma meeting a group of individuals with different cooking specialties isn't quite enough to carry the episode, and it ends up dragging in the middle.

Happily it is largely Erina-free, and it also mixes up its foodgasm game, marking a transition in the way people's enjoyment of exquisite dishes is portrayed, which should make some viewers happy. When the dorm matron tries Soma's mackerel burger, she's transported to a memory of her youth (albeit a sexy one) rather than orgasming, and when Soma tries Isshiki's food, he's simply transported naked to a field of flowers. The points are made without the exhibitionism or sexism, and it works a little better to get it across, I felt, because we aren't distracted by the excessive fanservice of the moment – definitely a case of less is more. And it isn't as if there isn't any fanservice at all in the episode, as we actually see a little more nudity than we've been having. It's just a shame that there isn't more plot to the show, because it seems to be visually heading in a positive direction.

Right now my main issue with Food Wars!, this episode included, is that it is exhausting to watch. The tension is so consistently high with every person Soma meets challenging him to a cooking competition of some kind (there are two in this episode, with the second carrying over into next week) that it feels as if we rarely get a moment to breathe...and then when we do, the show isn't quite sure how to handle the down time and we get either lengthy introductions or Soma grumbling about his situation. It's a mix of too much and not enough in terms of plot, and I do hope that it evens out as things move forward. At any rate, exhausting or not, Food Wars! still makes cooking look like an event instead of a chore and is absolutely mouthwatering in its depiction of food. That may make everything else worth it.

Rating: B-

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman is ANN's senior manga critic.