Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma

Episode 5

We have a title! In this episode, Isshiki explains to an over-eager Soma the finer details of challenging other aspiring chefs to a cook-off: a shokugeki, hence the series title, Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Sōma. This explanation comes on the heels of the boys' impromptu cooking battle the night before, when Isshiki wowed Soma with his delicate spring fish dish, causing Soma to retaliate this week with another deceptively simple offering. It's clear that Soma's strength is not only his cooking ability, but also the power of misdirection he unwittingly employs. Everyone at Totsuki is so snobbish that they consistently underestimate Soma's apparently pedestrian dishes, turning up their noses at “diner fare for the masses” based on appearance alone before he blows them out of the water with sophisticated techniques and flavors. While it may get old later, right now it's still a satisfying experience to watch him show them that food doesn't have to look fancy or innovative to be amazing. It also suggests that there's a lot more to Mr. Yukihira senior than his son knows about, because after all, Soma's stock answer to “how did you know how to use _____ fancy technique” is “my dad taught me.”

The explanation of the shokugeki system also serves as important plot, as Isshiki's casual conversation gets a much more serious demonstration in the second half of the episode. Erina's back and up to her same old tricks as she plans to demolish a club building to build herself yet another private cooking wing. While she remains difficult to like, we do see at the end of the episode that she's not actually doing this just to get more ovens to herself – she really believes in Totsuki's superiority and she's trying to weed out clubs that she feels serve no purpose and are bringing the academy down. If she has an immature way of going about it, that's probably because she's a teenage girl, something easy to forget with all of her power and her physical appearance.

While the art has greatly toned down its sexual overtones by this point – nudity is much less sexualized in the current round of foodgasms – Erina herself still suffers from some issues, particularly when she's wearing her chef's uniform. In all fairness, the way her crotch is drawn is improved from the original manga art, but her breasts look like they're attached to her jacket rather than her chest, and if she took it off, they'd go away too. Less buxom female characters look much better (at least so far – we haven't gotten a clear shot of next episode's meat-loving character), and generally speaking the art is much more comfortable with the male characters, who all have different builds and, excessive muscles aside, look a bit more anatomically possible. Unfortunately there really isn't a lot of actual animation to look at, with most of this episode feeling as if it is comprised of shots of people sitting or standing and the most movement really being putting a bite of food in their mouths. Even Erina's hair flip is mostly shown by her hand rising, then a still of her hair flowing out. Not that watching fish fry would be all that thrilling, and cooking really does make up at least half of the scenes, but it would be nice to see a little more human movement.

As I said last week, Food Wars! really seems to move from one tense cooking competition to another, with very little breathing room in-between – even when characters are eating, it's a single bite after someone has completed a challenge. This makes for very tense viewing, which is fine some of the time, but too much of it can be, well, too much. Food Wars! is treading dangerously close to that line. Hopefully we'll get a little more character-developing downtime as the show goes on. Shouldn't food be savored and not just used to compete? I feel as if Food Wars! needs to remember that, at least a little bit...title notwithstanding.

Rating: B-

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

Rebecca Silverman is ANN's senior manga critic.