In the past few years there’s been perhaps a dozen food-oriented anime, from the full length, long running Food Wars, to the single-season short Wakakozake. Only two, however are devoted to food in other worlds — isekai tabemono, if you will. With this increment of Anime Double Feature, I’ll be looking at those two — isekai shokudo and isekai izakaya. Let’s take that first one first.
Restaurant To Another World
異世界食堂
Isekai shokudo, which translates as Otherworld Restaurant (and no, I don’t know why the translators thought they needed the to), is a 2017 full-length anime, which started as a light novel series in 2015 and reappeared as a manga just as the anime aired. The fact that the manga and the LN were recently made available in the US means I can start off with a slight digression, comparing and contrasting the three different modes.
The Media
Looking at all three presentations highlights the different ways the three different media present the same information.
Light novel:
Reading is different. It engages different parts of the brain, essentially requiring that you decode marks on paper and use them to draw pictures in your mind. Books, therefore, are information dense, and since everything has to be described in words, any single passage can leave a lot of information out. In our case, some of it, but not all, appears in earlier or later paragraphs of the LN.
Light Novel
Of course, part of that is the fault of the Light Novel format. LN’s are not intended to be long, information-dense, documents. They don’t give you the minute character descriptions of a Charles Dickens, nor the convoluted lists of a Neal Stephenson.
Manga:
Manga mix art and reading. The information density is mostly in the artwork, which (for instance) gives us a better picture of the owner (which makes him look a little younger than one would assume from the description in the LN), and gives us a look at the chapter/episode protagonna (Sarah, named but not described in the LN).
Manga
Anime:
With color and sound and movement (and camera cuts), the anime gives one a much better feel for the restaurant and the people. The owner doesn’t appear quite as old as he sounds in the LN (less of a paunch), nor as handsome as he does in the manga, and Sarah is not as cartoony looking. Of course, for many of us, there is still a lot of reading involved, because we are dependent on subtitles. Those with a higher tolerance for the cartoon voices of the dubbing cast don’t have that problem.
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- Anime
The Story
The restaurant’s actual name is Nekoya, after the owner. It’s a small restaurant in a Tokyo business district, but once a week, on Saturday, it closes its Tokyo-facing door, and a magical door opens into a different world. There’s one door on the Tokyo side, and many doors on the isekai side. Towards the end we get the impression that the door was a magical item created by one of the great magicians of the isekai, who took refuge on Earth after the Demon Wars.
As is typical whenever Japanese food is introduced to a foreign culture/country/universe, the locals go wild over it (I still plan to write a story one day, where they think nigiri are bland and shoyu is too salty). Here, all the visitors come from the same world, even if they entered the door in different locations. So, we have an adventuratrix in a mine, a soldier in an abandoned cabin, a merchant in his storage room, an elf in an elven forest, etc. The only outsider is the dragon lady from their shattered moon. None of the guests can read Japanese, but they can all speak it as soon as they enter.
The episodes are pretty much cookie-cutter copies, with two meals highlighted per episode. So the sequence is: Local person comes across the door in an unexpected place; Local person goes through and finds themselves in the restaurant; Local person orders a dish off the menu (written in Eastern Continental); Local person describes meal in terms normally reserved for use by professional culinary reviewers giving a five star review. Unlike some of the other anime, we don’t get any real recipes, just partial lists of ingredients.
Later episodes branch out, a little, and we see interactions between the guests and learn some of their backstories. There is some crossover activity, as when the demon girl Aletta gets a job working for Sarah. Unlike Isekai Izakaya, however, there’s no significant outside plotline running.
Isekai Shokudo is pleasant enough, but not particularly memorable. The reasons for each meal choice can feel a little forced because the obvious goal is to come up with 24 different dishes. So, the elf can’t eat meat of any kind (tofu steak), and the perfect meal to give a gladiator strength is katsudon. Aletta doesn’t like potatoes until the Owner shows her how to steam them with butter, not taking into account that potatoes are all she eats on the six days of the week the restaurant isn’t opened, so she’s probably sick of them. The LN in particular gets boring fairly fast because it’s not much more than a constant refrain of and then what did they eat? The manga and the anime at least have pictures to look at, which gives you an idea of what the characters and, more importantly, the food, looks like. The anime is not one you’d want to marathon, and by extension, the LN and the manga are better off when sampled, infrequently. The animation is low budget, but not as low as some. It’s best with calm indoor scenes, and breaks down when portraying action. I did like the soundtrack.
Otherworld Bar “Nobu”
異世界居酒屋「のぶ」
Isekai Izakaya “Nobu” translates as Otherworld Bar “Nobu”, an izakaya being a small bar (similar to a Spanish tapas bar and typically consisting of one counter, with a few tables along the opposite wall), catering to salarymen on their way home in the late evening. The franchise started as a LN in 2014, with a manga version appearing the next year. The anime aired in the US in the Spring of 2018. Unlike Shokudo, izakaya is a half-length program, running 15min per episode. Actually, there’s only about ten minutes of anime programming, because each episode ends with Nobu Plus, a five minute live action commentary by a chef, who cooks up the meal shown in the anime part.
The Story
Izakaya Nobu (after the owner) is a little bigger than average, with more tables and a somewhat wider range of bar food. Whereas Shokudo has a door that opens to many places and then disappears, Izakaya Nobu is a permanent establishment, with a back door opening to an alley in Kyoto, and a front door that opens into a back street in the isekai. It exists because the waitress prayed for the success of the business at the Inari shrine in Kyoto, and the goddess granted her wish by creating the link to the isekai.
Light Novel:
I have not been able to find the LN for sale in English, but there are a couple of on-line translations.
Amateur translations sound amateur
Manga:
I own a copy of the manga, but not in an e-format, so here’s another from on-line.
Anime:
For some reason Crunchyroll decided to leave a header bar up throughout each episode.
There are some parallels with Shokudo. People can’t read Japanese, but are able to speak it, or maybe the owner and the waitress can automagically speak isekaian. Unlike Shokudo, Nobu has a couple of actual plot arcs, despite its limited episode length. Many of the episodes are one-shot and food related but, for example, there’s a set that deal with attempts to force the sale of the restaurant.
What sets Nobu apart is the five minute live action trailer, that has a Japanese chef cooking dishes inspired by the program. So, for example, Episode 1 features a potato/daikon oden dish. In the trailer, Chef Kijima Ryuta puts his own spin on the leftovers, producing a mashed potato salad and a daikon ‘steak’ appetizer. It would be much better if it didn’t have Suzuko Mimori, the seiyu for waitress Shinobu doing a color commentary — Oh wow! … That looks great! … Very interesting!– over top of his presentation.
Looks good, chef!
Both of these programs are good in their own way, although both tend to overplay the ‘Japanese food is the best in the Universe’ trope.
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