FOOD WARS! (2015) ADAPTED FROM THE MANGA OF THE SAME NAME BY YUTO TSUKUDA AND SHUN SAEKI. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I really enjoyed this super-fun animé series about an exclusive Academy for wanna-bee top chefs. Set in Tokyo, the lead character is a young fella of fifteen called Soma, who apparently held his first chef's knife when he was only a nipper of three.
For twelve years after that, he helped out his Dad in the family diner-slash-restaurant, where they serve great Japanese food cheaply enough. Dad is a super-chef and kinda cute with his long hair, manly chin and ripped body. Gotta bit of a douchebag chin-beard, though.
Soma's dream is to be as good a chef as his talented Pops and, although he's not quite there yet, he's pretty damned good for a kid of fifteen. The restaurant is having problems, though. Nothing to do with the quality of the food or anything like that, however.
Local bigwig businessmen are trying to force the little diner to sell up to them. It's easier for many of the little businesses and eateries in the area to take the pay-out in order to avoid hassle from the bigwigs, a delegation of whom calls to Soma's restaurant with their proposition. Soma tells 'em to get lost, but they refuse to budge.
Even though they've trashed the little diner, Soma offers to make the head lady bigwig a dish so delicious that she'll give up the ghost and bugger off. The next scenes are hilarious. Soma's dish is so mouth-wateringly tempting and tantalising that the busty, leggy business-woman in a ridiculously tight business-suit actually gets a sort of sexual release out of it.
Her clothes actually fly off of her body in a metaphorical explosion of delightful flavour and naked angels tickle her enormous bare breasts and buttocks with feathers while she squeals and moans orgasmically. It's so funny. This theme of peoples' clothes bursting off of them, Incredible Hulk-style, when they taste scrummy nosh is repeated many times throughout the series.
They don't, however, retrieve a pair of slacks Hulk-style from a local person's clothesline in their back garden and pin a couple-a-bucks to the washing-line in payment. Neither do they then walk sadly away with their tattered knapsack on their back to the accompaniment of the sad-walking-away-music from TV series THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Now that I think about it, that really only ever happened in THE INCREDIBLE HULK, so to expect it elsewhere as well is only to invite certain disappointment.
I must say, though, to get back to the food, that I think I've had a few dishes that yummy myself in my time. I've often compared the sensation of biting into a nice big slice of Black Forest Gateaux to great sex, and I stand by that. I'd even lie down by it too, har-de-har-har...!
What happens next is sad. Even though Soma's gone out of his way to impress the bigwigs, Dad comes home that same day and announces that he's throwing in the towel for a bit. He's going off to cook in a New York Hotel, but what about Soma, his fifteen-year-old son?
Well, that's the thing. Soma is being sent to a really fancy-pants chef school, namely the Tohtsuki Fine Dining Academy in Tokyo, a school so exclusive, exacting and demanding that it only ever allows about ten per cent of its students to graduate. Cor blimey! That ain't half strict, Mum...
Soma has to pass an entrance exam on arrival at the school. His fellow applicants all run like the dickens when they find out who's judging their entries. It's none other than Miss Erina Nakiri, a very special student of the Academy...
Erina certainly is all that, with her waist-length blonde hair, her endlessly long legs, enormous tits and tiny waist. A lot of the girls in Japanese animé look like this, as I'm sure you've noticed. Erina has more going for her than just her stunning good looks, however.
At just fifteen years old, she's already a member of 'the Ten,' the school council and the highest-up decision-making body at the Academy. Also, her grandfather, who's known as 'the demon of food' or head of the 'food mafia' because of his place at the forefront of the Japanese food industry, is the director of the Academy.
Erina herself is rather hilariously known as 'the God Tongue' because of her expertly-discerning palate, 'the greatest palate known to man.' She's hired as a taste-tester by famous restaurants all over Japan. There's a funny flashback to her baby-days in which she's seen
rejecting her mother's breast-milk because 'this lacks 'flavour...!' Talk about fussy, haha.
Soma isn't fazed in the slightest. The sheer deliciousness of his egg-and-rice dish (a Number Eight from their little diner back home!) causes the clothes to fly off of Erina's body, leaving her naked and feeling like she's 'being lovingly stroked by angels' wings.' That's got to be some egg-and-rice dish...
Even if Soma manages to please the uppity fusspot who sees him as a commoner from a 'low-end diner,' there are still two more culinary dragons he has to slay: Laurent Chappelle, the tutor notoriously known as 'the Chef who doesn't smile,' and the house-mother of his dorm, the positively fearsome Fumio Daimido who looks a bit like Medusa on crack. How do you think he does...?
Soma gets to see his first naked woman when he accidentally interrupts the girls' bath-time in the dorm on his first day. The girl in question is Megumi, a student whose parents, family and seemingly the whole of her home village all want her to do well in the Academy. They even give her an Academic Achievement charm when she sets off for the Academy. No pressure, then...!
She's getting low grades, however, but has already had her bacon saved once by Soma, so doubtless a strong friendship will develop there, or even a romance. That's if he's not foolish enough to start crushing on Miss Queen Bitch, Erina...
There'll definitely be romance coming somewhere down the line. After all, Soma's Dad has already stated that the secret to being a good chef is having the right woman to cook for. And there's me thinking that the secret to good cheffing was an ability to cook really well. Silly me. I really must flagellate myself for that in the style of Dobby, the seriously masochistic house-elf from HARRY POTTER.
Soma's roast beef dish, tenderised by honey, makes Megumi feel like she's bathing naked in honey herself. Of course she's naked, the film-makers whip the threads off the characters every few seconds. So much nudity, like most of Japanese animé, haha.
There are even naked males, though, to even up the nudity score a bit. What about Naked Apron Guy? I'm sure that there'll be lots of lady viewers who fancy being waited on hand-and-foot and cooked for by a buff, muscular He-Man who's stark-nekkid but for an apron...
There's one more thing you must watch out for. Soma's got a funny little trick of giving pieces of squid to people to eat as a joke, squid he's slathered in peanut butter or honey or something vile like that. Not vile as and of itself of course, but vile when you slather it on a bit of squid, see?
The shocked recipients feel like they're being violated by the squid itself, being 'raped' even between their legs by its wandering tentacles. The Japanese apparently have a huge big thing for tentacles and, um, tentacle sex, tee-hee-hee. Again, it's the film-makers' way of sexing up their animé series. Sexing up animé? It's a bit like bringing coals to Newcastle, is that...
FOOD WARS: SERIES ONE is available to buy now from MANGA UK.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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