The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Iron Wok Jan!

Jan Akiyama, a cocky, arrogant teenager, wants to fulfill his grandfather's wish to defeat his arch-nemesis, Mutsuju Gobancho. When he arrives at the Gobancho restaurant, he meets his granddaughter, Kiriko Gobancho. Their rivalry is easily compared to that of Jan's and Kiriko's grandfathers, for Jan believes cooking is about competition, and Kiriko believes it is about heart.

Iron Wok Jan! is based on the manga series by Shinji Saijyo. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

At the end of this first episode of Iron Wok Jan!, a title card lets us know that this series dates to a 1995 manga and that some scenes won't fit with 2026 sensibilities. I'm sure that's true; I've been rereading Red River, after all. But I don't believe that it's a question of “dated sensibilities” that made me not love this episode. Rather, the issue is that the protagonist, Jan Akiyama, is utterly insufferable.

Now, I'm not a competitive person. But that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy competitive attitudes and plots in my media consumption. But Jan reminds me of early Erina from Food Wars!: he's completely blinded by his burning need to be The Best at Everything and it makes him truly obnoxious. Every move he makes in this episode is designed to make it clear that he's got a serious issue with someone doing something differently than he does, and Kiriko Gobancho is spot on when she calls him out on his shenanigans. He clearly did choose a specific type of organ meat in order to put her in what he believes is her place. He disagreed with her choices and methods, and he felt the need to prove her not only wrong, but himself right. Did he make an impressive dish? Absolutely. But she did, too, and just because she did it differently doesn't make her wrong. That goes for Mochizuki's fried rice, too, and Jan was needlessly antagonistic in both cases. I'd have found him obnoxious in 1995, too.

In fact, the only thing I find dated at all here is the art, and that may be less “1990s” and more “some choices were made.” I'm not just talking about the men's eyebrows, which look drawn on with a thick Sharpie, but also the fact that mouths turn down like a bulldog's and that thighs are bizarrely skinny (and not just on Kiriko), making it look like you could drive a dump truck under anyone who happens to be standing up. The permanent scowl on Jan's face works, though, because it primes you for how pissy he is – I've met fisher cats with better attitudes.

The long and the short of this is that Jan's combative attitude and the adults' willingness to let him be a brat to everyone he encounters make this a no-go for me. Having watched modern competitive cooking anime, I do find it interesting to see their roots here, but that's about all that's appealing. Unless you're already a fan of the manga or a die-hard cooking anime fan, I think you're better off rewatching Food Wars!.

I love to cook, and I love it when anime can properly capture the joy of cooking with the medium's usual brand of insane enthusiasm. It took me a minute to warm to Iron Wok Jan!, because the show's rough linework and occasionally choppy animation had me worried that it would left down the central premise of the show. The first part of the episode is all about going deep on the intricacies of a simple-seeming fried rice dish, and the closeups of the rice didn't have the meticulous level of glistening detail that a lot of food focused anime hang their hats on.

It didn't take long for me to find Iron Wok Jan!'s wavelength, though. Even though it's not the most technical work of animation around, the crew at Studio TROYCA manage to squeeze a lot of great character expressions and personality out of the more limited resources they are working with. When it comes time to both show off the cooking sequences and highlight the ridiculously overdramatic mannerisms of its main characters, Iron Wok Jan! knows how to hit hard when it counts. The scene where the titular Jan bursts into the Gobancho kitchen, tosses his order of rice into the trash, and then flings off his overcoat to reveal the kitchen whites he is wearing underneath? That's exactly the kind of absurd flair I'm looking for in a show about deranged anime chefs and the life-or-death consequences of their pursuit of culinary perfection.

Some folks find their joy in the overcomplicated and self-indulgent excess of magical battle systems like whatever the hell Jujutsu Kaisen is getting up to these days. Well, for me, that joy comes from watching incredibly intense cooking weirdos go off on the overcomplicated and self-indulgent excess of magical cooking systems. I could listen to Kiriko angrily praise Jan's unorthodox fried rice techniques all the live-long day. In fact, wouldn't you know it, I just up from this document to find my online shopping cart has suddenly been populated with some brand new woks and a specialized induction burner. Now how the hell did that happen, I wonder?

Speaking of Kiriko and Jan, I think the two of them make for a great pair of foils around which to focus this story. Jan, as we've discussed, is the arrogant upstart who knows he is better than 90 percent of the chefs on the planet, and will damn well flaunt it. Kiriko is the meticulous young woman who is hell-bent on proving that she has the knowledge and passion needed to take over the family restaurant. She and Jan will make for perfect rivals who will push each other to reach even greater culinary heights. Please, Iron Wok Jan!, feel free to order maybe fifty or a hundred more episodes in advance. I can assure you that I will be glad to clean my plate with every single course that is delivered to my table.

Iron Wok Jan! was one of those manga that I saw haunting comic book store shelves back when I was first getting into the medium, but never picked up. I completely forgot about it until the jolt of recognition that shot through me when they announced this anime adaptation. I hadn't learned anything about it in the intervening years, so I genuinely had no idea what to expect when I started this episode up.

As I watched, I realized: this is the mother of all shonen food manga. This was the starting point for Yakitate!! Japan, Food Wars!, and every other series where chefs duke it out head to head in their culinary skills. It's a brilliant setting, considering professional kitchens have a reputation as being centers of machismo and dick-waving competitiveness. Jan is the epitome of that attitude, loudly declaring that all cooking is a competition and doggedly one-upping every dish prepared by the other chefs at Gobancho. While its successors have had softer hearts, Jan is unabashedly and explicitly antagonistic to everyone around him.

The result is that he is the kind of abrasive, unlikable protagonist that is certain to put many audience members off. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, by the end I myself was rolling my eyes and telling him to shut up; I genuinely don't know if I'll be able to stomach a full anime run with him, no pun intended. Still, for the short time I spent with the episode, I was able to get swept up in the sheer energy of the production. This was made with outright reverence for the source material; even if I had any doubt, the spiel at the end about the legendary manga that came out during the troubled time of 1995 would have cleared it. They also tacked on a bold declaration that they will not be updating the content to fit modern sensibilities. While there wasn't anything particularly troubling this episode, it does create a sense of foreboding.

As expected for such a reverent adaptation, the animation was jaw-dropping. I always say that a cooking anime lives and dies on how appetizing the food looks, and Iron Wok Jan! will have you reaching for the nearest takeout menu. From the individual grains of the fried rice to Kiriko's flower-cut veal tripe, I wanted to reach into my screen and grab a bite, even though I normally won't touch organ meat. Kiriko, Jan's rival chef and foil (A girl rival? How progressive!) describes the cooking process and methods employed, so even the most uninformed audience members can appreciate what's happening.

Just, don't make my mistake: I watched Iron Wok Jan! on an empty stomach. Now I am so, so, so hungry, and this little town I'm in doesn't even have a Chinese restaurant.

I have to give this premiere credit, I don't think I've ever seen a first episode basically end with an announcer screaming in my face about how important the show I'm watching is. However, given the historical significance of this series and the time it came out, I suppose it does make sense. In a lot of ways, the original manga the series is based on sort of defined a lot of staples for competitive cooking anime and after watching this first episode, I'm not really surprised why. This first episode really did come off like it was setting the stage for an anime style version of Hell's Kitchen, right down to Jan definitively defining cooking dishes as a competition.

I love how snappy and fast paced everything was, even though I have seen a lot of the story beats in various other cooking shows before. This is situation where a series is iconic and paved the way for other similar shows to come out, but because I've seen those similar shows before, watching a progenitor like this runs the risk of feeling boring by comparison. So far at least, that does not seem to be the case cause I was far from bored with this first episode. My only real complaint is that Jan is coming off as an unlikable pain in the neck, but I believe that's supposed to be intentional. The premiere jumps POV so much that I'm still not totally sure who the main character is supposed to be. I hope it's Kiriko because she seems to have a lot more going for her in terms of skill and likability. Plus, with shows like this, I'm naturally going to be curious about how all of the different dishes are talked about. Who knows, maybe I'll actually try to make fried rice with tofu after I grab my large steel wok out of the kitchen?