Iron Wok Jan!

Episode 5

This is great television no matter how you slice it. First, we get the tournament artifice. It's a tried and true trope because doggone it, it works. Jan and Kiriko get to face off against a bunch of other challenger chefs roughly of their own skill level in a large arena full of judges, onlookers, and their peers. In one sense it's nothing you haven't seen before, while on the other hand… dude, who cares? It's going to be great.

And great it is. We get a nice introduction of a few other chefs like Sawada who represent a gamut of different approaches to cooking. My favorite character note(s) in all this is how each chef tries to boil down cooking to one essential factor (fire, bear paws, etc) to explain their style and try to flex their particular experience. It's simple, but it works, and it's not functionally any different than having fighters in an action series talk about their approach to combat. And in the end this is combat, perhaps more real than any other - the battle for taste and preference, reputation in the culinary world. The stakes are almost entirely personal, and that's what makes it so immediately gripping.

The star, of course, is Akiyama Jan being a complete mad lad. I seldom manage to clock plot points in works of fiction because I get caught up in the moment, but this is one time where I knew the outcome as soon as Jan picked up the mushrooms. It's genuinely hilarious that not only did he drug the judges, but he ends up so pleased with himself that he is cackling over their fallen bodies during the judging.

Akiyama Jan's actions are so egregious that they required the anime team to step in and explain themselves. The fact that they decided to keep it in was a bold choice (and one I'm glad they made). I'm also glad that they explained their reasoning, particularly the legal dimension that this was technically allowed at the time of writing. Iron Wok Jan! is the kind of series where the culinary arts are so extreme that their very depiction requires the production team to break the fourth wall and explain themselves. If that's not the sign of a show with the juice, then I don't know what is.

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Iron Wok Jan! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.