The war between Azami and the Resistance is on as the First Bout of the Régiment de Cuisine is underway. Can Soma somehow manage to beat Nene at her own specialty?
Creative Staff:
Story: Yuto Tsukuda
Art: Shun Saeki
Contributor: Yuki Morisaki
Translation: Adrienne Beck
Production: James Gaubatz, Mara Coman (Touch up art and lettering), Alice Lewis (design), Jennifer LeBlanc (editor)
What They Say:
The Régiment de Cuisine has begun, and with the weight of their expelled classmates’ hopes on their shoulders, Soma, Isshiki, and Megishima step up to the plate first for the resistance! In true Soma style, Soma picks soba as his card’s theme ingredient, the very ingredient his opponent, Nene Kinokuni, specializes in! How can this very unlucky first-year possibly win now?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While it’s going to be annoying to have to wait for each volume as it comes, you might as well get comfortable with the setting here at the team shokugeki on Rebun Island. We’re going to be here a while. That’s not to say that this is a long and boring affair. Yuto Tsukuda compensates for the fact that we’re probably going to be seeing a lot of cooking contests by keeping the pace pretty fast. In the First Bout, which already started in the previous volume, we saw that Soma drew the short straw, so to speak, with the choice of Soba as the theme for his contest with Nene Kinokuni, the Council Member who specializes in soba.
Now, the cynical will probably think in advance “Of course Soma will win, as he’s the protagonist, this is pretty much settled, and I know there are several more volumes beyond this one.” And the cynic would be correct in that assumption. But…so what? In almost every shounen manga that is built upon a titular (usually male) hero fighting an uphill battle to be the best/get revenge for his family/win the top prize/etc., we all already know what the “final” outcome of the story will be: the hero will make his way to the top. It’s not that it happens quickly (if anything, the author wants it to happen as slowly and leisurely as possible, hoping the audience sticks around and keeps buying copies of the weekly/monthly magazine and his own collected volumes), but it is bound to happen…until the series ends. So, whether Soma beats Nene or not was never really a question worth pondering.
Then why bother? Because, gentle readers, those who have been following this series from the start probably continue to wonder how Soma will pull it off. That has always been a key point of the appeal: Soma is an underdog when it comes to the world of haute cuisine. He has not spent years training at a top-flight restaurant learning from the successors of Escoffier. He is not bound by the tradition.
This is a major point of Food Wars!, if we can, for a moment, pretend that a heavily comedic and at times titillating manga about unreal teenagers at an unreal school can have something serious to say about food. One of the major themes of the series is that no matter how tried, tested and true a tradition may be, there will occur a series of circumstances where it will be outdone by creativity and by a competing but possibly less prestigious tradition.
Sadly for her, Nene is our bad example in the demonstration of this point as it is made clear, at the end, that she lost to Soma not during the contest, but right at the start. It was not some kind of weird improvisation that won Soma the Soba Battle. It was his thinking ahead from the very moment he entered the contest venue. Nene concentrated on replicating the “perfect” formula for proper soba as dictated by tradition, even if she puts her own personal spin on it. That “perfect” formula was not meant to be served inside a cold, poorly-heated arena with high ceilings and lots of cold drafts. The point is that when it comes to competition, Soma’s tradition, a tradition of catering to demanding customers on a daily basis where dining conditions can change at any time, makes him superior to someone who has only learned how to do things one way.
To back up the validity of this point, we have the introduction, delayed from last time, of the judges, a trio of book-bound experts who promise “absolutely correct judging.” They are Une, Charme, and Histoire of the World Gourmet Organization, a group that rates all of the best restaurants in the world on a 3-point (star) scale and publish a book of their ratings (like a certain book with a name from a French tire company…). While quite comical in certain respects, the judges are deadly serious in their attention to food. When they pronounce Soma’s dish superior, you can see that it is not tradition that holds sway with their palates, only taste.
Satoshi Isshiki’s eel battle with Julio Shiratsu pushes a related, separate point. There, it is also a matter of a high tradition being challenged, but Isshiki tackles tradition in another manner. One of the major non-battle segments of this volume focuses on Isshiki’s backstory, where we learn that he and Nene were acquainted back in childhood (he stayed with her family for some time). During that time, Nene already showed the early signs of her later character: studious, serious, and perhaps a touch too single-minded in her loyalty to her family’s tradition. Isshiki also exhibited traits seen in his later self: talent and flightiness. But here, he employs a different loyalty, his faith in his friends and what they have tried at Polaris, to combat both Julio and Nene at the same time. Another family tradition is taken down by inventiveness, but one that was prepared well in advance.
We can draw no lessons from the third contest in the First Bout, however, as Megishima’s victory over Kaburagi is merely reported, not shown in detail.
Thus Round One ends in favor of the Resistance. That was perhaps a bit unexpected, that everything would go swimmingly for Team Erina right off the bat. But it does make one expect that Round Two will not be so favorable to the anti-Azami group. That would be natural to expect in the ebb and flow of war.
In Summary:
The First Bout sees the Resistance manage to overcome the odds of a stacked deck and talented chefs from Central. Though the contests themselves are not really the main focus, in an odd way. Tsukuda seems interested in making a couple of points about the importance of tradition—but about how being too bound to tradition can actually make you a less successful chef. Serious philosophical points about food when I just want to see foodgasms? Don’t worry, there are some of those too. The Régiment de Cuisine looks like it’s going to take a while.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A-
Package Rating: B+
Text/Translation: A-
Age Rating: Teen+ (16+)
Released By:Viz Media
Release Date: August 7th, 2018
MSRP: $9.99
