Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma



Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma is a 2012 cooking shonen manga. The main character is teenage chef Yukihara Souma, who's gone from working in a small special-of-the-day Japanese restaurant with his (unbeknownst to him) famous father to attending the largest and most prestigious cooking school in Japan (and thus the world, since this is a manga after all).

Written by Yūto Tsukuda. Illustrated by Shun Saeki. Published on Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump.


 * Adorkable:
 * Takumi. While he has pretty-boy looks and delivers a lot of lines typical of The Rival, he keeps stumbling over his attempts to be cool in endearing ways. After one of his early encounters with Souma, he declares "We'll meet again one day, Yukihara Souma!"... only to have to spend the entire bus ride back sitting next to Souma, blushing and fidgeting over his dramatic parting line being thwarted.
 * Sort of desconstructed with Megumi. Being clumsy makes her adorable but it's also a flaw she must overcome to not be kicked out of cooking school.
 * Alpha Bitch: Nakiri Erina. Kind of odd for the character who's rather obviously meant to be the hero's eventual love interest. But she's definitely rude, judgmental, a Hypocrite, dishonest, arrogant, disdainful of "commoners", and smug. She's also adored by the school population and came in second in the reader popularity poll, but the latter is probably because of another trope.
 * Ambiguously Gay: Chapter 2. When Erina offers Hinako a dish she made, roses suddenly appears on the panel where she is touching the girl, implying some kind...of affection from Hinako'a part.
 * Blessed with Suck: How Erina's grandfather see her special ability of "God's Tongue". It ensures that almost all food she tastes will taste awful to her.
 * Boring Invincible Hero: Averted. Souma not only loses one of his earliest matches (though it's technically a tie, but only because several of the judges were very generous due to his team being students going up against an accomplished professional chef), but he's lost almost 500 cooking competitions to his father. His confidence and drive are actually built on failure rather than cruising through life succeeding at everything he tries.
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: In Chapter 306, Asahi has a flashback about several characters never seen before that have apparently taught him about cooking techniques of the five great cuisines (france, mexican, italian, turkish, and chinese). Mito, Yuuki and Daigo suddenly yell after that is over complaining about how nobody should care about him mentioning these characters because nobody saw them before, and that Asahi behaves as the protagonist of the story.
 * Brother-Sister Incest:Barely averted. Chapter 315.2 reveals.
 * Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: While he was never shown to be a moron, per se, Isami Aldini is introduced as Takumi Aldini's tagalong fat brother and Sidekick. When he shows up for the Autumn Election, he's lost a ton of weight (which he apparently does every summer due to heat exhaustion) and gotten quite serious about showing his brother just what a great chef he is.
 * Dramatic Irony: Erina, Rich Bitch that she is, absolutely refuses to acknowledge Souma's talent because he's a "commoner" who doesn't come from a pedigree she considers worthy enough. Except we the audience know that Souma is the son of the man she has Hero Worship and Puppy Love feelings towards, and is in fact one of the finest chefs in the world.
 * Estrogen Brigade Bait: Never let it be said that the fanservice in this manga is one-sided. While some of the male near-nudity is obviously meant as Fan Disservice, there's also plenty of shots of very attractive men wearing little to nothing.
 * Fan Disservice: Some of the food reactions are this and Fanservice simultaneously.
 * Food Porn: Very close to literal. Remember that scene from The Matrix Reloaded where the woman eats some "special" dessert? Tsukuda Yuuto and Saeki Shun apparently figured they could use that one thing as a concept for a whole series.
 * Informed Ability: Nakiri Alice's molecular gastronomy curry, which is declared to be so good that it's a whole new level of cooking, period... but also incapable of being described in words, even by Japan's best and most experienced food critic writer. But it's definitely super good.
 * Jerkass:
 * Erina is too rude with people that fail to suit her tastes.
 * Asahi's mother, who physically abused her own son. She was apparently so rude and stubborn even her own friends, when mourning her, comments about how she had so many flaws.
 * Left Hanging :
 * Chapter 315..
 * Chapter 315.3 is only a little better about it..
 * Ms. Fanservice: Nikumi's preferred style of dress is tiny bikini tops and very short shorts. If she's feeling a bit more formal she may put on blouse (but leave it unbuttoned and tie it under her chest) and switch to a miniskirt. In a side comic shortly after her introduction, it's shown that she'd like to dress a bit more conservatively, but dressing skimpily actually gives her more confidence and lets her project a stronger personality... in other words, she's too shy to be modest.
 * Mr. Fanservice: The answer to "What is Isshiki wearing?" is always "How little can Isshiki currently get away with wearing?"
 * Perpetual Frowner: Roland Chapelle is said to never smile. Souma finally mamanges to make food that makes him smile of happiness in Chapter 5.
 * Regal Ringlets: A unnamed female character in chapter 4 have this hairstyle.
 * The Dreaded: Cooking students cower in fear at vision of Erina's grandfather, solely because he is such a powerful figure in the japanese cooking industry.
 * The Faceless: We don't see Souma's mother's eyes on the family picture.
 * The Rival: Takumi Aldini, who agrees with Souma's assessment that most Tootsuki students are a bunch of smug rich kids who have never done a day's real work in a kitchen for normal customers... because, like Souma, he's been a working chef since he was a child. He becomes quite upset when it looks like Souma might have become rivals with Akira instead.
 * Science Hero: Souma, despite an appearance that should put him squarely in the Action Hero box. He's extremely knowledgeable of the chemical reactions that take place when cooking even before he comes to Tootsuki. Where some cooking manga are content to have their hero be an idiot who just stumbles across favorable cooking reactions through chance or trial and error or natural talent, Souma will carefully and intelligently dissect why something works, more along the lines of, say, Alton Brown.
 * Serious Business: Cooking, as is to be expected of this sort of manga. One chapter has the characters take a break and play ping-pong... only to treat it as seriously as they usually treat cooking, prompting the narration boxes to remind the reader that this is a cooking manga, honest.
 * Shout Out: The Akira vs. Kurokiba match contains a fairly extended reference to Yu-Gi-Oh. (Well, all collectible card games, but the style of laying down cards and dramatically posing is all Yu-Gi-Oh anime.)
 * Straw Man Has a Point: An in-universe version occurs where various of the characters admit that Erina's father's methods and system do have various merits, in that they'll ultimately produce more high-quality chefs and allow more people to learn and have jobs... but they're not willing to sacrifice creativity, individuality, and just plain having fun with cooking for the sake of his "elites and copiers" methodology.
 * The Dreaded: Cooking students cower in fear at vision of Erina's grandfather, solely because he is such a powerful figure in the japanese cooking industry.
 * Tsundere: Unlike most manga, this one doesn't settle for just one. There's Erina, Nikumi, Alice has shades of this towards her own assistant, Jun acts like this at any mention of Souma's father, Miyoko even acts this way towards Megumi a bit, and then there's Takumi's rivalry with Souma...
 * Unreliable Narrator: Asahi, big time. Almost immediately after his flashbacks about his supposed mentors end, Sarge reveals they weren't his mentors, but rather people who Asahi defeated and assimilated their cooking techniques on his own.
 * Well Intentioned Extremist: Erina's father tries to portray himself as this, claiming he just wants to elevate cuisine and eliminate the cutthroat nature of Tootsuki in favor of a more "fair" system. Those that know him best, however, all think his intentions are more purely malevolent. Whether he himself buys his own hype is not entirely clear.
 * Who Wears Short Shorts: Ikumi Mito in her cooking attire.
 * Zettai Ryouiki: Erina wears a grade B in her school uniform.