Food Wars! The Second Plate

Episode 2

I was willing to overlook the rushed feeling of the first episode, but now that the second has also felt that way, I'm beginning to worry that too much is going to be crammed in due to episode count constraints. As with last week's premiere, this second episode spends not quite enough time on the actual cooking in an attempt to give us both food, emotional setup, explanatory flashbacks, and the eating of the dishes. It isn't bad, and it does give us one of Food Wars!'s trademark killer cliffhangers, but it doesn't quite measure up to the pacing of season one.

Despite these issues, the cook-off between Megumi and Ryo is still a good one. Their theme is ramen, and being from seaside towns, both stick with what they know – fish. Megumi, however, has an advantage in that Ryo chose the style of ramen noodle he wanted right in front of her, and from its thickness and shape she can make an educated guess as to what style of broth he'll be making. As it turns out, she's spot-on, so even though they've both decided to go with seafood, Megumi's choice is deliberately opposite to Ryo's.

The best part of this episode is that it showcases how Megumi has grown as a character. Last season, she would have been extremely timid, panicking over the strength of her opponent and afraid to use a seafood stock because of her certainty that she would prove inferior to the egotistical chef. Now she's learned to distance herself from the proceedings enough to think calmly and recognize her own strengths. This Megumi is still timid because that's her natural default state, but she's also able to tune out the world around her and just focus on what she's doing. She credits Soma with this transformation, and he did help, but the strength had to come from Megumi to begin with, and we can see that when she interrupts the judges to tell them to add some paste to their broth. Last season's Megumi would never have been able to do that, much less tell Ryo that she disagrees with his cooking philosophy.

There is an element of that philosophy to their cooking battle. Ryo sees cooking as a battleground where other chefs must be made to yield, where Megumi believes that food preparation is about the end result and that cooperation is necessary, both between chefs and with the customer. Ryo runs his kitchen like a tyrant, the Captain Bligh of food preparation. It may produce results, but it doesn't endear him to others, and as we've seen with Soma, that's not always the way to keep plates moving. What Soma has really done for Megumi is allowed to her understand that competition doesn't have to be mean, putting the two of them into direct opposition with Ryo and Alice.

We don't learn who the winner is this week (I have my hopes), which was thankfully indicates that perhaps a little more time will be devoted to each cook-off as we all get back into the groove of the show, animators included. There are a few off moments in the art this week, the most egregious being the foodgasm when Megumi tries Ryo's ramen – it took me a minute to realize that I was looking at her butt, which was bizarrely uneven and only got worse when it began to…wriggle? Undulate? I'm not quite sure what the right word is for such unnatural movement. Poor Megumi also had a few off-model face moments, as did Alice in her few appearances. Also, the crowd scenes looked more like a close-up of tire treads than rows of people, which kept throwing me.

Food Wars! is definitely making a bigger deal out of the dueling cooking philosophies of the Snob Squad and the kids at Polaris. The very fact that Megumi has a cheer section (to the Aldini brothers' bemusement), while Ryo just has a gloating Alice illustrates this as well as any dialogue. Hopefully the series starts to slow things down a bit so that we can see this more clearly while reveling in the glory of everyone's food.

Rating: B+

Food Wars! The Second Plate is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.