Cooking is something that many people take for granted. There are so many unique combinations and ideas that go into making a single dish. Even when a meal can be prepared by anybody due to its simplicity, there are so many little details that help elevate the overall dining experience. Cooking can be seen as an art, but it is also a science. Some calculations can go into making the perfect meal, and Fermat Kitchen is a show that seems to be capitalizing on that unique perspective.

Gaku is a character who is incredibly talented at mathematics because he developed a love for it when he was little, but lost his creative spark once he made it to high school. He is still brilliant by various metrics, but like a lot of creatives, he seems to have fallen into a mundane trap. What he lacked was a new creative outlet that allowed him to properly expand upon his mathematical interests, and thus, he got strong-armed into a new creative world he never knew existed. The setup is pretty simple. I relate to the emotional struggle that our main character goes through, but there are a few hitches in how this journey is executed in these first five episodes.

The whole point of the initial setup is that Gaku is a very talented mathematician who seems to have fallen off, but the place in the story doesn't seem to match what everybody else is saying. The show seems to be taking the angle that Gaku is in a rut because he is not actively developing new formulas or unique approaches to solving problems. The problem is that the show still tries to frame him as a genius who is leagues above everybody else, and doesn't make it clear that he can't make it as a mathematician. He failed to finish the Math Olympiad, but he's still the top student at his incredible high school. The show's inciting incident happens because of his self-doubt and anxiety, not because of his abilities, and it's only because his evil principal wanted to unfairly punish him that there was a conflict in the first place.

It's a very messy setup because it implies that the pressure of competing with other, more dedicated people is what got to Gaku and shattered his belief in himself, but then the whole structure of the show is him being placed in do-or-die cooking situations. Kai keeps putting Gaku in situations where he needs to cook a meal or solve a puzzle, or he will fail as a chief, and he succeeds because he's good at solving a problem, not because he's overcoming self-doubt. The show doesn't make it clear whether or not his main problem was that he genuinely lacked what it took to be a mathematician, or if he was just overwhelmed initially and needed to be pressured more. The lack of clarity does make it occasionally difficult to resonate with what our main character is going through, because I don't know what emotional journey he's on.

That lack of clarity sometimes also translates into the show's overall premise. It drives itself on this idea of mathematics being a key component to understanding cooking, but the show also cheats a little bit by making the answer to a lot of problems have very little to do with math itself. A lot of times, math will be brought up in a standard way, like how adding components together to get a new component can evoke different flavors. Or it can be something as simple as how temperature control can be used to elevate a dish. However, the show makes the answers to a few problems either incredibly personal or by having them based on something that is more tangentially connected to mathematics than explicitly about it.

It is a shame that this gradually deviates from its premise with each passing episode. I do think the show is at its best when it is very personal. I love the relationship that Gaku has with his dad and the rest of the main cast. Outside of the principal, everyone feels so driven yet understanding towards each other. Despite the deviation from the premise, I do love it when Gaku takes more personal feelings and integrates them into his dishes, like invoking a feeling of nostalgia or learning how to present dishes in ways that complement other types of cultures, since they work at a restaurant that serves different clientele, not just Japanese. Everyone is very no-nonsense but not in a mean-spirited way. There's this idea of “if you can't handle this, then you won't make it as a chef.”

I don't think the show needs to pick one approach over the other; it just succeeds more as a narrative when it leans into those more personal ideas. There is a way to create a formula for itself where it is able to use the foundation of mathematics to elevate those subjective and personal experiences, but it hasn't been found yet. It's still a little lopsided in the way it doesn't go far enough with its mathematical explanations of merging ingredients together to complement and elevate those more emotionally enriching moments. I hope the show can find that formula during the second half of the season, because there is a lot of potential. I want to learn more about specific enzymes. I want a more thorough understanding of how changing values or adding values to different ingredients brings about those distinct outcomes.

I want to try to see the world as our main character does, which is probably one of the more distinct visual motifs of the entire show. Whenever Gaku is close to hitting an eureka moment, he starts seeing binary and different formulas scattered all over the place. He is applying mathematics to the way that he breaks down his understanding of the world around him, and it's great. I also like the ongoing metaphor of scaling a mountain of numbers with different tools once he makes a discovery. This is hands down the most creative the show ever gets when it comes to its visual presentation, because everything outside that is unfortunately a little bland.

I love the way the food looks when it's prepared, but there's no real emotional musical accompaniment that adds that extra flair the show is going for. The background music feels very stock without any real distinct themes or emotionally uplifting symphonies that reflect what emotions the characters are feeling when they try the dish. Outside of when the food is prepared, the show as a whole looks very bland. The color palette feels very muted, like somebody rubbed Vaseline on the lens, and all of the designs are incredibly flat and lifeless. The show will occasionally switch to a slightly more cartoon style with the character models whenever they want to capture a specific reaction or go for something funny, but they will sometimes have those simplified character designs in the same shot as the actual character designs, and it looks very off-putting. They do not blend well together at all, and it ends up doing more harm than good.

Overall, there is a lot of potential in this premise, and there is a lot of heart here. The characters are strong, and the way they bounce off each other is very believable, especially when they try to use cooking as a means of invoking specific feelings in the person eating them. The problem is that the overall premise that the show starts on is very rocky and gets less developed as time goes on. It feels like the show is struggling to find its footing, much like how Gaku does when he first enters the culinary world. That does mean the show has a lot of potential to turn it all around and make things feel satisfying, almost in a meta way, by the end of the season. I hope that it does, because, much like Gaku, it has all the tools it needs to be a great show; it just needs to find the best way to utilize and bring the most out of those tools.