The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!

Dennis is a level 99 cook who's just been exiled from the guild he's been working at for many years and decides to set up his own diner in the countryside.

Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! is based on the light novel series by author Yūki Kimikawa and illustrator Gaou. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Content Warning: The second episode of Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! features sexual assault.

There is a major difference between the ways that Clevatess and Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! use sexual assault in their second episodes. In the former, it's meant to show the dark side of human nature as a way for Klen to grasp humanity better. It's still not something I want to see, but it at least has a storytelling purpose beyond titillation. In Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!, the near-rape of Henrietta the knight is thrown in solely to make Dennis look more heroic. There's no reason why we need a lurid scene of four adventurers luring her into a dungeon and attempting to rape her. It does nothing for Henrietta's character at all, unless you want to count “makes her grateful to Dennis.” It is solely an act meant to assure us that Dennis is going to save the ladies every time (especially when paired with his purchase of Atelier last week). Henrietta and Atelier are props to showcase Dennis' greatness, and the cost is their bodies.

The worst part of this is that it in no way needed to happen. Dennis offering a starving patron down on her financial luck some free meals more than does the same job in a way that doesn't belittle Henrietta in the process. And when the episode is focused on Dennis' cooking, it's actually quite an enjoyable show: the food and cooking are both lovingly animated and gorgeously drawn. Even Atelier adorably pattering around the restaurant, bringing patrons water, allows viewers to set aside the whole “slave” thing, because he's clearly raising her like a dad, and she's free to leave at her leisure. If the story had stuck to the restaurant plot, I'd be giving this a much higher score, especially since it lets the food speak for itself without any of the trite trappings of most foodie anime, like foodgasms and excessive descriptions.

However, after this week, I no longer trust Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!. There was no point to Henrietta being sexually assaulted that couldn't have been made differently, and it's not okay to give the series a pass on using sexual trauma as a fleeting plot point. I'm out.

I was all set to rip this show a new one for two things: a gross Semitic stereotype in the form of potentially dishonest (see how much he's sweating while trying to sell Dennis an icebox) and definitely pedophilic merchant Polvo and the fact that our ostensible hero, Dennis, buys a slave at about the twelve minute mark. The latter turns out to be not quite as bad as other shows that use a similar plot device, however. It's still bad, don't get me wrong, but when Dennis tells the little girl he just purchased that she's free if she wants to leave, he seems to mean it more than other comparable protagonists. Atelier (this show has a name problem; there's also a guy named Spaghetti) is young enough that her survival should she leave is questionable, especially given that Polvo and a bunch of other guys wanted to buy her for decidedly unwholesome reasons. So she doesn't really have as much of a choice as Dennis implies. But he's still trying to be better than we typically see and does appear invested in caring for Atelier in a non-creepy way. And with the bar firmly in hell, I guess that's what we're going to get.

That aside, Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! seems to answer the question, “What happens if you combine ‘unfairly kicked out of my party’ with ‘cooking’?” Dennis is a cook (that seems to be his class in this RPG-inspired world) and is, in fact, unjustly removed from the Silverwings, in this case because the captain is jealous of his friendship with bikini-armor-clad Katie. Dennis doesn't seem too heartbroken over this, though, because he's been carting around a book on how to open a restaurant when you retire from adventuring, and despite spending most of his money on Atelier, he's still able to get that project off the ground. At this point it looks like the series is set to be about the delicious food he cooks for fantasy people and how cute Atelier is when she tries real hard.

And the food does look delicious. There's only one cooking scene this week, but the ease and pizzazz Dennis uses to whip up a batch of fried rice is impressive, and the end result looks very tasty. It seems like all of the episode's resources were directed at that one, small scene. Not that the rest of it looks bad, but it's still a definite upgrade once Dennis begins chopping green onions and whipping eggs. Credit where it's due, the depiction of Atelier as utterly defeated and beaten down by life is also well done, and it's nice to see her slowly coming out of her shell be expressed through both her facial expressions and the colors used to paint her.

If Polvo never comes back and the whole slave element is tossed aside, this could be decently cute. Those two things don't make me want to continue watching, however. I have to, of course, because that's my job, so we'll see if next week's episode can change my mind.

You know, I never thought I'd have to bring this up in a series about an overpowered chef who was kicked out of the heroes' party and opened a restaurant, but this series has forced my hand: Let's talk about rape as a plot device.

In fiction, characters are put in harrowing situations all the time. Sometimes they get out of it on their own and sometimes they are rescued. It's all about building tension and, through that, a sense of drama. Obviously, life or death situations are the most common of these but there are countless others that can be used.

The threat of rape is one such possibility. However, it is a crime with many real world victims (many more than we as a society like to admit) who are likely to be a part of your perspective audience. So while it can be a necessary part of some stories—something vital to the characters or themes being explored—using it casually is simply in bad taste.

So let me pose the question: was it necessary in this episode for Henrietta to be the victim of an attempted rape? Does it further the story or redefine her character in some vital way? Would everything play out 99% the same if the evil party had been trying to either kill her or steal her items, weapons, and armor instead of rape her? The answer to these questions is obvious. Rape was simply chosen because the author likely thought it was the worst non-leathal thing that could happen to a woman and so used it as a lazy plot contrivance to make Dennis seem like a badass and give Henrietta a reason to fall in love with him.

It's both lazy writing and offensive—and it doesn't even fit with the tone of this series. This show is presented as “healing anime” about people eating food and how their interactions with Dennis help them overcome their problems. Henrietta's problems to be solved were sexism in the parties she joined and her being too naive. Having her sexually assaulted in a dungeon is in no way needed to overcome either.

There's just too much hack writing in this one—and the remainder isn't anything beyond bog standard. And, as I don't care about food porn at all, I can't think of a single reason to keep watching this one. So yeah, after this episode, I am out.

Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! is the latest in the increasingly prolific “banished from the hero's party” fantasy sub-genre. And while that may sound like a complaint, this isn't inherently a bad thing. After all, as an unabashed fan of every villainess anime, manga, light novel, and manhwa under the sun, far be it from me to complain about a sub-genre of fantasy that uses the same setup for each and every story.

What is a complaint, however, is that this anime doesn't really do anything new with said setup. Dennis is just the newest in a long line of protagonists whose logistics and/or support skills go unnoticed by his party at large. So due to a mixture of ignorance and jealousy (because who doesn't love a man who can cook), Dennis is made the scapegoat for a dungeoneering failure and booted from the party. Knowing his worth, Dennis sets off to do his own thing—leaving his old party rife for reaping what they have sewn.

The only difference between this anime and the others in the sub-genre is Dennis' job class: chef. Of course, this being a fantasy world, that doesn't mean he's just a cook but can make potions as well (hence his behind-the-scenes value to the party). Other than that, there is really no iteration on the standard pattern—I mean he even buys an abused orphan slave girl as an assistant (who he at least bothers to free right away).

All this is to say this first episode is painfully paint-by-numbers. However, it's my hope that now that the setup is out of the way, this show can actually start to blaze its own path a bit next week. After all, Dennis is likable enough (and different in design enough from the scores of black-haired, slim build fantasy protagonists out there), that I wouldn't mind spending some more time with him.

I can't decide how much I want to give credit to Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! for having a more substantial story in its second episode compared to how much I ought to take it to task for being so crass about it. Just in case you thought that the anime about an easygoing guy who wants to start his own grubbery would be fairly low-key the whole way through, this episode centers around a gang of predators who lure women to the depths of dungeons to assault them and leave them for dead. Oh, and there's delicious katsudon to “ooh” and “ahh” at, too.

I'm not going to pretend that Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! isn't being trashy and exploitative with its subject matter, here. Poor Henrietta is played as a naive doofus from the moment she show up in Dennis' restaurant, and it becomes all too obvious what is going to happen to her after those other girls conveniently gossip about the Evil Rape Gang that just so happens to be prowling around at the same time that Dennis introduces Henrietta to a crew that is specifically looking for lady adventurers to join them. Just about the only surprising thing about the scene where Henrietta ends up victimized so that Dennis can come in and save her is the goofy paper-bag mask that Dennis wears while he takes care of the scumbags. So, if you were hoping that this show would be tonally consistent with how it treated its exploitative trash, well, I hate to disappoint you.

That said, if there's anything I've come to realize over the last few years, it's that I much prefer stupid trash to boring trash. The first episode of Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! felt like the latter. At least now Dennis has the opportunity to do Chef Guy Stuff and Hero Guy Stuff in a manner that will keep your attention to the end credits. Dennis uses his restaurant connections to meet new characters, get the scoop on the rumors about the gang, and then he puts his kitchen blades to good use and extracts some old fashioned rescuing a damsel in distress. There's nothing about the heroic power fantasy being presented here that is new or exceptionally creative, but it is being executed well enough for what it is trying to be (which isn't much more than “competent”). I still can't call Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! a good show, but it just might end up being a decently watchable one for anyone so inclined.

If I can praise anything about Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!, it's that the show presents us with a slightly more sane interpretation of this tired old cliche, where the world of the cast-out adventurer protagonist allows for one to pursue an occupation that is not intrinsically tied to grinding it out in a bunch of anonymous dungeon caves for all eternity. It's not an original enough detail to make this utterly generic MMORPG-esque setting into something genuinely classy or compelling, but it at least makes the world of the show feel like it is ripping off a mid-tier fantasy game that people might actually play.

To be clear, this isn't actually an anime where the main character is literally stuck in a video game, but I think we can all admit that such a detail is almost always completely superfluous. The only thing that I'm looking for that will truly differentiate Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! from its slop competitors is whether it actually tries to be, you know, good. Even then, I think most of us can also admit that the term “good” is in this case going to be very relative - the “we need scare quotes and half-dozen asterisks worth of qualifiers to make sure we're being transparent” kind of relative.

So, is Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! any “good******”? Eh…kind of? It is decently animated, and the voice actors seem to be putting in some effort to give their characters a bit of personality. Then again, our protagonist looks like a substitute gym teacher who is just trying to save up money so he can open up his own independent hardware store, and his name is Dennis. Dennis. With all due respect to my 80-something-year-old great uncle, the only roles for people named Dennis in popular fiction should be reserved for tiny rascals who pester their neighbors and get into weirdly dangerous misadventures with killer vagrants. Also, Dennis' response to the issue of slavery is “I can't just go and get outraged by every last injustice in society - oh wait, this slave is a cute little girl? I guess she deserves some rights and freedoms.”

So, to be clear, we're not shooting for the stars, here. Still, this premiere isn't busted or braindead enough to inspire any legitimate anger. Besides, it's got that benefit I mentioned earlier of not just recreating mediocre dungeon-crawler RPG mechanics. It's also about recreating mediocre dungeon-crawler cooking mini-game mechanics! I would be a bit more enthusiastic if this episode spent more time with the foodie aspects of the show that are easily the best cards it has to play from its hand, but we only get one measly montage of Dennis prepping some (admittedly tasty-looking) fried rice. I'm of the opinion that any decent foodie cartoon had better function as a proper cooking show. We need ingredients lists, narration, step-by-step instructions. If Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! takes more time to get the “Restaurant” part of its title right going forward, I might even be persuaded to remove an asterisk or two from that “good******” descriptor.