The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Food Diary of Miss Maid

Follow maid-in-training Suzume Tachibana as she tries all sorts of Japanese food, from sweets like taiyaki and melon bread to savory snacks like takoyaki and onigiri.

The Food Diary of Miss Maid is based on the manga series by Susumu Maeya. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

It used to be that the oversexed school nurse was my least favorite random anime character type. But now I have a new one: the anachronistic maid. Suzume is a prime example of this type: her entire identity is wrapped up in her work. She dresses like an early twentieth century maid at all times – despite the fact that, according to both Suzume and her employer, she's on vacation. By the end of the episode, I was beginning to wonder if she owned any other clothes, because the most change she makes to her outfit is when she ties the top of her apron down.

But don't worry, she has at least two other facets to her personality: she's very naïve and she really likes to eat. The latter is, of course, a major component of this series – after her vacation gets extended by her employer back in the U.K. hiring apparently incompetent contractors to build his rooftop pool, Suzume settles down to mark up her guidebook and eat her way through Japan's snack food landscape. In this episode she samples, taiyaki, takoyaki, dango, onigiri, and Baumkuchen, and credit where it's due, they all look incredibly tasty. So tasty, in fact, that I'm glad this aired before Passover starts, because that just would have been cruel. Also remarkable is that the animation lets the food speak for itself. Yes, Suzume waxes rhapsodic about flavors and mouthfeel, but mostly the images of the food is allowed to demonstrate how amazing it is all on its own. It left me wanting some fresh taiyaki, that's for sure.

While this will undoubtedly go over better with fans of slice-of-life series, the real reason to watch this seems to be the food. Suzume herself is a bit of a nonentity, and while a scene where she attempts to befriend a cat and embarrasses herself in front of her neighbor Nana is amusing, it's not enough to count as plot. I also did find myself wondering just when this is set, in part because there wasn't much else to do while watching, but also because Suzume calls her employer from an old-fashioned pay phone and her grandmother's dress looks right out of the 1980s. I think there might have been a background character using a smartphone in one scene, but there isn't much to suggest this is contemporary in setting.

In summary, watch this for the food. The rest is just window dressing.

Aesthetically, this anime is above average. The animation is clean, the food looks appetizing, and the character designs are solid. If I were a person who found food porn anime even remotely appealing—especially food that is uniquely Japanese yet surprisingly everyday—I'm sure I'd be having a blast with this one. I like that this show puts a focus on how to eat the food as well, as it's not obvious for a lot of the food we see in this episode. In fact, how to eat these things is something I've had to learn over my decades in Japan. However, that doesn't make watching this anime any more engaging.

I was incredibly bored watching this anime. Every time it reached a new section, I instinctively checked the remaining time for the episode—and felt disappointed every time. Be it the food or the interactions between Suzume and her grandmother, boss, or neighbor, nothing sparked even the least bit of interest in my mind ...except for one thing.

Suzume's neighbor is named Nana Komatsu. For those of you not into Josei manga or anime, Nana Komatsu is the name of the co-protagonist of Ai Yazawa's seminal classic, NANA. It's like naming a character Motoko Kusanagi or Usagi Tsukino—even if it were an everyday name, the name itself has so much pathos that it automatically overshadows any other character to use it. Now, to be fair, one of the character's kanji is different (this anime's is 小松菜々 while NANA's is 小松奈々), which doesn't fix the issue. To make things worse, there is also a popular Japanese actress with the same name (though with the spelling 小松菜奈), which leads to the same problem only outside of the anime sphere. The only exception where this would be okay is like with DAN DA DAN—where Ken Takakura having the same name as a famous actor is a recurring plot point—but there's no sign of that yet.

So yeah, given that I just spent an impassioned paragraph on a character's name rather than the actual show, it's safe to say that this show isn't for me—though I'm certain there is an audience out there who will absolutely love it.

The Food Diary of Miss Maid is a perfectly pleasant show about a young woman enjoying Japanese street food and convenience store snacks under the cherry blossoms. It is idyllic. It involves listening to Kana Ichinose gasp over the delights of packaged onigiri and freshly-cooked takoyaki. It's one of the better-looking anime produced by EMT Squared, perhaps because they're working in conjunction with longstanding studio Magic Bus, which has been around longer than I've been alive. And trust me, that's a very long time.

But forgive me for using it as a springboard for a greater discussion, and that's how maids are depicted in anime and manga in this modern age. In the opening of the episode, Suzume narrates how maids must rise at dawn and begin their day's work cleaning, even in places others don't see. She dons her uniform and gets to work dusting. Then, the camera pulls back to show she's in a small tatami floor apartment.

See, Suzume is not a maid as in she is a person who is employed to provide services that involve cleaning and other care work to a household. Suzume is a maid as defined by anime, a sort of fantasy creature who has an inherent drive to wear frilly black and white uniforms and clean. Even without an employer—sorry, a “master”—to care for, she continues this daily routine out of pure instinct, instead of wearing normal clothes and maybe sleeping in while she's on paid leave from her job. She is not a human with her own life and goals. She does not serve to live, only lives to serve. Serve who? It doesn't matter. Even without someone for her to serve, she continues to go through the motions.

It's weird, right? Like, if you stop and think through it for more than ten seconds, it's weird.

Except that Suzume goes to get takoyaki with her grandmother, so clearly she has some kind of human lineage. How did this become so inculcated in her? Was she conditioned into this from an early childhood, instead of attending school? Was she sold into indentured servitude or trafficked?

But The Food Diary of Miss Maid doesn't want you to think about that. They just want you to see a young woman in a long skirt and apron trying to figure out how to eat dango. And you know what? It does a good job depicting that.

The setup for The Food Dairy of Miss Maid is pretty odd. Here we have a Japanese girl dressed like a French maid who has actually lived in England for most of her life, but she's now stuck in Japan (a country she barely remembers) for an entire year because her employer destroyed the family mansion with a botched rooftop pool extension while she was out on vacation. There are plenty of questions I think we could ask about all of this: How does Suzume adapt to this apparently foreign culture so quickly, despite seemingly knowing nothing about basic things like food? Why is she wearing that silly maid uniform everywhere she goes? But I'm sure we're not meant to think that hard about the silly little slice-of-life show for foodies.

Though, while we're taking the premise of this goofy cartoon far too seriously, I have to wonder how shows like this play for the native viewers in Japan. It just seems awfully obvious and self-congratulatory, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit that Japanese cuisine is tasty as hell, but we're not even delving into especially fancy or unique dishes here. I do find it funny that a cooking-themed anime would work so hard to sell the glory of animated takoyaki and onigiri to folks who can already just spend a couple bucks at the nearest 7-11 for the real deal. Hell, I live in the most landlocked part of the entire United States, and even I can drive ten minutes to my local Asian Import shop and get some pretty decent onigiri.

Again, I'm probably thinking too hard about a cartoon that exists primarily to be cute and show off tasty snacks. To Miss Maid's credit, the series does a good job of selling its qualities as a more general sitcom for folks that aren't immediately taken in by the segments of the show that function as shameless advertisement work for the Japan Tourism Agency. The show's production values are consistently strong, which helps to sell the gentle comedy of Suzume's antics and the overall pleasantness of her misadventures. Some genuine effort is being made to establish a supporting cast that we can get invested in; the maid's budding friendship with her standoffish neighbor is honestly quite sweet, for example, and her grandparents are just adorable. While the food angle of Miss Maid's Food Diary isn't quite novel enough to stand out from the competition, I think this is one anime that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. I'm actually interested in watching more of it in the future, which is not how I thought things would go when I first tuned in. Preview Guide is always full of fun surprises, isn't it?