Things get cooking right away in this dungeon epic with cheat skills and delicious dishes! Koichi Suzuki, an incorrigible lover of beastfolk and their adorably fluffy ears, dies young after heroically saving a child. In a divine exchange, his reward is reincarnation into another world... and the ability to cook up magical beasts? Now called Thor, he must use the knowledge of his past life and newfound culinary skills to survive a world that shows mercy to no one, not even children. But just as he manages to find his footing, who should appear before him but two beastfolk on the verge of death! Thor will have to cook up a recipe for success if he wants all three of them to survive. And so begins their story of furry ears, mouthwatering cooking, and dungeon crawling!

The Accursed Chef and His Pair of Furry Foodies has a story by Yuu Tanaka and art by Watarinica. English translation is done by Kamishiro Taishi and lettering by Luis Chavarria. Published by J-Novel Club (April 22, 2026). Rated 15+

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Do not let the cutesy title and cover image fool you. The Accursed Chef and His Pair of Furry Foodies is a miserably dark story centered on the abuse and neglect of children. While the story takes a moment or two to explain why everything is awful in this story, it does not do the same to explain why everyone is also awful. That leaves protagonist Thor at four years old, befriending two five-year-old beast children who have clearly been treated with contempt and rescuing another child who is blinded and disabled. It all seems to be meant to be redemptive and wholesome, but actually, it is quite awful.

Once again, an isekai is taking the opportunity to put adult behavior in children's bodies, not accounting for the physical limitations that a four-year-old would absolutely encounter. Again, this is meant to be cute, but it just isn't.

The recent trend of adult men losing their minds in the most unseemly way for the very idea of fluffy ears is always cloying, but making the characters' children, and every single adult around them, violent just makes this whole manga a hard pass from me.

Even the idea of Thor being a magical chef is rendered unoriginal, with ingredients that “look exactly like” the ingredients of our world. We learn that animals and insects are only vaguely different when we are told that they “taste like” things from our world. No originality at all.

Bolts
Rating:

The main character in this story might be one of the most relatable I've ever come across because after dying and being allowed to either reincarnate in his world or go to a magical world filled with furries, he took the latter. I am, however, also calling this book out for lying to me because the opening story promised a fantasy world filled with anthropomorphic furry creatures, but it just couldn't help itself by defaulting to the main girls of the book being your typical cat and dog girls. None of this is helped by the fact that these girls are children. But before I jump out the window out of frustration, there is a sweet story here.

This is a story about a young man who gets reincarnated into a life of struggle and poverty. All of this is to counteract the fact that he was also gifted with really powerful abilities that he should not have, despite how young his new body is. All of this was done just to facilitate the overall setup where he is living in the slums, taking care of very young animal girls that don't know how to fend for themselves and are being pursued. So, in a lot of ways, it feels like a mishmash because at first, I thought the main appeal was going to be in the cooking side of things.

The protagonist has developed abilities to defend himself, but he is also capable of preparing meals out of the most rancid ingredients. There are some beautiful art spreads here that show off the meals, and it reminds me that we have seen an uptick in stories that specifically revolve around cooking in the past couple of years. However, that doesn't seem to be the focus because there is a looming plot in the background of a much darker and edgier story. There's political unrest, the town they live in is destroyed by a dragon, and there's abuse all over the place. This is a story where you can have a wholesome chapter about preparing a nice meal, and then in the next chapter, I'm getting a flashback of the protagonist piercing a dude's skull at the age of four. Thankfully, the tone is always kept dark, given the fact that the main cast literally lives in the slums, so ultimately this is a survival story. I appreciate the story's consistency with that idea at least.

I don't know what the story is trying to do. It's not really a harem romance or anything, but it also doesn't go into that much detail about the cooking aspect for it to feel like a cooking story. There are dark elements that make it more typical of an edgy Isekai, but the world-building isn't nearly as explored as I would like it to be, either. Sometimes things just happen for the sake of moving the plot along. If you like any of those elements, this isn't a bad pick-up necessarily, and maybe more of these elements will be fleshed out in later volumes. But personally, this story is juggling a bunch of different ideas without fleshing any of them out.