Shokugeki no Souma

Shokugeki no Soma is one of the most popular ongoing shonens in Weekly Shonen Jump. Its anime is rated pretty highly on myanimelist, IMDb, and other media forums. The manga here is rated an 8.36 on MAL. Does this mean you should read it? Absolutely not.

It's unfortunately common for long running series to end unsatisfactorily, whether that's because it's dragged out for too long, author doesn't care anymore, it's cancelled, or other unforeseeable circumstances. Look at Bleach and Fairy Tail. Those two series are infamously regarded as the worst shonen manga to have ever existed, due to how they've fallen in terms of the quality of their storyline and conclusions. Shokugeki no Soma? It tops those in terms of how mediocre it is.

I have little to say about the first 264 chapters of this series. Why? Because the final arc of this series DECONSTRUCTS all of which the fans loved about this series.

From the beginning to the end of chapter 264, we had seen the cooking journey of a young diner chef surviving in one of the world's strictest yet most prestigious cooking institution, trying to chase after his father's footsteps in order to inherit his family's diner. Along the way he met a variety of other chefs around his age and experienced their unique lifestyles, cultures, techniques, quirks, and personalities. Training with a master French Chef and losing several competitions, he adapts and strives toward each challenge and grows out his little "Diner world" and realizes he wants to come up with his own brand of cooking and follow his own footsteps. To do that, he must create a dish that his eternal rival, the possessor of the God's Tongue, the talented and beautiful daughter of the Cooking Yakuza (the noble Nakiri Family), Erina, will acknowledge. But said prodigious heroine has her own cooking journey to explore with our male protagonist.

Sounds like a really great story. A little diner chef rose to the top of the cooking world and the rich and talented heroine goes to the bottom to see the little things in cooking to discover her own sense of identity, her own cooking. Well, now lets rinse and repeat all of that, let's ignore the rest of the talented cast that the MC met and have Soma start at level 1 once again. Let's have him be the underdog and prove that diner cooking is the best! How do we do that? Well let's have the heroine be kidnapped by his long lost mafia brother who has superpowers and has defeated who was built up to be the final boss of the series, Soma's father: Joichiro Saiba. What does he want? To marry Erina to make his cooking taste better. How will he do that? By appealing to Erina's horrible mother that abandoned her as a child and has shit taste that can't let her consume anything in this world.

Erina Nakiri becomes an abused doll who can't make a single decision for herself in her life and has no hope of pleasing her mother's shit palette with her prodigious cooking. She has to tell the MC to lose and let her marry the mafia brother so her mother can be happy. SHe went from developing for 264 chapters into a confident young chef who fights for her newfound friends and views cooking as fun to this.

Soma Yukihira had risen to the top of Totsuki academy as the First Seat of the Elite Ten. By the end of the Central arc, he had already created what he referred to as his own specialty. Now? "His cooking style is just addition and substraction. He can't multiply, and he certainly has no super powers! What can he do? No way he can make me strip!" Everything he has learned about cooking has went to 0 and he has to use his DAD's cooking yet again to fend off against the dastardly "Dark Chef's" Wolverine Claws, TNT, and chainsaws.

Repeating Nakiri abusive family drama, replacing the final boss of the series (when the series was all about Soma coming up with his own cooking style to beat his father and inherit his restaurant), NO LONGER EVEN REVIEWING DISHES OR SHOWING THEM BEING MADE (possibly due to the author's fixation on Chunnibyou super powers or because the series's cooking consultant has left), having a battle between light and darkness, showing guns and kidnapping, and worst of all deconstructing the main characters and shafting most of the cast. This series takes it all! Everything that was hyped and built up and somehow made it turn into a worst trash than it was the week before.

The series betrayed its own themes and basically its premise by dragging on way past what it needed to be. It became a battle shonen criminal NTR INCEST soap opera family drama than a cooking manga. The author needed to increase his foodgasms of fanservice to BUILDING-breaking levels (lewding all sorts of girls wasn’t enough, the food has to give buildings orgasms now!) in an attempt to critique the kind of cooking this series has produced now.

Might as well change the name of the series from Shokugeki no Soma to “Keeping up with the Nakiris”.

Overall, I give it a 4/10. 264 chapters of a respectable quality being its crutch, it's an utterly garbage series that destroys all expectations.

Read with caution if you want to stop up to chapter 264 or wish to see a masterpiece of a trainwreck. Otherwise, do not bother with this series.