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darumachan 's review for:
Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu Volume 1
by Natsuya Semikawa
lighthearted
fast-paced
An isekai slice-of-life focused on food. On a superficial level it is cozy and appealing, but any kind of closer reading reveals it as unimaginitive at best and xenophobic at worst. In every single dish vignette, the characters bemoaned the boring or distasteful local food options. Then they found pure bliss in the marvelous food they got to taste at the izakaya. It was pure self-exoticization and agrandizement that ends up feeling almost like colonizing propaganda in its heavy-handedness. This is also the second isekai cooking manga I've read that essentializes Japanese cuisine as an ideal in contrast to the dingy and lackluster food of the fantasy setting. Don't get me wrong, I love Japanese cooking and love going to izakaya whenever I have a chance, but this kind of approach to isekai is completely baffling to me, because if I'm immersing myself in a fantasy world, I kind of want to let my imagination run wild with every aspect of the made-up culture, including its foodways, rather than be told the that thing from the world I know is actually as good as it gets. Ah well, now that I know that "bringing Japanese cuisine to a drab isekai" is a subgenre, I'll try to be on the lookout for it in the future.
Content Warnings
Minor: Xenophobia