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 Spotlight on: Oishinbo A la Carte
Written by Park Cooper
Okay, so... here’s the deal.
Oishinbo A la Carte, which I will now refer to only as Oishinbo for my own convenience, is a cooking manga brought to us by Viz.
There are some unusual things about it.
1. It’s old... like the 1980s. But it’s hard to tell HOW old, because we don’t seem to start at the beginning. The credits list this as Oishinbo 20. This makes sense in many ways, because:
This manga is all about a guy, Yamaoka, a medium-level journalist whose newspaper (magazine?) is putting together the “Ultimate Menu” –representing the best selections possible out of all of Japanese cuisine. His supporting characters are his buds from the mangazine (newspaper?). But as of what’s being called Chapter 1, they’ve already started this, and you only have it explained to you in the notes in front, as well as who Dear Old Journo Gang are.
I think what happened is that in Chapter 1, we meet, seemingly for the first time, Yamaoka’s DAD, a big important artiste and gourmand who doesn’t get along well with Yamaoka at all, or vice-versa. Most chapters deal with Dad or Yamaoka trying to outdo one another Iron-Chef-style in some way. They each have about a 50% success rate, which makes you hate them both. If Dad was ale, which makes you hate them both. If Dad was always right, you’d feel that Sonny had a lot to learn still from the old master. If Yamaoka was always right, you’d feel like Dad is an ogre and his son is a saint for having to be raised by him. The fact that neither is consistently right means they’re on the same footing as equals, and thus you hate them both for being such mule-heads chapter after chapter. Also, when Yamaoka left home, he trashed all the pottery Dad had made, and Dad is a famous ceramicist, so I felt like, what a bastard! You just ruined a small percentage of Japan’s rich cultural heritage! I hate you Yamaoka! On top of this, Yamaoka is usually in a bad mood when he’s not helping out timid, budding chefs or other unfortunates, so he’s really not terribly likable.
Anyway, the manga makes it clear that they’re cherry-picking their chapters, but here’s how I think it happened: I think they were running this manga about Yamaoka for a long time, and then one day they decided to write Dad into the storylines, and that’s when things really took off, and so that must be where and why we’ve started importing it at this point—this must be where we all agree it got really good.
Another indicator of 80sness is things like the line “You gossipy female!” Uh, okay...
2. Which brings us to another indicator of the 80sness—the art. It’s kind of manga-primitif... People’s faces look a lot like a souped-up version of Egyptian tomb paintings and Norman tapestries... the pupils are fine (unlike I sometimes see in indie comic books), but the eyes are usually noticeably off-alignment from one another in height. That’s not... exactly good...
So, as for the cuisine part... it’s interesting, and its details make for some good stories, but while it’s made me think that if it was done extremely well, I might actually like sushi... it’s also made me never want to try sushi, because there’s always a line like “Let me show you a mistake many chefs in even good restaurants make with sushi” or “Oh my! This tastes so superior to the sushi one commonly eats in restaurants!” If it’s THAT hard to get it right, surely my chances of eating delicious sushi in an AMERICAN restaurant are extremely slim...
So, if you want to learn more about the amazingness of Japanese cuisine, then you may well favor Oishinbo over the eating-endangered-species antics of Iron Wok Jan. But if you demand satisfying stories for this cultural tour to be couched in, Oishinbo might not be the perfect manga experience for you.
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