That’s a spicy meatball!
Yeah, so – if you remember that “repeating pattern” thing I opened with last week, I think it pretty much applies here. There’s really not a lot new in this episode of Shokugeki no Souma or indeed this entire arc – it’s pretty much another story about Souma-kun’s resourcefulness and resilience and the loyalty of his friends. If anything maybe we see the ante upped a bit here, but Souma has faced battle with more unsavory foes than Kuga-sempai before, with equally high stakes on the line.
The question, then, is perhaps just how this show manages to be as consistently entertaining as it is. I won’t deny that there’s a bit of “oomph” missing with these sorts of plots now as compared to a season and a half ago, but they certainly still work – at least for me. There often comes a point with series like this where I stop rooting for the protagonist just out of a desire for something different, but that’s never happened with Souma and Souma. That’s probably a good testament to the quality of the execution.
As this episode unfolds, Souma-kun’s plan starts to come into focus – but only slowly, piece by piece. There’s the seating his old friend from the Yukihira Diner shopping district, Tomita-san, brings by. As Kuga points out just adding seating doesn’t in itself instigate any chance in the dynamic, but this is merely the first domino Souma has lined up. Next is the menu itself, and the big gun Souma is going to challenge Kuga with – his own version of Lion’s Head soup, Sichuan-Yukihira style. That means adding noodles (making it mapomen), and then a big pork meatball – but the real secret is what’s inside of that meatball.
I said earlier that Souma-kun was smart not to take on Kuga directly with Szechuan cooking, but in a sense he really had no choice – if he was going to steal Kuga’s customers he had to give them something to satisfy what they were craving as they stood in his interminable lines. Those lines were his restaurant’s Achilles heel (patrons were even being told to dine and dash in 20 minutes), and Souma knew that. And that secret ingredient inside the meatballs – curry, what a brilliant idea, and not just because of the moon theme. In Japan curries are typically comforting and hearty rather than fiercely spicy, and as such make a perfect counterpoint to the ma-la intensity of the mapo dofu. And of course, curry smells great.
What all this is, really, is a compendium of what makes Souma so good at what he does. He watches and learns from other people. He isn’t too proud to ask for help (which indeed represents real growth over when we first met him). And he knows which people to call on for maximum benefit – like Mimaska here, the perfect mimic, to act as his second pair of hands in the kitchen. And as a final salvo, Tadokoro has had her clubmates bring in a collection of paper lanterns to make the cart’s seating area a desirable nighttime destination. It’s a bit farfetched (unlike Alice’s 3D food printing, which is a real thing) that even with unsolicited help from the likes of Niku-san and the Aldinis that this little booth could beat the Kuga machine, but this is pretty much a fairy tale so I’m not going to begrudge it a few fairy tale endings.
