Food Wars! The Third Plate

Episode 21

My hunch was right – this week's episode is the backstory that was previously left out in order to better set up the conditions for the Team Shokugeki. That rearrangement of the original material is fine, because it gave us a chance to really appreciate Azami's weird and unhealthy attachment to Joichiro before we find out its origins. Those origins, as well as the seeds of Azami's culinary philosophy, all stem from his severe misunderstanding of Joichiro himself, setting the stage not only for the Central arc, but for his abuse of his daughter.

Azami, Dojima, and Joichiro all met at Polaris as students, with Joichiro quickly establishing himself as the top student of their year. That doesn't seem to be something he takes particular pride in – he just likes cooking, he's good at it, and he enjoys the competitive atmosphere at Totsuki. The problems start to arise when he reaches the point where people outside the institute take notice of him: adults begin to forget that he's just a kid and put pressure on him to climb to even greater culinary heights. It isn't that Joichiro isn't interested in doing that, but they're beginning to erode his joy in each achievement; prizes just become shiny objects that he goes after like a trained animal. Dojima begins to realize what's going on, as does Jun – they figure out that his gross dishes were a way to blow off steam, and even that's no longer an option for him. When Joichiro has his total breakdown, Dojima and the caring adults realize that he really does need to just walk away or he'll end up in a very dark place.

Azami, on the other hand, has zero emotional intelligence on this front. (Or at all.) He saw Joichiro as becoming a precision cooking machine, and while his tenets would indicate that he did understand to a degree how the pressure of innovation hurt his idol, he has failed to grasp that it was also what Joichiro enjoyed doing. Instead of learning what Dojima and Senzaemon did from the situation, Azami set out to recreate the robotic Joichiro in his own daughter, looking to form a school of perfection that takes all of the joy and spontaneity out of haute cuisine. It's as if he thinks that by walking away and working at a family diner Joichiro threw everything away, when in fact he learned that cooking under too much pressure and without someone to enjoy what you make just for them is no way to live.

We saw Akira learn that same lesson when Soma defeated him a couple of weeks ago, and Erina's been slowly coming to realize that “perfect” doesn't have to mean what her dad taught her. Whether or not Azami is capable of rectifying his misunderstanding of many years is definitely up for debate, because while he's the emperor with no clothes, he's also the emperor who would have the kid who outs him beheaded for their audacity in speaking the truth. More than seats on the Elite Ten or expulsion reversals, what's really at stake in this upcoming Team Shokugeki is the philosophy of what it means to be a chef, which is presumably behind both this week's backstory and Soma's defeat of Akira. When Dojima years later gets the phone call from Joichiro saying that he's back in Japan and cooking at Yukihira (and has a kid), he's visibly shocked at how comfortable his old friend sounds – presumably, he sounds like he did before the breakdown, when he was enjoying himself in the kitchen. It wasn't Totsuki entirely that took that out of him, but he couldn't get it back while there. He's raised his son to have the resiliency and strength of conviction to do what he couldn't, and that's really what this episode is about underneath it all.

We're running out of episodes to complete this arc, and I'm hoping we'll get an announcement of a fourth season to do the Team Shokugeki justice, because it would be a real slap in the face if they rush through it in the few weeks remaining. Now that we have more of what we need to know about where Soma and Erina came from, the stage is set for them to shine.

Rating: B

Food Wars! The Third Plate is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.