Food Wars! The Third Plate Episode 12

At least we know why that specific reveal was left out of an earlier episode—Food Wars was saving it to end the season on. That's not entirely surprising, nor is it a particularly bad plan. For a split-cour series, there needs to be something sufficiently compelling to whet our appetites for the next half, and Tsukasa and Soma's impromptu pseudo-shokugeki wasn't quite enough.

Of course, that's partially because of how rushed it was. I don't always like to make comparisons with the source material, but there was some serious abbreviating this time that didn't do the storyline any favors. The manga gives this battle almost an entire volume when you add up the pages, so this much-streamlined version of events feels a little lackluster. In part this could be because the audience isn't likely to be familiar with the properties and flavors of venison—unless you live in a rural area, it's not a meat many people have sampled. (I find it usually just gives people gas; I'll take moose over venison any day.) Therefore, we're a little more in the dark than with some of the other main ingredients—I'd really have liked for the episode to go over venison and how to prepare it in more detail, such as we saw in season two with the turtle Hisako cooked.

Despite this, the reactions of the tasters—Megumi, Hisako, and Erina, who Soma knew were there all along—are particularly interesting and do a good job of highlighting the differences between Tsukasa's venison and Soma's. We've seen Food Wars use foodgasms to show us the nuances of people's reactions to a dish before; the most notable is the difference between a good meal and one of Soma's creepy experimental foods. That's largely gone away since season one, so it's nice to see how starkly different the girls' reactions are this time. Soma's dish causes the usual “violent” reaction that we see in the show—clothes explode off (except Tsukasa's which just sort of open) and there's a real sense of surprise on the part of the tasters, as if they weren't prepared for the flavors of Soma's cooking. When the girls eat Tsukasa's dish, however, they're transported to a gentle woodland paradise, clothed in translucent white dresses symbolic of purity when contrasted with the nakedness of their Soma reactions. The implication is that Tsukasa's cooking somehow tastes more natural, gentler on the tongue than Soma's surprising use of ingredients. While I would argue that both are valid cooking methods and that “gentle” doesn't always trump “surprising,” it makes sense given Totsuki and its history that Tsukasa would be declared the winner—even before Central, experimentation was looked at somewhat sideways.

The real takeaway here (before the big reveal at the end) is that Soma's cooking makes Tsukasa distinctly nervous. He's unpredictable, which is a detriment to the anxious chef himself, but also to the worldview espoused by Azami. Soma's dish forces Tsukasa to question his own views, and that's not something he's at all comfortable with. While he doesn't quite manage to express that to Azami, it's clear that it concerns him, which is likely to resurface at some point further down the line.

This may not have been the best episode of this season, but it does manage to wrap things up while still preparing us for more Food Wars fun in April. If nothing else, we can now see Erina as a wounded soul trying to cope the best she can rather than an irredeemable jerk, and the scene of all of the Polaris kids protecting her from her dad is heartwarming. How she'll change further knowing who Soma's dad is remains to be seen—but I'd wager that her father has no idea what he's in for now that Erina is finding her own voice.

Rating: B-

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

source:- Anime News Network