Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma: The Fifth Plate

Episode 7

I must have blinked, because somehow I missed the announcement of the theme of Tsukasa and Asahi's match. Fortunately it isn't hard to figure out – poussin, a term meaning “young chicken” and hilariously called “poussin chicken” throughout the competition, making it “young chicken chicken.” But the fact that it was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment is symptomatic of what's been wrong with this season of Food Wars!: it's pressing the gas pedal to the floor at all times. Tsukasa and Asahi have barely taken the stage when the cooking is over, and their entire competition takes slightly less than the back half of the episode. While I understand that the series needs to highlight its major showdown – Soma vs. Asahi – the unseemly rush it's in to get there is dramatically cutting down on the enjoyment.

This episode does, however, bring up one very pertinent point: if Noir is composed of underworld chefs, who's to say that they're going to follow the rules? If you think about it, it's actually stranger how rule-abiding they largely have been up until this episode; it would seem to be against their very nature as people who pride themselves on being the baddest chefs ever to set foot in a kitchen. And even if they have been using odd implements, they still haven't overtly cheated. All of that seems to change here, though, when Asahi prepares to go up against Tsukasa. He confronts the other Noir chefs to demand their help in winning, and when they refuse, citing a lack of Sarge's loyalty, he simply beats them up and steals their stuff. Even the management refers to this as “an illicit fight,” seemingly by virtue of the fact that their signature cooking tools are missing from their unconscious bodies as well as them being unconscious in the first place. There probably isn't anything in The Blue's rulebook against borrowing utensils, but I'd be very surprised if there wasn't something against actively stealing them from other contestants.

What's interesting is that Asahi is worried enough about beating Tsukasa that he feels the need to resort to such trickery. And for him it really is a “trick” – his super secret special skill is apparently “crossed knives,” a talent like a souped up version of Mimasaka's tracing: he can replicate any chef's skills if he lays hands on their favored utensils and then make them somehow even better by layering many other chefs' specialties. It definitely feels like a game-breaking mod, if only because it allows him to get help from others without them overtly being there working beside him. It's therefore no surprise that he defeats Tsukasa; what is surprising is that he's allowed to get away with it.

It's also worth a comparison with Soma's own skills. This week, Joichiro lays out his training regimen to Erina's grandfather, relaying how he kept giving his son ever more impossible tasks around the diner from his sixth grade onwards so that Soma would essentially have the same power as Asahi, but entirely dependent on himself. That could very well make Soma the more powerful of the two, because he doesn't have to rely on stolen, or "borrowed," tools; he just has to tap into the wealth of knowledge that his father meticulously fostered within him. We've seen him do just that on many occasions, and it's apparent from his attitude in previous seasons that even a loss is worthwhile if it teaches him something he didn't know before. He may not have Asahi's developed “sense of touch,” but he could have something more valuable: a confidence in himself that doesn't rely on external devices or fancy ingredients.

Doubtless Noir, or at least Asahi, will try to come up with a way to thwart that later on. Right now they seem to be concentrating on cheating Takumi out of his sous-chef, with the old “layered signs” trick. That raises one very important question: when the villains resort to Looney Toons gags, is it time to give up on the show?

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Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma: The Fifth Plate is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.