After the Golden Kingdom was sunk a thousand years ago by a magician, the king emerged from the depths and said that anyone who can defeat the mage will get his treasure. The king crumbled to dust and adventurers raced into an expansive underground labyrinth to prob its dangerous depths.
Laios is the leader of one such adventuring party. However, when their battle with a red dragon goes awry, his sister Falin is eaten when sacrificing herself to transport them out.
With no money to buy supplies in order to go rescue his sister, Laios and his two remaining companions, Chilchuck the thief and Marcille the healer, decide to eat the monsters they defeat in order to save money on food and get to Falin before she is digested.
With eating monsters considered a bit taboo not to mention gross, they struggle to prepare them correctly since there is little knowledge on how to do so. However, they stumble across a dwarf named Senshi who has a passion for cooking monster ingredients and just so happens to have always wanted to try eating a red dragon.
Who says a food anime can’t sit on a platform of detailed world-building? If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Delicious in Dungeon, head on down below.
Anime Like Delicious in Dungeon
For Fans of Cooking and Eating in a Fantasy World
Toriko
In this world, happiness is measured by what you eat. As such, people are always on the hunt for ultimate ingredients that are gotten from powerful monsters.
Those who battle these monsters for ingredients are Gourmet Hunters.
This story follows Toriko, a Gourmet Hunter, and his chef friend, Komatsu. Toriko aims to cook the perfect meal while Komatsu wants to reach the level of master chef.
What Delicious in Dungeon to food in a swords and sorcery fantasy world, Toriko is to food in a shounen action anime world.
Both series are about fighting – and then eating – monsters. It it is the primary focus of the plot and the major source of the action. Both series follow very passionate foodies and their companions that eat a number of questionable things, often surprised when they turn out delicious.
While both Toriko and Delicious in Dungeon are dedicated to comedy, Toriko adds in what can best be described as “Dragon Ball Z energy,” where the fights are over-the-top and the heroes are wildly overpowered, like any standard shounen action anime from the DBZ era.
Campfire Cooking in Another World With My Absurd Skill
Alongside three other heroes, Mukouda Tsuyoshi was transported to a fantasy world to save a kingdom.
However, it becomes very apparent that he was summoned as a mistake when the only skill he has is to be able to open an interface to purchase food items from modern Japan.
Kicked out into the world, Tsuyoshi sets out into the world and his ability to make delicious dishes soon pays off. He attracted the attention of legendary wolf Fenrir who enjoyed the meal so much that he forms a pact with him to be his familiar.
Now employed as a merchant and adventurer, he travels and cooks to earn a living.
Like Delicious in Dungeon, Campfire Cooking in Another World takes place in a typical RPG-like fantasy world, but is fully dedicated to food instead. The main characters are great cooks and often use monster meat in their recipes.
The key difference is that Campfire Cooking in Another World is an isekai anime. His special main character isekai perk is that he can access a Japanese grocery store. While at first he just makes Japanese food for fantasy creatures and adventurers, over time he also starts to use monster meat with Japanese ingredients to save money and not waste the monsters that his companion kills.
Sweet Reincarnation
Without realizing his dream of making the world’s best pastry, a promising pastry chef suddenly dies. However, he is reincarnated into a new world as the young noble, Pastry Mille Morteln.
Although he is the eldest son of an impoverished country lord, he is determined to still follow his dreams of being a pastry chef even in his new life. Now, he balances fulfilling expectations as an aristocrat while also gathering all the ingredients he needs to make wonderful confections as he builds his dream kingdom of sweets.
If Delicious in Dungeon is the main course, then Sweet Reincarnation is the dessert.
Like Delicious in Dungeon, Sweet Reincarnation is a food-focused fantasy anime. However, it is an isekai so half the anime is about a reincarnated baker trying to procure the rare and expensive ingredients needed to make sweets while the other half is typical isekai adventures about him being a nice young man who helps everyone.
However, while Delicious in Dungeon is distinctly dungeon crawling-focused, Sweet Reincarnation is more like a kingdom building fantasy series as the main character improves his father’s small barony in order to be able to make or buy more baking ingredients.
Drifting Dragons
Dragons rule the skies. While they are a threat to humanity, they are also a source of medicine, meat, and oil.
In order to procure these goods, outcasts called Drakers traverse the skies on giant airships. They have no home on land, but they live to hunt dragons as a dangerous and thankless profession.
As dragon populations and those who become Drakers dwindle, the airship Quin Zaza and her crew are one of the last teams to bring down these great beasts.
Both Delicious in Dungeon and Drifting Dungeons are about characters that fight and eat creatures in their fantasy world. Furthermore, they also aren’t just doing this as a flimsy excuse for action. Instead, they are dedicated to explaining the ecology, environmental impact, and details of their hunting.
That said, Delicious in Dungeon has a very diverse diet. Drifting Dragon is specifically about hunting and eating dragons. Furthermore, dragons in that world are also used for their parts. Essentially, Drifting Dragons presents dragon hunting like whaling in the 1800s, but with airships.
For Fans of Dungeon Crawlers
Handyman Saitou in Another World
Handyman Saitou has always been a kind of unremarkable man. He worked a thankless handyman job where the company prioritized profits and clients often dismissed his work as too simple to be worth paying for.
One day, Saito is transported to a fantasy land where he takes up with a group of adventurers who, despite having some slight dysfunction of their their own, make his skills feel valuable!
Despite Handyman Saitou in Another World being an isekai, it starts in a similar way to Delicious in Dungeon. At first, both series seem like pretty simple fantasy comedy anime that are enjoyable, but not particularly deep. However, both of them do get deeper as they follow their primarily dungeon crawling-focused plots.
While both series expand, neither forgets their initial focus. Handyman Saitou in Another World takes breaks from comedy for serious character development and drama, but always goes back to being silly. Delicious in Dungeon has its serious moments, but always goes back to the food.
Handyman Saitou in Another World isn’t quite as dense with its world-building, but it does enjoy a darker sort of humor.
Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
Thrown into a foreign land with no memory of their previous life, a group of strangers must try and survive in a brutal world filled with dangerous monsters.
While the strong quickly band together, the weak are left to make a patchwork group of their own. Slowly but surely this group becomes fighters, finally earning enough to survive each day.
Like Delicious in Dungeon, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash is a dungeon crawling anime. However, it lacks any sort of food focus.
Both series feature characters who spend much of their time stumbling through the standard sword and sorcery-style fantasy world filled with adventurers, monsters, and dungeons. However, while Delicious in Dungeon focuses on chronically broke adventurers eating their monster kills, Grimgar focuses on a group of weak adventurers who teamed up because no one else wanted them. As such, Grimgar focuses its plot on them struggling to grow stronger – putting extra emphasis on the “struggling” part.
Made in Abyss
The Abyss is an enormous cave system and the only unexplored place in the world. No one knows how deep it goes, but generations of bold adventurers have descended into it.
In the town at the edge of The Abyss, an orphan named Rico dreams of raiding, as her mother did before her. One day while exploring the murky depths, she meets a boy, who turns out to be a robot, kicking off the start of her epic adventure.
Both Delicious in Dungeon and Made in Abyss follow a group of adventurers diving deep into a dungeon. However, what these series most share is their distinct focus on the environments and ecology.
You get to enjoy curious characters that focus on the flora and fauna, and who seem to understand how and why they developed as they did based on the environment. Essentially, they give you is the small details about a world that other series often skip because both stories take place in enclosed spaces rather than a vast world.
All that said, Delicious in Dungeon is comedic and sometimes a little dramatic while Made in Abyss has some questionable content and situations that are so grotesque they can be a bit traumatizing. Despite how the characters look, Made in Abyss isn’t a wholesome and fun adventure. It is more about adventure, exploration, and the moral decay that comes from delving deeper into a lawless abyss.
My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1
After working at an exploitative company, Ryouta Satou died from overwork, but was reincarnated to a fantasy world. There, he makes the unfortunate discovery that in a world of adventure, he is level-locked at level 1.
While he can’t level up, Ryouta gains access to a special cheat dungeon that shouldn’t exist. Inside, the monsters that don’t drop items for anyone else will drop weapons and items that let him rank up his skills.
After maxing his stats and gathering weapons only he can use, he finds that he is now overpowered even such a low level.
If you were intrigued by the concept that Delicious in Dungeon presented – one where even if you are broke-ass broke you could still get food from eating monsters – then My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 may be for you.
My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 presents a world where items – primarily food items – are obtained as dungeon drops by killing monsters. As such, you can either eat them yourself or sell them for money.
Unfortunately, that is about all My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 shares with Delicious in Dungeon. My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 is an isekai, and one of the very basic, slightly harem ones that make people tired of isekai. However, if you are not tired of isekai and do want to see an interesting take on the usual world of dungeons and adventurers, My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 does offer that.
For Fans of Detailed World-Building
Frieren – Beyond Journey’s End
After the Demon King’s defeat, the victorious hero’s party returns home. After disbanding, the elven mage Frieren continues journeying to indulge her hobby of collecting spells. However, being a long-living elf, fifty years pass in the blink of an eye for her. Now, she finds her old companions and friends slowly passing away from age one by one.
Before his death, Heiter the cleric manages to foist his young ward, Fern, onto Frieren as her apprentice mage. Together, they travel to collect spells, but after visiting many locations that Frieren had once visited with the hero’s party, she begins to ponder the missed opportunity to form deeper bonds with her now-dead comrades and cherish the new opportunities she has with her current ones.
At a glance, you can sort of expect Frieren to put some effort into the world-building, since the only real plot is a journey to see how the world changes during the long life of an elf. You don’t expect Delicious in Dungeon, a show about eating monsters in a dungeon, to offer it as much. However, dedication to detailed world-building is what these two series share most.
Whereas Frieren offers up more of the history of the world and how areas transform over time while highlighting the main character’s newfound desire to form meaningful connections, Delicious in Dungeon is more focused on the ecology and environment of the dungeon. Both series play with common fantasy adventure anime tropes, and subvert them by focusing on aspects that most fantasy anime don’t focus on.
Ascendance of a Bookworm
Motosu Urano loves books. She recently got her librarian certification and was about to enter her dream job when an earthquake caused her to be crushed by her collection of books.
She is reincarnated into a new world as the five year old daughter of a soldier. Unfortunately, in this world, books are reserved for the elite nobility.
What do you do when your station in life does not afford you access to books? Make your own.
While Ascendance of a Bookworm is an isekai anime, it isn’t about your standard OP isekai protagonist. Instead, it is about a girl who just wants to make books available to everyone in a fantasy world where they are rare and only something the nobility can easily obtain.
While making books and eating monsters in dungeons are very different things, what Delicious in Dungeon and Ascendance of a Bookworm most share is a dedication to explaining the detailed process of doing things. Ascendance of the Bookworm walks the audience through all the various steps involved in making books, and makes it interesting. Delicious in Dungeon does the same thing, but with butchering, cooking, and eating fantasy creatures.
The Faraway Paladin
Born into a new world, Will awakens as a baby that has been taken in by three undead guardians of a long-dead city.
As he is raised, he is taught magic and swordsmanship, but also learns of the world that surrounds him. A world that was once ravaged by a powerful warrior that the three undead guardians only just managed to seal away.
As they are bound to that city, they can’t say for sure what became of the world or humanity after their death and undeath, but they prepare young Will for when he will eventually have to venture out into the world.
While The Faraway Paladin lacks any sort of food focus, it has a dedication to world-building on display in its more common adventure story that you don’t often see. Like the details that Delicious in Dungeon explores in its dungeon environment with its ecology, The Faraway Paladin explores in the history of the world and its religious systems.
The Faraway Paladin is definitely the more common fantasy anime (with a light isekai element), but it is a great one for those that do like anime that focus more on the details rather than flashy action alone.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Delicious in Dungeon? Let fans know in the comments section below.
