After the death of his wife, high school math teacher Kouhei Inuzuka is left to care for his young daughter, Tsumugi. He does his best, but his busy schedule and poor culinary skills limit them to eating convenience store food separately. One day, his daughter expresses an interest to eat together after talking to one of his students in the park, Kotori, who deeply enjoys food. He rushes over to the restaurant owned by the student’s mother, but she is not there. While Kotori tries her best to cook for them, her skills are lacking. However, together, Inuzuka-sensei, Tsumugi, and Kotori learn to expand their cooking skills.
Heart-warming and stomach-rumbling, Sweetness and Lighting proved to be a hidden gem. If you are hungry for more food and parental affection, then check out these anime recommendations like Sweetness and Lightning.
Anime Like Sweetness and Lightning
For Fans of Food
Gourmet Girl Graffiti
Ryou Makiko lives alone while attending art school in the city. Unfortunately, while Ryou loves to cook, all of her dishes have been tasting horrible to her lately. Depressed, her aunt calls one day and tells her that her cousin will be staying with her sometimes on the weekend. When Ryou cooks for her cousin, suddenly she realizes that her cooking wasn’t bad, it was just meant to be eaten with others.
Food brings people together. That is the central theme that unites both Gourmet Girl Graffiti and Sweetness and Lightning. In both series, food is used as a catalyst to bring family and friends together where they bond and strengthen their relationships. Both feature heavy emphasis on enjoying the food as well as detailed instructions on how to prepare it.
Silver Spoon
Yuugo Hachiken is studious and hard-working, but is tired of trying to live up to modern society’s high academic expectations. So for high school, he decides to go to agricultural school in Hokkaido, thinking it will be a breeze. Oh, how wrong he was. Yet, he is about to learn how much more rewarding the work is.
While Silver Spoon has more of a focus on where food comes from, like Sweetness and Lightning it does have some moments where it is cooked and enjoyed. Both shows feature a slowly paced slice of life story about food, featuring light-hearted comedy with some drama mixed in.
Dagashi Kashi
Kokonotsu Shikada has aspirations of becoming a manga artist, but his father wants him to take over their prestigious rural sweets shop that has been in the family for nine generations. Kokonotsu continually refuses until one day the eccentric Hotaru Shidare breezes into town and wants to make his father work for her family’s sweets corporation. Kokonotsu’s father agrees, but only if Hotaru can convince Kokonotsu to take over the shop. So begins Kokonotsu’s days of listening to Hotaru laud the history and value of beloved Japanese treats.
Although a lesser known food anime, Dagashi is a food anime none-the-less. While Sweetness and Lightning deals more with dinner dishes, Dagashi is all about sweets. However, they both maintain strong stances on savoring the dishes presented to them.
Food Wars
Ever since he was a child, Yukihira Souma has helped his father cook in his diner. The definition of learn by doing, he thinks that he has mastered his technique, but still can’t beat his father. After his dad decides to travel the world, he enrolls his son in the Tootsuki Culinary Academy, a brutal academy for upcoming chefs where only ten percent are actually able to reach the high standards demanded to graduate.
Food Wars, with its clothing bursting off in orgasmic bliss after eating something truly great, is a little less wholesome than Sweetness and Lightning. However, if you were enchanted with the food in Sweetness and Lightning and liked that it gave applicable, real recipes, Food Wars is a similar beast in that regard.
Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family
With the Holy Grail War no longer a threat in Fuyuki City, Masters and Servants adjust to this time of peace. For Emiya Shirou, he has taken it upon himself to cook for Saber and show her the joys of modern cuisine.
While Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family is a spin-off series of the Fate / Stay franchise and it helps to have at least seen a little of that to be familiar with the characters, if you are just in it for the food, it is a pretty great standalone. It focuses on cooking meals and, most importantly, how to cook the meals.
If food anime really is your toast and jam, check out these food anime recommendations.
For Fans of Unorthodox Families
Usagi Drop
Daikichi Kawachi is a 30-year-old bachelor with a decent job, but no purpose in his life. When he returns to his family home for his grandfather’s funeral, he finds out that the old man had an illegitimate daughter. With his other relatives not wanting to take in such a child, Daikichi steps up and takes her home. From that day onwards, his hard new life as a parent begins.
When it first premiered, audiences thought Sweetness and Lightning was the spiritual successor to Usagi Drop, and then it turned out to be more about food. Regardless, while Usagi Drop deals with more serious topics of death and family, both it and Sweetness and Lightning are about single fathers trying to do their very best for their kids.
I Love You, Baby
Kippei Katakura is your typical high school playboy. However, his flirty high school life comes to an end when he is tasked with caring for his 5-year-old cousin after his aunt suddenly runs off. Although he has no knowledge of child care and a lack of responsibility, both he and his cousin must adjust to their new chaotic life.
Both anime series feature a man who doesn’t have the best parenting skills being left with a young child. However, Inuzuka in Sweetness and Lighting really does try his best to do right by his daughter all the time, while Kippei has to learn responsibility via caring for a young child.
Listen to Me, Girls. I Am Your Father!
Segawa Yuta is now a freshman in university. Since a young age he was raised by his sister Yuri, but now she is married with a family of her own. One day, Yuri and her husband decide to go on a trip and ask Yuta to look after their three daughters. When Yuri’s plane goes missing, the three children are at risk of being divvied up among relatives. In order to prevent this, Yuta decides to step up and care for them on his own.
This anime is essentially what you would get if you combined Usagi Drop’s loss of family with Sweetness and Lightning’s light-hearted fun and subtracted the food emphasis. While it dips its toe into the dramatic side of the situation, mostly it is a light-hearted anime about an unusual family.
Poko’s Udon World
Souta Tawara is a web designer that has been working in Tokyo. However, when he returns to his small town to visit family, he discovers a young boy alone and with a supernatural secret. Upon the confrontation, Souta decides to quit his job and take care of this boy dubbed Poko. This anime follows their daily adventures in the Kagawa Prefecture, the Udon Kingdom.
Both series highlight adult men who are / end up parenting young children. Don’t be fooled by the title, Poko’s Udon World is less about food. It is more so cute child antics.
Kakushigoto
Kakushi Goto is relatively well known for the lewd manga that he creates. However, when his daughter Hime was born, he vowed to keep his profession a secret. This is the story of the great lengths he goes through to keep his ecchi manga profession a secret from his beloved daughter.
Both series focus on a father trying to be a good father to his daughter. However, while Sweetness and Lightning is about cooking, Kakushigoto is more a comedy about hiding the lewd profession of the father.
If it’s for My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord
Despite his age, Dale is a skillful adventurer with quite the reputation for competence. However, one day while he was on a job, he finds a young devil girl, weak and malnourished, with a dead parent nearby. He decides to take her home and ultimately ends up adopting her. However, the question remains, why was she in the forest to begin with?
Whereas Sweetness and Lightning is fatherhood with a food spin, If It’s For My Daughter is fatherhood with a fantasy spin. Both series are mostly cute fluff, but they do have their more serious moments.
If you enjoyed the parenting aspect of Sweetness and Lightning, try these 7 Anime Recommendations About Childcare
For Fans of Heart-Warming Fluff
The Flying Witch
The young Makoto Kowata is a witch, but her skills in magic leave something to be desired. To further train her craft, she moves to rural Aomori to live with her cousins. This area, rich in nature, is the perfect place to commune with natural forces and hone her craft.
Colorful, peaceful, and full of laughs – that is what these two anime series with very different plots have in common. They are both about cherishing the precious small moments in life and seeing the beauty in things like nature and food.
Barakamon
After losing his temper on a critic, renowned calligraphy artist Sieshuu Handa is exiled to the Goto Islands by his father for a period of self-reflection. There he seeks to find new inspiration for his art, but finds that his neighbors and some neighborhood kids keep getting in his way.
Both series feature kids that are energetic, demanding for attention, and have just the right amount of weird to them. They are also responsible for a metamorphosis in the older male characters in their life.
Gakuen Babysitters
After the death of his parents, teenage Ryuuchi becomes the caretaker of his younger brother Kotarou. After meeting a chairman of an elite academy at his parent’s funeral, they are given room and board in exchange for him becoming the school’s babysitter – a role established to support the female teachers.
While there is no delicious food in Gakuen Babysitters, it has more cute little kids roaming around. However, as they are younger, they are up to child antics of a different kind.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Sweetness and Lightning? Let fans know in the comments section below.
