30 Tasty Food Anime About The Joys of Eating

There’s just something about food when it is animated that just make it look delicious, even more so than if it were in front of you.

And that’s great, because anime actually has a bit of a love affair with food! Maybe its because animators only have a spare moment for a hot meal and have to live vicariously through their art. While that’s a tragedy, their love of food grows everyone’s love of food.

No matter whether you want to learn some new recipes, watch girls enjoy food in an almost sexual way, or enjoying high-octane cooking competitions, there is a food anime out there that can satisfy you.

Best Food Anime

Gourmet Girl Graffiti

Gourmet Girl Graffiti is, in its simplest terms, about girls enjoying food together. Like in other food anime, it is occasionally weirdly sexual in their enjoyment, but it comes with a wholesome message.

However, Gourmet Girl Graffiti isn’t just about eating, you learn the basics of each recipe and watch the girls eat it. Within, it discusses how food tastes better when you are with friends and does a little philosophizing on what different foods are good for different seasons or occasions.

Wakakozake

Wakakozake is a short-form episode anime where episodes are just a few minutes each about an office lady that likes to eat and drink to unwind each night after work.

This is another food anime that is all about food philosophy, such as what food and spirits go together, what to eat after a long day, and so on and so forth. It features simple animation and simple stories, but the food looks amazing.

Ristorante Paradiso

Ristorante Paradiso is just slightly more elegant than most food anime.

It is about a young girl that initially wants revenge for her mother leaving when she was young. However, when she goes into a Italian restaurant in Rome, she is so captivated by the elegance, her need for revenge fades.

This, in turn, sends her down the long road of working there, enjoying the food, and even starting her own uniquely explored age-gap romance.

Bartender

Bartender isn’t really about food, but rather about drink.

Cocktails can have a similar effect as a good dish. They can have explosive flavors, and the whole plot of Bartender is basically helping people with their problems by pairing them with the right cocktail.

Bartender is most interesting when it is exploring the various character stories each episode, but it is also surprisingly educational about cocktails, giving you brief snippets of history about many of them.

Yumeiro Patissiere

Japan has a major love affair for pastries, and you better believe that Yumeiro Patissiere won’t be the last food anime about pastry chefs on this list.

Yumeiro Patissiere is, however, aimed at a younger, female audience, but if you like competitive cooking anime, then this is an excellent option for anyone. However, most people just watch it for the good looking baked goods and okay-looking slight romance.

Ben-to

Not all food anime have to be cooking anime.

Sometimes they are about fighting.

Fighting over food.

Fighting over lunch box bentos, to be specific.

That is the premise of Ben-To. People fighting over the best bento boxes with the best prices. It is peak silliness in terms of plot, but it carries it out perfectly. Plus, the bentos do look worth fighting for.

Cooking Papa

Although this anime series is older, if you want to get into Japanese cooking, Cooking Papa can be a very informative anime.

The series has a basic plot about a dad cooking for his kid, but it is an excellent show that displays a number of basic recipes and light food philosophy.

Bonjour Sweet Love Patisserie

This is one of the newer pastry chef anime out there, but Bonjour Sweet Love Patisserie is one for the ladies.

Essentially, the show is Ouran High School Host Club if all the boys were pastry chefs. You watch bishounen men make delicious sweets, and what more of a sell do you need?

Silver Spoon

Silver Spoon isn’t a cooking anime. Silver Spoon is a farming anime. However, what do you think the very first step to food is? Producing it, of course!

Silver Spoon follows a city boy that goes to an agricultural high school thinking it will be easier. However, farming is not just hard work, but slaughtering animals you raised for meat is emotionally difficult.

The series does well to cover the difficulties of farming in all forms, but it also shows you the rewards for that work – amazing food.

Yakitate!! Japan

Yakitate Japan tells the story of Kazuma Azuma, a teenaged boy with warm hands that are excellent for making bread. His dream is to make Ja-Pan, the national bread of Japan (“Pan” meaning bread in Japanese).

If you have ever been interested in the finer points of making bread, well, here you go. While Yakitate Japan can get silly with it, the anime is still very educational about bread-making.

Oishinbo

Like Cooking Papa, Oishinbo is an older anime series and vastly more lengthy manga series following a culinary journalist and his partner.

They live, they laugh, and they eat ten tons of food, critiquing it and how it is made.

You want to see lots and lots of food, but don’t necessarily care about seeing it cooked? Choose this anime.

Ramen Fighter Miki

Ramen Fighter Miki is the story of two young delivery people. Miki, who delivers ramen for her parent’s shop, and Megumi, who delivers bread for her parent’s bakery.

They take their jobs and their products very seriously. So seriously it results in fights.

To be honest, this one has less of a focus on the food and more of a passionate love of food, but it is still a fun watch despite the basic animation.

Cooking Master Boy

You want a food anime a little more flamboyantly original? Well, Cooking Master Boy takes place in the (fictional) Era of Cooking Wars in China.

Liu Mao Hsing dreams of becoming a legendary chef, so he travels China to expand his knowledge and challenge great masters.

Cooking Master Boy is actually a nice change of pace in the large genre of cooking anime because it focuses on Chinese cuisine rather than Japanese.

Sweetness and Lightning

Although Sweetness and Lightning is about parenthood, or rather, single fatherhood, it is also about cooking.

A single father and teacher learns to cook for his young daughter alongside one of his students at her mother’s restaurant.

Together they learn to make and enjoy some truly amazing looking food while also being pretty detailed in the recipes.

JK Meshi

In JK Meshi, three girls have mastered the art of JK Meshi cooking, or “high school girl” cooking.

This anime is about them trying to focus on school, but getting distracted and ending up JK Meshi cooking. It is simple and easy food, but it looks and probably is delicious.

Food Wars

Food Wars has probably become the most famous cooking anime because it combines the excitement of a shounen anime, the gags of a comedy anime, the all the amazing food of a competitive cooking anime into one tidy and addicting package.

While some may be put off by the series frequently expressing how good the food is by having the character’s clothing burst off, Food Wars is a food anime deeply steeped in reality, when it comes to its recipes, anyway.

Many of the food in Food Wars, even the most craziest dishes, can actually be replicated in real life.

Toriko

While Food Wars captures some of the shounen battle-like intensity that keeps audiences addicted, Toriko takes it up a notch.

Toriko is all about about fighting for rare ingredients and eating to gain power. It follows a hunter who is hoping to someday craft his ultimate meal. He and his chef friend head out to gather ingredients and cook them all for that sweet, sweet eating experience.

They basically made a food-themed Dragon Ball Z, and there is nothing wrong with that at all.

Drifting Dragons

Drifting Dragons follows a team of dragon hunters to travel the skies in an airship to take down dragons for meat and oil.

While Drifting Dragons is very much a monster hunting anime, they are hunting those dragons for meat. As such, it becomes a food anime too.

Similar to Toriko, they are using fictional ingredients from their world, but you see real world inspirations in the dishes. You have (dragon) steak sandwiches, (dragon) meat cutlets, and (dragon) meat stew that is an awful lot like Hungarian goulash. If you know your food, you’ll recognize the dishes.

Mister Ajikko

Mister Ajikko tells the story of the young Youichi Ajiyoshi that helps his mother cook at their restaurant. However, he catches the eye of one of the most famous food critics in Japan who then invites him to Japan’s most prestigious cooking competition.

If you need a Top Chef, Master Chef, or Hell’s Kitchen fix in anime form but didn’t like the ecchi of Food Wars, this is for you.

Moyashimon

Moyashimon is a unique anime about a boy that can see bacteria. While Moyashimon goes through all the roles that bacteria plays in our life, from being harmful to helpful, it can also be surprisingly food-centric sometimes.

Bacteria doesn’t just make food go bad, the right bacteria plays an essential role in fermenting food, and Moyashimon goes into great detail about it.

Deaimon – Recipe for Happiness

When it comes to found family anime, they tend to have a larger than usual focus on food. Almost as if eating something good is some kind of boon, or a great unifier, or something.

Regardless, Deaimon is a found family anime in which the main character, a failing musician, returns home to Kyoto after thinking his father is ill. He had intended to take over the family’s traditional confectionary business, but finds that his father already has a successor – a little girl they took in – and isn’t even sick anyway.

The main character and the girl bond in a very father-daughter-like way as the series also explores the production process and philosophy of traditional Japanese sweets.

Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family

While Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family is a spin-off of the girthy Fate / Stay franchise, you don’t actually need to watch the main franchise to enjoy it for what it is. It certainly helps you understand some of the characters, but otherwise this is a very food-focused anime.

Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family is a slice of life food anime about what the characters of the Fate franchise would be cooking tonight if they weren’t killing each other in a battle royale tournament for the Holy Grail. The series is meant to be nice and light since the Fate franchise can be something that is particularly grim at times.

Antique Bakery

It might be best to mention early that Antique Bakery is a food anime, but it is also a boy’s love romance. Although, it is one of the tamer ones.

Antique Bakery follows a man that has become a serious playboy, but also a great pastry chef. When he gets a new job at a bakery, he discovers that he is working under the man that brutally rejected his love confession many years ago.

This series perhaps prioritizes its BL romance over the food, but you get a few tasty pastries along the way.

Isekai Izakaya

The bulging genre that is isekai anime comes for all things, and with Isekai Izakaya, it comes for food anime.

Isekai Izakaya features a Japanese izakaya that serves people from another world. It highlights all the staples of the Japanese Izakaya, which is a restaurant that specializes in small dishes and spirits to go with them.

This short-form episode anime often captures the basic enjoyment of the food, but doesn’t really focus in too much on individual characters. It really is a show aimed pretty specifically at food.

Restaurant to Another World

Isekai comes for all things, but this time it came almost suspiciously similarly. Like Isekai Izakaya, Restaurant to Another World is about a Japanese restaurant that serves fantasy patrons.

This series, having the benefit of longer episodes, often lets the characters shine a little more. Speaking of shine, they certainly jazzed up the food visuals as well.

Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits

After discovering that her grandfather sold her as a bride to an ogre in the spirit world, a girl does what she must to instead settle the debt herself.

Instead of becoming a bride, she starts a restaurant on the grounds of that ogre’s traditional Japanese Inn in the spirit world.

Kakuriyo does great at balancing exploring the unique residents of the spirits world, building out the romance, and showing off great Japanese food. No one aspect begins to overwhelm the other, which actually works to let the show never be boring to fans who were maybe more into the food than the other aspects.

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles is quintessential cute girls doing cute things anime. In this case, that “cute thing” is eating ramen all over Japan.

That’s it. That’s the anime. They travel all around Japan and eat the many different types of ramen. If you are a serious ramen enthusiast, then this is the food anime for you.

Dagashi Kashi

Japanese snacks often get a serious snub when it comes to food anime, but that’s okay because Dagashi Kashi fully dedicates itself to them.

Dagashi Kashi features the daughter of a wealthy snack company trying to recruit a boy’s father. However, the man only agrees to go if she can get his son to take over his snack shop. So, she gets to work trying to light his passion for snack food!

The most charming thing about Dagashi Kashi as a food anime is that it really goes into the history of popular Japanese snacks. Sometimes so much so that the audience finds it off-putting. However, if you enjoy a variety of Japanese treats, it is actually pretty interesting to learn about them.

Poko’s Udon World

Poko’s Udon World is another food-themed found family anime with a bit of a supernatural twist. Instead of bonding with a human kid, he is bonding with a kid that is actually a tanuki.

After returning home to Kagawa, the home prefecture of udon, for a break, a man finds a tanuki and decides to take care of him. The pair bond over many things, but none more than udon.

Campfire Cooking in Another World With My Absurd Skill

Campfire Cooking in Another World is pretty much what it says on the title. A guy is summoned to another world, discovers his only special power is being able to buy goods from an online Japanese grocery, and sets off on an adventure to not be an adventurer.

He gains a pretty ravenous companion, and starts cooking meals that provide serious buffs for people that eat them – alongside being pretty delcious.

I find Campfire Cooking in Another World to be one of the more approachable cooking anime. It does things honestly like using pre-made marinade and sometimes buying specific ingredients already made. Food anime has a love affair with doing things from scratch sometimes, but buying premade components still is completely valid, and Campfire Cooking in Another World really embraces that.

Did we miss any more good food anime? Let ravenous fans know in the comments section below.