Eat to Your Heart's Delight Inside 'Isekai Shokudou'

There exists a door that connects to another world. All you need is wait for that door to appear so you can enter into the other world quite different from your own. When the door appears and it is opened, a brand new story unfolds. 

The wooden door appears from everywhere. It can be found in the forest, in the cave, on the falls ground. It happens to appear just from everywhere.

Supported by a wooden frame, the single door hangs a bronzed gold plate with a cat on top biting on the rope of an engraved kanji characters on the ribbon sign. A bell chimes entry when the golden knob is opened.

Welcome to Cat Western Restaurant.

Cat Western Restaurant is like an ordinary food restaurant where regular people come in to eat and fill their hunger. That's mostly for the typical days of the place though, which is the weekdays.

However, every seventh day of the week, the door opens to serve another group of people. 

 

The seventh day, also known as the special day of Satur, is a special day to creatures from the demon fairy land. This is the day when they come in to eat and enjoy food at Cat Western Restaurant. Different kinds of creatures drop in here. Including  are a sage, elf, warrior, treasure hunter, dragon-changing-women, etc.

Aletta, a homeless demon, shunned from work because of her goats' ears (demon ears) stayed in a broken down place where she sleeps on thick mounds of hay. Always hungry from lack of job, one night, she found a wooden door that showed up near her sleeping place. She smelled the scent of food emanating from the inside. She opened the door with a chyme, barged inside quietly, and headed straight to the kitchen to find a whole pot of soup newly cooked. Famished from hunger, she dipped the metal soup ladle to sip the soup until she finished the entire pot and slept well-fed on the floor.

She was found by the restaurant-chef owner aslept on his kitchen floor, fed her breakfast and asked her to serve tables for his place for ten silvers. Every day of Satur she served customers who came in with their regular orders. 

Like Aletta, several people living in the demon fairy land also saw the magical door. The first time each characters opened the golden knob, the chime of the bell rings before stepping inside the restaurant. A chef wearing a white uniform greeted the new guest and prepared his or her selected dish.

Full of flavor and delightful to the tastes of these new customers, each eagerly awaited for the day of Satur to arrive so they could eat again in the chosen restaurant. Eventually the dish they first ordered became their favorite dishes as they became regulars of the place. Their favorite dishes became their nicknames. Sometimes a heating debate ensued to convince which plate was the most delectable.

Isekai Shokudou serves to delight its audience on this food fantasy anime adapted from the novel written by Junpei Inuzuka. Silver Link Studio produced the anime under direction of Masato Jinbo.

The fairy tale fantasy, which is the theme of the story combines and co-exists with the normal human world. The chef cooks dishes for elfin customers  and normal humans alike coming in every Saturday from the demon fairy land.

The animation is elaborately done. The demon fairy world offers what you can imagine for this world. The trees, mountains, waters, etc. The characters are nicely illustrated, bishoujo-style for women characters. I thought it was a manga adaptation but it was a novel written first, then adapted into manga.

"One in a Billion" by Wake up, May'n is a slow start song going lively to the chorus part. "Chiisana Hitotsubu" by Kiyono Yasuno is a slow, soft and relaxing ending theme.

Enjoy Isekai Shokudou and eat like one of the customers here to your heart's content. Bon appetit!