Headscratchers / Food Wars!

• What happens when any of the Elite Ten members graduate while retaining their seats?
  • Just curious. Is this where the prejudices of Shokugeki against alumni comes from? Is it a free-for-all between all takers until someone crawls out on top? Do they "pass" their seat on to a chosen successor? Do they just drop it, and stop caring? Ideas, please.
  • I'm leaning towards either a 'drop it and let them fight over it' attitude, or the graduating senpai in question sponsors a small tourney between his/her chosen candidates before s/he graduates. However, this becomes problematic once we look at Erina, since the events of the manga starts right at the start of the academic year and there is almost no way that a shokugeki had been started and won by Erina.
    • Totsuki has both a Junior High School level and a High School level. Erina most likely won her Elite Ten membership in the previous level. (she also is already referenced as Elite Ten by Hisako when Soma has his entrance exam)
  • My guess is that the members below their rank have a mass Shokugeki to see who gets it, or maybe everyone below just moves up a rank and there's some sort of competition for the new 10th seat.
  • It's likely that when an Elite Ten member graduates, they have to re-evaluate the current members to fill the new spots with other students. So it's possible for an Elite Ten to gain a higher seat like Azami did, or gain a lower seat due to another member or non-Elite Ten student's result in said evaluation.
    • Hayama becoming the new 9th seat seems to be a good indicator of this since Eizan was the original 9th seat.
• I am rather curious on how the Tootsuki school is structured as a whole. I simply see no way that a bloke fresh out of middle school learning three years in Tootsuki can open a restaurant within two years of graduating (and being successful at that). Perhaps Tootsuki is more of an elevator culinary school that starts with a middle school and ends in college?
  • Ikumi's manga introduction states that she had the top rankings for meat dishes in the "middle school section" of Tootsuki, so the elevator school theory is probably right.
  • This is not possible, consider Sonoka Kikuchi, as a member of the 89th generation she would only be three years older than Soma and the rest of the 92th gen, so she would only have finshed high school last year, already owns a restaurant. More likely they use the power that comes with being a member of the elite 10 to make contacts and earn money while still in school, Eizan for example runs a food consultant business.
  • It's probably similar to how a graduate from a prestigious university can get a high paying job. If someone goes to a bank and says "I graduated from this uber-prestigious culinary school and have worked in several world-famous five-star restaurants, btw here's a sample of some of my cooking please give me money to open a restaurant" I can see that being successful. The only issue that might arise is the age of the students. However, remember that a lot of the graduates are from prestigious families and most likely already have family-owned restaurants they work in (like Souma and Houjou) so they definitely have both experience with running a restaurant and business in general, not to mention the relationships made within the school itself would have certain benefits (for example, Nikumi owning a meat company would be a good personal relationship to have down the road when you need to purchase some high-quality meat for your restaurant)
  • In terms of the graduates themselves having the proper know-how to run a business, events like the Stagiaire System and the Moon Banquet Festival give the students multiple opportunities for them to gain experience with working situations. Not to mention that it is also entirely possible to graduate from Totsuki and NOT actually end up successful right off the bat; Shinomiya himself almost failed completely due to his inexperience with working with others and just barely dragged himself back to success.
• So basically, if you aren't on the Elite Council, you will not graduate from Tootsuki. What a huge waste to get through three years of high school, only to not be one of the five to graduate. What happens then, taking the GED or equivalent just to show that you passed high school? That's even worse somehow, to be there all three years only to be expelled right before the graduation ceremony because you aren't on the Elite council. And everyone would know.
  • The series never said that. Being a part of the Elite Ten only gives the members more benefits in the culinary world, and doesn't imply the opposite. The main point of the story is that most of the students are easily intimidated by their competition being "more talented", and they would give up without even trying to take the top, which is why most of the students have been expelled, regardless if they were part of the Elite Ten or not. Soma's admission to Tootsuki is established to be the turning point where the other students will have to bring up their potentials and demonstrate that everyone can be skilled, no matter who they are against.
    • It is said that only 1% of the students will make it to graduation. Furthermore, the number of graduates can be counted on one hand. So it is heavily implied that the ones on the council are the ones to graduate because they are the ones on top. If the student makes it on to the Elite Council, they are certain to actually graduate with a diploma. After all, the alumni shown thus far, except for Shiomi, had high ranking seats. So what happens to the rest of the ones that make it through 3rd year but don't make it on to the council? They're guaranteed not to get a high school diploma, wasting three years only to get whatever is the equivalent to a GED. Great. Unless graduation can be won by Shokugeki... In any case, Soma is a sign of change because he is such an underdog and his father didn't graduate at all. In the end, the question is what happens to the ones who make it through, but don't graduate? It's not like they can transfer to finish the year. They can be chefs, but what if they wanted to do something else after devoting all that time to and, by Tootsuki standards, failing at cooking? They don't have a diploma to go to college. GED, then? Just thinkin'...
    • I think it's pretty safe to say that if you gut out Tootsuki's curriculum for three years, you are there because you want to cook professionally. Also, everyone is aware that being expelled from Tootsuki is not "failing as a cook" any more than dropping out of SEAL training or Ranger School is "failing as a soldier". You are a stone-cold badass for getting in.
    • Donato and Sekimori aren't Elite 10 when they graduated. Manga clearly states seat holders in the panels.
    • Actually, we don't know if Donato and Sekimori held seats in the Elite 10.
    • actually it never is said that only 1% graduate. Rather 10% graduate, but of those only 10% (so 1% over all) are really worth it. This comes down to roughly the ten best of a class.
    • As an aside, a seat on the Elite Ten is no guarantee for graduation. Jouichiro didn't graduate, and he was second seat.
  • Judging by how the members of the Elite 10 are split up by year, it's entirely possible to be part of the top ten or even top five of your year and not be part of the Elite 10.
  • The "Survivors Hunt" disproves it even further, as Azami created an army entirely made of "Elite Ten Reserves", who are all the students with talents nearly as good as the Elite Ten members. Central currently has 30 members who have eliminated many of the Research Society leaders.
• In the anime, during the camp on the first evening, the students are tasked with making 50 steak dishes apiece in an hour. How is it even possible to cook 50 steaks in an hour? More to the point, with a class size somewhere between 500 and 1000 at this point, that would be at minimum 25,000 meals in an hour. Where are all the support staff and facilities to store that much food and then serve it? The hotel doesnt appear to be nearly big enough.
  • The steak set itself seems to be pretty easy for an experienced chef. Each steak would probably be able to get cooked in 3-4 minutes, with the ability to cook multiple pieces at once. Soup, salad, and rice can be made and served in large quantities, and using the time that the steak is cooking to prepare the other ingredients isn't out of the question. The beginning of episode 10 implies that they are actually preparing the sets in bulk, with Megumi serving maybe 8-10 people at one time.
  • The food appears to be served as soon as it's done, and it's multiple groups of people who can all eat multiple portions, so presumably they're being cycled in and out of the hotel as they eat. There are also different areas where the tasks are being done (Erina was definitely in a different area as Souma as he would have noticed otherwise that she finished so early) and with such a fancy hotel holding the name of the biggest culinary juggernaut in Japan there's no reason that they wouldn't have the ability to store that much food. Also, it's entirely possible that they have trucks that are bringing the ingredients in as the students cook or something like that.
• This is an anime-only headscratcher, but in episode 24, the anime added a scene at the end with Erina where she reminisces about the fragrance of Souma's curry dish and gets mad. It's a funny scene and all, but while I can stretch my suspension of disbelief that the smell from the fragrance bombs would reach the members of the audience that were inside the stadium, I can't believe that the smell would be strong enough to be that distinct even inside the observation area that Erina, Isshiki, and Fumio were in. The area itself is blocked off with glass, and I can't imagine it being able to survive going through a ventilation system or something like that.
  • I would counter this by bringing up the fact that as a necessity Erina's God's Tongue would mean she has a crazy acute sense of smell since the "taste"of food is actually a combination of smell, taste, spiciness, temperature and texture. Much of the flavor of food comes from smell, so much so that when you are unable to smell you have lost much of your ability to experience flavor. Therefore to have a palette as sensitive as the God's Tongue one would assume that her sensitivity to all the above is several fold higher than and ordinary persons.
  • Also, back in the training camp, Shinomiya picked out one particular student in a crowd by his hair spray. So some people are 'just that good'.
• How does the bottom not fall out with the school? Considering how almost every event we see is do or die... You can be expelled by non-teachers on a whim or for relatively trivial or incidental issues... Set up intentionally to fail and restrict applicants passing... And that's after a curriculum that seems to be less about teaching, and more testing, expecting the students to be flawless from day one. We're told there are about 1000 students in the original new class with Soma and crew, a number that has been whittled down to less than 300 since in the manga. And it hasn't even been a year, let alone the three where it supposedly gets even harder. How does this school function when graduation is almost statistically impossible?
  • First of all, this is adressed within the manga, after Senzaemon was deposed. The competitiveness of the curriculum was not appreciated in all quarters, and Azami's reforms were (as far as we can see) welcomed by many, including a significant number of the Elite Ten. That said...
    • Tootsuki isn't about taking people off the street and turning them into cooks. It's about taking people who are already knowledgeable and passionate about food and turning them into culinary powerhouses. The manga states that just being able to say you attended Tootsuki is enough to get you an entry-level job in pretty much any kitchen, because the school is just that prestigious. Judging by Jouichiro's career, even Tootsuki drop-outs pick up skills which are well beyond the ken of mortals, and skills will get you far in the cooking world, even without a piece of paper to prove them.
    • Or to put it simply, if food is a battlefield, Tootsuki is Ranger School, not boot camp.
    • The only events we have seen which are do or die for everyone so far, which aren't clearly the result of exceptional circumstances or someone running their mouth, are the Training Camp and the Stagiare period. Two hard tests, with those who can't pass leaving because they can't handle the curriculum, in a year... sounds about right to me. Tests that can only be passed by a set number of students are not common in a regular school setting, but common in military settings, and in this series it wouldn't surprise me if cooking is as serious business as war. Guest instructors having power to remove students from courses is, again, not common at a high school level, but could easily happen in a university setting. Tootsuki's methods are extreme examples, but the underlying principles are not unheard of in real life.
    • We only see the situations that are life or death because the rest of the comings and goings do not make for good drama. The cast has been seen in class, and has less demanding lessons and tests going on behind the scenes. As seen in the preliminaries for Soma's face-off with Subaru, a regular afternoon for Soma means classes in Math, English, Western Cooking History and Practical Spanish Cuisine.
    • Financially, Tootsuki is a powerhouse unto itself. It owns a large hotel chain, has a cutting-edge food science division and its school festival draws half a million visitors.
• Apparently, Azami intends to shut down every restaurant in Japan that he doesn't personally approve of. Three things here that don't make sense to me:
  1. One of the restaurants apparently in Azami's steamroller is Yukihira. Isn't Soma's father one of the few people Azami respects as a chef? Why would he want to tear down a restaurant belonging to someone that he respects? (Or am I remembering something incorrectly?)
  2. A huge reason not every restaurant is haute cuisine is because it is way out of the price range of all but the most wealthy. Under Azami's system, what will become of the people who don't have that income level or the time to just eat homecooked meals every day? For that matter, isn't he forgetting that restaurants can only exist when enough people buy their food to remain profitable?
  3. Does Azami really think he has the power to go to court against companies like McDonald's and Yum Foods (which owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut)? He may be fabulously rich, but he doesn't have the power international companies like these do. If Azami tries to make a law against fast food chains (and plenty exist in Japan with tremendous influence too, like Yoshinoya), these guys are going to destroy him in court.
  1. Azami admires Joichiro and didn't like him reducing himself to serving mere commoners. Which is why Azami was excited when Joichiro offered to join him.
  2. Azami stated in his very first appearance that he hates people who think expensive food made from expensive ingredients is automatically haute cuisine. His judgments rest on the skills of the chefs and how close their skills and methods adhere to his ideals, and he wants to introduce that level and type of cooking skills at all levels of the culinary world.
  3. No, he doesn't. He thinks that with a thousand new chefs a year, all trained to his (insanely high) standards and indoctrinated to blindly follow his way of thinking and backed by Tootsuki's massive resources and influence (remember, Tootsuki is not just the school, but also an international R&D division, a huge luxury resort chain, and several food production branches), he can shape the way the world thinks about food and out-compete anyone else. That other styles than his might be more appealing to some people probably never crossed his mind. He's a bit of a narcissist, y'see.
• Soma's father is shown to be an extremely skilled cook, to the point of not only having a position at a posh NYC hotel, but also having Buddhist monks tracking him down there just to eat his food. How do the diner and Soma not already have some kind of reputation among the culinary elites at Totsuki?
  • The simple answer is: Because Jouichiro actively worked to keep it that way. Isshiki mentions that "the Wandering Chef" dropped off the radar and vanished about a decade earlier, and while Yukihira obviously served good food, it was also very much a small working man's diner tucked away in a very unremarkable suburb.
• How is it realistic that Roland asks the students to make a beef bourguignon in 2 hours? Beef bourguignons in real life take those 2 hours just to properly cook inside of the pot, if you consider chopping all the ingredients and browning the meat you'll only have like 1 hour to 30 minutes to fully cook the stew which is unrealistic for a full block of meat to get soften in such few time instead of the traditional chunks. Also it's very few time for the wine to properly mix and evaporate the alcohol which in fact takes all those 2 hours, with such few time it may taste terrible.
  • First of all, the bœuf bourguignon I'm familiar with is a stew, with chunks of meat; what Chapelle's class is making seems to be a pot roast. I suppose you could make that with the same sauce. Maybe Japan has different definitions?
    Second, yeah, I don't see how tough meat could be tenderized so quickly — unless you used a pressure cooker, which they aren't.
    On the other hand, I think there is enough time for the sauce. You can cook off alcohol quite quickly if you reduce the wine by itself first, then add the stock or whatever other liquid is going in.
• Don't the middle-school kids talk to each other? How is it that Mimasaka's technique of baiting other students into betting their prize tools, then copying their dishes, isn't well known? I could see the first half-dozen victims being taken by surprise, but 99?
  • Mimasaka does mention that when he's up against a chef who's aware of his copying trick, they do one of two things: claim to be preparing one dish but then make another (which Mimasaka always sees through with his stalking), or completely improvise a dish (which thought process Mimasaka extrapolates from their actions with his stalking). Additionally, the expelling for poor cooking has been going on since middle school. Their first year begins with 1000 students, so we can assume that there were far more than that in middle school. So (a) a fair number of people are aware of his tricks, but not enough that it has percolated the entire 1000 (or less now) student population, and (b) it's highly probable that people who had lost to him or were aware of him had left, making the spread of gossip about him much slower.
• The answer to this question is probably going to be "Totsuki can do whatever the hell it wants and the whole Elite Ten system has even worse problems", but anyway... How is allowing any student (i.e. Erina) to proctor entrance exams not a huge conflict of interest? If anyone that could threaten her as a chef were to appear, she could just reject them.
  • Flip the question: The Council of Ten Masters runs the school. If one of them decides they want to proctor the entrance exam, who is going to stop them?
• The Hokkaido tests are obviously and blatantly incredibly stacked against what the examiners call "the resistance." Aren't they asking for a lawsuit? Does Totsuki have really good lawyers? Or are they employing Loophole Abuse? I know none of the Polaris people are really that interested in taking legal action, and they'll pass the tests regardless of the setbacks placed on them, but if this ever happened in the real world, I think Totsuki would need to get their lawyers ready.
  • "What, exactly is so unfair? We assigned the salmon randomly, and there were some which were of inferior quality. Really, we tried to get the best ones we could, but so late in the season...tant pis... why they ended up with detractors of the current leadership? Bad luck."
  • "There were more than enough basic ingredients for everyone to have enough to make a noodle dish. If some students took more than their fair share... well, that's hardly our fault. Also, it's a chef's responsibility to secure ingredients, and there was ample time to go into town. We could hardly have predicted that there would be a snowstorm exactly at the time of the exam, could we?"
    • Yes, there is stacking, but nothing which will hold up in court, especially not since the only proof of stacking is the word of a few disgruntled students who have made it their business to stick as many spanners in the machinery as they can.
    • Until the Elite Ten being the Resistance's opponents comes into play that is, these are the 10 best students in the academy. Even if Azami does allow more than one of them to face against a single member, it's clear he's setting them up against opponents that almost everyone in Totsuki can claim are guaranteed to beat them.
• How can Kojirou use Gratuitous French — saying "recette" instead of "recipe" — in scenes where he's actually speaking French in France?
• In the Moon Festival, why does the first day put Soma so deeply in the hole? He had a fair amount of food left over, but much could be used the next day. His staffing and equipment-rental costs are minimal. All I can think of is the fee for the booth space.
  • Soma most likely heavily overestimated how many customers he would pull in on the first day and made too many black pepper buns in advance. Since that sort of food has to be served hot and fresh, it can't exactly be saved for the next day and would have to be disposed of somehow.
  • It's later revealed that Soma gave away his leftovers as free samples as advertising of a sort. This would explain where all his profit margin went. (Unsure if he did that on the first day too, though.)
• Why entrust the Elite Ten with so much power and influence at Tootsuki as such to control the school's budget and headmaster when a number of the members have their own personal quirks or issues from their upbringing or age that would negatively affect the intended purpose of the school?
  • Because it falls in line with the school's strict adherence to pure meritocracy. Those that manage to make their way to the top have the power to call the shots.
• What is it that makes a "Noir chef" a "Noir chef"? Is it the fact that their cooking methods are illegal, they become co-accomplices to crimes by holding in information of their criminal clients from the law or using methods that are so unorthodox that both could endanger others or turn cumbersome in a regular restaurant and kitchen with its staff that might end up in the cross-lines of them? Are they evil or just illegal chefs? What is the definition of a "Noir Chef" really about?
  • It seems the Noirs are simply talented chefs who couldn't or aren't interested in working in a "legitimate" cooking position, so they turned to the underworld cooking scene.
• How the hell did Asahi manage to defeat Joichiro, when the former received sporadic training from the latter? Sōma on the other hand has been training for years and is still unable to defeat his father.
  • The most recent chapter implies that he used his "Cross Knives" ability to perfectly copy Joichiro's cooking talent and defeat him. It's also possible that Joichiro deliberately lost against Asahi to ensure he and Soma face off.
• Why would Momo acknowledge Megumi if Megumi lost to Momo? It would make more sense for Momo to acknowledge Erina instead. After all Momo lost to Erina.
  • Just because Megumi lost doesn't mean she didn't give an impression on Momo. Remember, Momo's victory came with a split vote as opposed to a unanimous decision, not to mention the fact that the most major thing that brought Megumi down (at least from what I watched from the anime) was the fact that part of her dorayaki had a slight bitter taste that took away from it (making so that should that mistake not have happened Megumi may very well have won). The fact that Megumi was able to keep up with Momo and even came close to winning was enough for Momo to acknowledge Megumi as her equal.
• If Mana didn't want Erina to participate at BLUE, why was Erina even invited to participate in the first place?
• In Le Dessert: Future, it is stated that Erina graduated with top honors from Totsuki. How is that possible when at that time, she was already the Dean of Totsuki? Did she frame the exam and give herself the highest grades???

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