Book Review
Title: Sota’s Knife Volume 1
Author: Kei Honjo & Yuichiro Sueda
Genre: Manga
Rating: ***
Review: So, this manga follows 20-year-old Sota Kitaoka working at a famous restaurant as he struggles with his own ambition to become a chef in his own right. While he is working doing small jobs like dish-washing and peeling potatoes Sota has a dream to work with his father in their family restaurant.
For the first ¼ of this manga, we have been following Sota in his daily life working at the restaurant and the different kinds of people he interacts with and how these interactions affect him and his decisions. While I liked some of them and hated other I understand this is helping Sota grow as a person and giving him more perspective on his life. However, not a lot has happened in the grand scheme of things and I wasn’t really enjoying the story.
As we cross into the second half of the manga, Sota is learning more and more about what it truly means to be a chef and how some of the skills they use can only come from years of hard work along with plenty of trial and error, but he isn’t ambitious in the sense of getting ahead but in the sense of helping his friends.
However, when a famous connoisseur visits the restaurant he takes a liking to Sota and sets him a challenge to cook without using an extremely important ingredient. Sota being only a kitchen hand has never been allowed to cook in the restaurant before and he puts his everything into this challenge and comes away better for it. We also learn behind the scenes that the challenge that Sota completed in a few days took the man near a decade to do and he knows that Sota is going to go far and I have a feeling he will be setting Sota more challenges in the future.
Overall, I enjoyed the learning experience that was Sota’s knife, but it wasn’t really in a genre that I liked. Food Wars is set in a similar genre, but it offsets the tension and serious moments with light-hearted humour that Sota’s knife lacked in my opinion. While this manga might be right for some I won’t be continuing with this series.
Buy it here:
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Also see: Ping Pong Dash Volume 1 by Shingo Honda
I received this review copy from NetGalley
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