Cooking anime meets dungeoneering adventure in Delicious in Dungeon. Based on a manga from Ryoko Kui, this show is focused on…

…food, slow character development, light comedy, and snippets of lore about the world and the dungeon environment. We grow to know our several heroes as they learn how to cook many of the creatures they come across, but we’re only given the faintest bits of backstory for each of them—the show is more concerned with revealing them as they interact with each other and the dungeon.

While I’d call this a gentle show, there certainly is violence and death. It’s just… the violence and death aren’t the focus, and they don’t dominate the tone of the show. The show is far more concerned with food, and with musing on how the greater web of dungeon life ties together.

In fact, there’s none of the obsession with fighting that so characterizes shonen or isekai or whatever the hell you call the sexual violence-filled garbage fire that is Goblin Slayer. Yes, it wears many of the same genre trappings, with parties of adventurers dressed in vaguely medieval European gear fight monsters underground. And yes, there are fight scenes as the party encounters monsters or witnesses other groups fighting. But Delicious in Dungeon is less about sweet sword tricks or magic spells and more about properly animating real-life knife skills for use in your kitchen.

Thus, Delicious in Dungeon is a slow character-ful anime about coming to understand the ecology of a dungeon, and about turning elements of that dungeon’s ecology into tantalizing food. There’s a story in here too, and hints of deeper lore, but six episodes in they mostly feel like they’re present as vehicles for the food parts of the show. Mostly. There are hints of more to come.

About that story…

There is an odd note in the show’s setup. Our dungeon-delving protagonists are heading for the dungeon’s depths in hopes of rescuing their erstwhile cleric, Falin (who is also the fighter’s sister). Their quest is urgent—Falin was eaten by a dragon, and they need to retrieve her body while it’s still intact enough to resurrect her—but the show and the characters never feel rushed. They mention the need to reach the depths in time, and they talk about missing Falin, but their journey feels methodical at its fastest and nearly whimsical at its slowest.

If you’re able to set that mismatched urgency aside and trust in the slower episodic pacing of the show, I think you’ll be delighted. That’s especially true if you like cooking shows and are a fan of dungeon delving adventures. But (as I mentioned above) that slowness also means that the show doesn’t give us fast-paced character development.

We don’t have deep backstories for our central protagonists. They all start off fairly trope-y, with the only distinct one being the fighter—and that only because he’s a nerdy weirdo who wants to eat monsters. I’ve wished several times by now for more character development for our other party members, more ways to distinguish them from the tropes they fall into. But this show’s approach to character development is more slow cooker, less flash fryer, and I have gradually come to appreciate and enjoy that.

With a show like Lower Decks, where every episode should be expected to simultaneously check off boxes marked “plot advancement,” “character backstory or growth,” “deep cuts,” and “widely accessible humor,” I often end an episode amped up and excited. It’s fun, it’s engaging, it’s… not precisely relaxing. Delicious in Dungeon takes a very different path, one that reminds me of what I like about things like The Chef Show; ultimately we’re here to feel relaxed and enjoy watching people cook. Yes, there are moments of excitement in Delicious in Dungeon—it’s a fantasy adventure in a magical dungeon, after all—but episodes are biased towards a feeling of rest and contentment that I find soothing.

I’m looking forward to more Delicious in Dungeon. If any of that sounded appealing to you, I suggest that you check it out.