Fermat Kitchen – Episode 1

What’s it about? Kitada Gaku is a talented mathematics academic. Asakura Kai is a similarly skilled chef. When their lives collide, as the lived lives of others so often do, Gaku finds inspiration by going from the frying pan into the fire…

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Cooking in another world, or even just ours, will always be a timeless type of anime to me. I love the joy of seeing a meal come together, of imagining the smells and tastes through the screen. I live for watching others enjoy food, simply because there’s so much joy in the experience of eating.

Enter Fermat Kitchen, which is currently streaming, with subtitles, on…REMOW’s YouTube channel? Okay, unexpected for sure, but I can work with that: what’s an anime season if there’s no surprises, after all? Question is, will this anime that sounds delicious on its proverbial menu end up earning five stars? Or is it all foodie hype with no substance?

Episode 1 starts with a very relatable lament: wanting to be better than your circumstances. Enter Gaku, a scholarship student and a very skilled young man who wants to become a mathematician of legends. While skilled, he ends up underperforming during a critical test, resulting in his fall from academic grace. In his young eyes, this marks the end of his life as a mathematician: after all, how can you reach for the moon when you’re fated to land among the less brilliant stars?

Thankfully, that’s not where this story ends.

Instead, Gaku turns to the one thing that all of us find some level of comfort in: food, or rather working in the cafeteria around food. It’s clear he has the passion, clear he has the skill—but there’s still the matter of his recent failure at the Mathematical Olympiad, a grand stage for testing the skills of up and coming mathematicians. Yet when life throws a wrench in Gaku’s already upset life, this story goes from a set of ingredients that make a good meal to the start of a rich coming-of-age dish all about finding yourself and your way through life.

Speaking honestly, Fermat Kitchen looks pretty average, which these days, means it’s perfectly serviceable animation that doesn’t look off, but doesn’t necessarily look distinct. That said, I also don’t watch anime for the beauty, necessarily: you can have a gorgeous show that has a huge budget but a poorly directed and badly written script, and it’s still ultimately all shine and no substance.

Here, the animation being foundationally perfectly okay gives way to a story that’s quite engaging from the start: that of a gifted and talented student having to find a new way to navigate life when he faces failure and reckons with the breadth of his skills. That leads him to cater an event and start down the path to a new passion.

It’s this that is the heart of Fermat Kitchen, and it beats loud and proud. It’s the kind of throughline that makes me immediately want to watch episode 2 when it drops, meaning I’ll officially be monitoring a YouTube anime channel just to make sure I get my foodie fix.

If it’s not already evident, I really enjoyed this premiere more than anticipated. I mean, I know myself well enough to know that an anime about cooking and the enjoyment of food would be just the thing for me, but I going in knowing next to nothing about Fermat Kitchen made it even more enjoyable. The combination of Gaku and Kai makes for a bit of an oddball team of two people with enough character between them to make me want to see where they land at the end of this story.

My one qualm is actually about where you can watch this anime. While almost everything landing one of two places—Crunchyroll or Netflix, with occasional Amazon Prime and HiDive—isn’t great, there was next to little advertising by REMOW that Fermat Kitchen was going to land on YouTube outside of an ANN article. In a sea of premieres and sequels, it would have been really nice to see this get some sort of social media update that it even existed for streaming outside Japan.

Still, that’s just one thing in a sea of really good things that shape an anime that feels extremely grounded with a sharp twist mid-episode that sets up a very dynamic story. Overall, I gotta say, I really think everyone should give this a watch. It’s a nice addition to the plethora of food-centric anime, adding a very human touch to a story about success, failure, and finding yourself all over again.