Oishinbo - Vol. 31 Ch. 289 - The Ultimate VS Supreme: Hot Pot Showdown!!! (Part 5)

[MangaDex]

 

[BippidiBoppetyBoob]

Well, that's a wrap on Volume 31!

I wanted to wait until seeing the whole thing. I get the idea behind the loss, but Jesus, Kaibara could've just made the crab hot pot, and also, one of them, he didn't even really present since he couldn't get the mushrooms. That could've and really should've been disqualifying.

 

[feignedremoteness]

yeah, it ends up feeling like he just presents the first 4 hot pots as contrast to the “greatest” one. it makes sense to establish a baseline, but I do think it’s cowardly as well. he’s saying that no one will be disappointed with crowning crab as the supreme, but he makes sure to first present the other hot pots fully to show that they “lost” to crab instead of just presenting crab by itself.

plus Hechikan makes a good point by saying that all ingredients are equal (I was thinking it’d be something along those lines), but it’s undercut by Kaibara saying that people will “yearn” for the hot pots instead of being offended. it’s tantamount to saying “because the common people don’t have the money to try my expensive hot pot, they just have to shrug their shoulders and accept that the experts have deemed it better than their local hot pot”. it’s a kind of “authority” that can only come from using the fancy ingredients.

you can’t say price doesn’t matter while using price to “solve” the mind trap you did on your opponents

 

[PA270]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to have the patience to suffer through another 80 volumes of this. Kaibara was not playing fair here, and it just feels so obnoxious. You put in their heads that they need to find a hotpot that everyone will love and accept, and then you pull the rug out from under them with five hotpots, one of which you're not even able to present because it's seasonally unavailable! Yes, there have been other times when there's been a disaprity in number of dishes presented, but this competition had an implied limit from the very start that Kaibara used to manipulate the Ultimate Menu! It's the same thing he did during the first showdown with the Miso-Glazed Egg! And what is with Hechikan's response here? Yes, the man has high standards, but we literally see him making first class tea for the homeless and having a grand time with them. You'd think that the Ultimate Menu keeping him in mind when designing their hotpot should count for something, even if he prefers the other! The second chapter sets him up as an "anything goes, be happy" type of connoisseur, and yet here he is tacitly justifying Kaibara's elitist bull!

Ugh..I'm sorry, I feel like every comment I leave is just a giant rant. It's just so frustrating to see the characters degrade in real time, and to see the complete transformation of Kaibara Yuzan as an enemy that needs and deserves to be overcome to a god of cuisine who Yamaoka needs to learn from and/or make amends with.

 

[BippidiBoppetyBoob]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to have the patience to suffer through another 80 volumes of this. Kaibara was not playing fair here, and it just feels so obnoxious. You put in their heads that they need to find a hotpot that everyone will love and accept, and then you pull the rug out from under them with five hotpots, one of which you're not even able to present because it's seasonally unavailable! Yes, there have been other times when there's been a disaprity in number of dishes presented, but this competition had an implied limit from the very start that Kaibara used to manipulate the Ultimate Menu! It's the same thing he did during the first showdown with the Miso-Glazed Egg! And what is with Hechikan's response here? Yes, the man has high standards, but we literally see him making first class tea for the homeless and having a grand time with them. You'd think that the Ultimate Menu keeping him in mind when designing their hotpot should count for something, even if he prefers the other! The second chapter sets him up as an "anything goes, be happy" type of connoisseur, and yet here he is tacitly justifying Kaibara's elitist bull!

Ugh..I'm sorry, I feel like every comment I leave is just a giant rant. It's just so frustrating to see the characters degrade in real time, and to see the complete transformation of Kaibara Yuzan as an enemy that needs and deserves to be overcome to a god of cuisine who Yamaoka needs to learn from and/or make amends with.

I get it. I’m hoping Yamaoka gets some wins in the future.

 

[d_a_renoir]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to have the patience to suffer through another 80 volumes of this. Kaibara was not playing fair here, and it just feels so obnoxious. You put in their heads that they need to find a hotpot that everyone will love and accept, and then you pull the rug out from under them with five hotpots, one of which you're not even able to present because it's seasonally unavailable! Yes, there have been other times when there's been a disaprity in number of dishes presented, but this competition had an implied limit from the very start that Kaibara used to manipulate the Ultimate Menu! It's the same thing he did during the first showdown with the Miso-Glazed Egg! And what is with Hechikan's response here? Yes, the man has high standards, but we literally see him making first class tea for the homeless and having a grand time with them. You'd think that the Ultimate Menu keeping him in mind when designing their hotpot should count for something, even if he prefers the other! The second chapter sets him up as an "anything goes, be happy" type of connoisseur, and yet here he is tacitly justifying Kaibara's elitist bull!

Ugh..I'm sorry, I feel like every comment I leave is just a giant rant. It's just so frustrating to see the characters degrade in real time, and to see the complete transformation of Kaibara Yuzan as an enemy that needs and deserves to be overcome to a god of cuisine who Yamaoka needs to learn from and/or make amends with.

I agree completely with your rant. This here clearly shows that the author has an agenda to push.

Like, as a comparison, it's like the "draw" verdict in the curry contest precisely because there's no way to compare them both, and I think the two hotpots presented here had the same issue. Back with the curry, Yuzan's cooking method is tailored for meat, while Yamaoka's side used seafood as main ingredient. Seafood has more delicate flavours and would require a completely different handling of spices. Therefore it's very hard to compare and the draw verdict made sense.

This here has Super Fancy Expensive stuff VS cheap and affordable potluck pot. There's no way you can compare the two.

The argument of people thinking "well my cooking is better" is literally nonsense, because Ultimate's hotpot is literally "just put whatever you want". If anything it'd make more sense for an average reader to be like "Huh, never thought of that, I want to try this with my buddies", while Kaibara's one is just "oh yeah, fancy McExpensive nonsense that I could never have, wow".

 

[AstraLuna]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to have the patience to suffer through another 80 volumes of this. Kaibara was not playing fair here, and it just feels so obnoxious. You put in their heads that they need to find a hotpot that everyone will love and accept, and then you pull the rug out from under them with five hotpots, one of which you're not even able to present because it's seasonally unavailable! Yes, there have been other times when there's been a disaprity in number of dishes presented, but this competition had an implied limit from the very start that Kaibara used to manipulate the Ultimate Menu! It's the same thing he did during the first showdown with the Miso-Glazed Egg! And what is with Hechikan's response here? Yes, the man has high standards, but we literally see him making first class tea for the homeless and having a grand time with them. You'd think that the Ultimate Menu keeping him in mind when designing their hotpot should count for something, even if he prefers the other! The second chapter sets him up as an "anything goes, be happy" type of connoisseur, and yet here he is tacitly justifying Kaibara's elitist bull!

Ugh..I'm sorry, I feel like every comment I leave is just a giant rant. It's just so frustrating to see the characters degrade in real time, and to see the complete transformation of Kaibara Yuzan as an enemy that needs and deserves to be overcome to a god of cuisine who Yamaoka needs to learn from and/or make amends with.

man, this really is just Baki if it was a Cooking manga

 

[TakesatoKeita]

man, this really is just Baki if it was a Cooking manga

Or Asahi Saiba from Shokugeki no Soma (another famous cooking manga), too, if we're talking about unrealistically powerful antagonists that can never lose/draw unless the creators permit them.

 

[Diabeetiz]

This is such dumb logic. A lot of people cant eat seafood, guess they should just starve then, what great hospitality. Yamaoka approach is perfectly sound. The essence is to share and to enjoy what you enjoy most regardless of monetary status. Hell crab maybe tastier, but i want some fatty beef. Why are you, as host, imposing your will on me, your guest.

 

[Another_Oni]

For me, hot pot is a type of communal meal. You sit with friends or family around a pot of boiling stock and enjoy the food that you all cook together. In The Chef, there was a chapter about an old rich dude booking the whole damn hot pot restaurant just so that he can enjoy the pot alone, and at the end of that chapter he was taught by the protagonist that the core concept of hot pot was about the people you shared the pot with.

I don't know why but there is something doesn't make sense on this chapter. Kaibara's supremacist-pot is literally something that a holier-than-thou bestows to the uneducated plebians, and only then by consuming the dish that the plebians can achieve a tiny bit of enlightenment. Yamaoka's omni-pot, on the other hand, imho, is the epitome of respect towards the regional hot pots throughout Japan, and in a sense, he treats everything the same way that the monk mentioned later in the chapter, that every food is equal under Buddha. So, why did Yamaoka lose here?

Seriously, sometimes I try to read the chapters where Kaibara won just to desperately find a reason not to hate him, and that he has some redeeming qualities inside him but most of the times I just can't. He's treated like a bloody god, he molds the rule as he sees fit and when he cannot won, he makes excuses and guilt-trips Yamaoka into thinking that the young man knows who is the real winner.