Review of Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!

Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! - Come one, come all: all you outcasts and the oppressed, for food and humour will delight you alongside people who may not understand and/or feel your pain, but good company begets a lonesome life! I really admire authors who go out of their way to show something different of well-known cliches and tropes, even if they have to mask it and show that the works they do are the "same but different," when all AniManga fans know that it's just the same shell, plastered with another coat of paint that hides the true reverence for the cliche/trope in an alltoo similar manner. And like all LN authors who think they know how to play the game better, please try harder, and this message goes out to authors like Yuuki Kimikawa and his series Tsuihousha Shokudou e Youkoso! a.k.a. Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!, which is just the all-too-similar idea of the "Banished from the Hero's Party" storyline, with the cooking aspect as a mask to hide its inherent flaws.

Meet Dennis Blacks: the big-sized middle-aged man who has a very unique role in the parties that he requests being assigned to or belongs to: being a chef in times of rest and need, even though he doesn't quite have the versatility and dexterity of Jidou Hanbaiki a.k.a. Vending Machine Isekai's Boxxo. For much of his time in the parties, most of it with the premiere party of the Silver Wing Battalion, Dennis always plays the calm-natured character who always focuses on alchemy, metallurgy, and knives, until the "unfortunate" party-booting that sees him open his own freedom-fighting restaurant in a small town, where people of all personalities and figures frequent for either a good or bad time dealing with the Lvl 99 chef himself.

It's also at the Adventurer's Restaurant that Dennis links up with his ragtag crew that would come to help him define his new journey, the first of whom he meets is the oppressed young girl Atelier, who once belonged to a wealthy family that, like Dennis, got the exile due to internal power strife and politics and earned her place in his restaurant being the poster girl. The next few characters that would join Dennis's food party out of circumstances (of which there're many to count), such with the swordswoman of Henrietta being casted out because of her being a woman to "lavishly" eat Dennis's food on credit that he hopes she would pay him back; the young wizard of Vivia Strange, that as cocky and self-conscious as he looks, that's the exact reason why people can't stand him and would not allow him entrance into any party; as well as the sage and corporate drone of Bachel, that for her, good work is always being taken advantage of until she's stripped off of any form of contact, leaving her with nothing but destitution, until her arrival to Dennis's restaurant. With more characters in tow, they flow pretty much with the narrative of a world that rejects them, and Dennis's small restaurant becomes the small light in the darkness that gives them that small sliver of hope. It checks out for a world where everyone strives to be heard and known amidst living in the same place that's filled with evil and tyranny across the board, to oppose with tit for tat to stand up for their own right. If anything, character development is the strongest aspect of the series.

It's prospects such as these that tell you how deep the series's world lore is, and in the twinkling of an eye, it's a work that pretty much combines the best and worst of both worlds: the Isekai Shokudou a.k.a. Restaurant to Another World, treatment with as many fantasy stories of the "banished from the hero's party" type as possible, eschewing the bad and putting only the good parts of what makes the cliche/trope "great" to begin with. So, have that for what you will for a series that tries to be interesting, but the depth of its world-building is just too shallow to ever take notice.

I guess then, this is a good segue to showcase that the show's overall production from OLM's most prominent segregated Team Yoshioka is decent at best and serviceable for the below-averageness of the series in its own right. While I do find Dannie May's OP to be quite the funky song of note, the same cannot be said for Cho Tokimeki Sendenbu's ED, which is at least OK, but it will not warrant a listen outside of the anime.

Sure, without a shadow of a doubt, you can call Tsuihousha Shokudou e Youkoso! a.k.a. Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!, a generic fantasy series whose banishing theme is more prominent than its sum of gourmet stuff. But while the series is far from average, it's one cook too many in the vein of similar works that do a better job integrating different themes seamlessly, so you'd find yourself encroaching on the "yummy" from the not-so-prevalent "yum" portions a lot.

It's an alright show, to be honest, but it sure doesn't try much to stand out, and that's OK. Just have a better savoury taste next time, I guess?