The Archmage's Restaurant

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The MC is a well rounded hero who was born in a fantasy world from his 2nd life and worked his up to become one of the strongest. The "beginning" segment was skipped, which is fine, the pacing itself is fine. I admire how he carries Heroic qualities and won't hesitate to help people when push comes to shove. Sure he is a war hero in a way, but the restaurant isnt' going anywhere. It's super cool, he integrates earth's cooking aspects while balancing his powers and idealogies as a hero.

What really got my support is the incredible backstory, holy shit this Manhwa explains the ... backstory very clearly. The pacing is perfect with the right balance of comedy, emotion, action, and dark reality.

This is barely about a restaurant and the plot will give you whiplash.

So, I thought this manwha was good at first. I went into it liking the story and pacing. It was genuinely interesting until...the red flags popped up.

1. The author seems to promote and normalize age gaps. There's a young girl and an old man which, although it isn't illegal, it is weird, but this is a plot device used to set up something a bit worse.
2. The main character kills a bunch of dragons in a war and later finds a CHILD dragon. Said dragon has a human polymorph and follows him in ... his adventures/restaurant endeavors. He essentially raises her. The manwha starts where said dragon is a TEENAGER...mind you the MC is nearly in his thirties. Sixty-four chapters later the girl who is still a MINOR, tries to kiss our MC. He brushes it of...next chapter:"I like her *blushes*".

All of a sudden the writer brings up oh 'she's gonna go through puberty soon' and 'look she's grown taller and more mature'.


This story is weird and problematic and you'd be weird to keep liking it despite that. Listen, if you're **that** type of audience then go ahead. For everyone else, stay away. The sad thing is, there were other actual adult characters who would be better fit for the MC and the art is good.

An arrogant nobleman enters a restaurant and attacks the poor chef. After insulting, punching and kicking him, he now tries to take his restaurant away from him. Fortunately, this chef is the strongest creature in the world and won't put up with it!

The story type “chef is actually strong and helps with his food” is no longer a rarity. While the market isn't really saturated with this approach yet, it's not hard to stumble across the idea either. But where it's usually about the chef revealing his strength or using his food to make others stronger or whatever, “The Archmage's Restaurant” takes a different approach.

A ... world that was almost destroyed by war and still bears deep scars to this day. On the surface, everything is peaceful again, but not deep underneath it is seething. Gangsters run unchallenged through many cities, the government loses its power, dragons kidnap people and humans enslave others of their kind. Even though “The Archmage's Restaurant” starts out cheerful and colorful, the story quickly grows up. The main theme soon becomes loss, grief and self-sacrifice. For example, the sad side of Isekai - e.g. being torn away from his family - is highlighted and when the protagonist is close to tears, he finds his joy in cooking or his girlfriend.

I don't want to overdo it, because especially at the beginning this manhwa is still quite shallow, quite cheerful. Only after the characters, world and story in general have been introduced does it start to reveal the more gruesome stuff. Especially in the last arcs available to me, the story becomes so sad for this very reason, here it is revealed that the characters we have come to know and appreciate as shallow, joyful personalities have been through hell. Unexpectedly, I was really on the verge of tears.

Conclusion: I haven't been so emotionally moved by a story for a long time. Even if the manhwa still seems quite generic at the beginning and therefore probably deserves a point deduction, the final chapters blew me away. So even if there are books that generally have better stories, the brilliant staging here makes me cry. 9 out of 10 potato points.

Edit: I almost forgot to mention it, but strangely enough, there are some cases here where love affairs are advertised between people of very different ages. Some could be excused by fantasy “they just look younger” logic - a young dragon who looks 17 and a seemingly 25 year old human are one of these couples, for example - but at least one case is obviously a young woman and an old man. If this couple only existed, it could simply be ignored, but instead a comical story develops about the morality of it all and in the end the conclusion is “age is just a number”. This situation and these characters were at least strange, if not disturbing.