English Dub Review: Restaurant to Another World “Crepes / Natto Spaghetti”

Are there no male fairies?

Overview (Spoilers)

The fairies are in a tizzy. A door keeps showing up every week in their land, with no explanation. They summon swamp thing to open the door for them, then head inside to investigate. Fortunately, Victoria is there to explain everything, and to order them their first meal. Fairies like sweet food, and are kind of tiny, so she orders them a mixed-fruit crepe. The Fairy Queen Tiana gives her a valuable, magic seed in exchange for Victoria paying for the crepe, and makes it a point to bring as many of her people as possible over time. It’s not like they’re expensive. One crepe feeds six of them.

Courtesy: Funimation

In a completely unrelated story, Fardania is on her journey to figure out new gastronomic possibilities. She’s off to see her father’s friend Christian. He’s gotten an interesting idea from his own trip to the Nekoya ten years before. He’s been fermenting elven beans. His favorite dish from the Nekoya is natto spaghetti. It smells terrible, but elves (and apparently the Japanese) love the flavor. Fardania is inspired by the dish and instinctively thinks to pair the sticky beans with rice. There is a bit of an aside from the restaurant staff, since technically, what she ordered is straight up Japanese, and the Nekoya is supposed to be a Western Restaurant. Oh well. He makes it, they love it, the go home. As she leaves, Christian provides her with a batch of his elven bean miso as he mulls over that fact that his best friend’s daughter has surpassed him in almost every way.

Another strange thing I noticed: Altorius is either hiding his magic power or has lost it all together. When Tiana was looking around the room at everyone’s magic power, his was the same as the standard humans. Only Arte’s blue aura and Victoria’s electric aura stood out. Altorius was an adventurer and is still a wizard. He should have immense magic power.

Our Take

Today’s episode spent half of its time following the same old formula. Someone finds the door, walks inside, eats food, has foodgasm. It’s getting really old now, even though they keep trying new ways to pull it off. Again, the first chunk is an effort to expand the universe, but not deepen it. Yay, there’s a fairy kingdom… and? What does that change? How does that affect anything? How do these fairies contribute to the plot and character growth? This show has so much potential for stories, but it’s content to sit back and be an experiment in flipping between Food TV and Nat Geo specials. Where this portion does build up the plot is near the end, as Tiana asks the Master about the door. Here, we learn that not only does he not know anything about how it works, but it seems to appear in random places, with no logic. Like a written script, he apologizes for any inconvenience caused by its appearance. Has there been an incident in the past? A time where the door’s appearance cut off access to something, or worse? This seems like it is the first hint that we might learn more about this door in the future. We’d better. We’ve only got two episodes left.

The second half, on the other hand, IS about character development. Unfortunately, it chose to develop a character we haven’t even seen in a while, and not one of the main ones. Fardania’s portion here got dangerously close to breaking the mold, presenting Christian to us as a patron, but not having him in the Nekoya at the time. This sequence could have been rather interesting, showing us more about elven culture, the technique of bean fermentation, or… just about anything. We see that she is exceptionally skilled at magic, and has an instinct for flavor. So my question is, why did they need to go to the Nekoya? Christian has been fermenting beans and possibly made an elven equivalent to Natto. Spaghetti is sold in their world (We’ve been told by the traders that sell it). Rice exists in their world. Absolutely none of the things that were in this dish are exclusive to our world. I feel like it would have been more interesting if she had gone to him, and he fed her the Natto Spaghetti. When he reveals he was inspired by a dish at the Nekoya, she muses that she would have liked to try this on rice. Since he’s a gourmand, he’d more than likely have some, so they try it. There wasn’t a need for the trip to the Nekoya here. It only serves to move the characters back to the restaurant so that the formula can be maintained.

Now, when we talk about how this episode stacked up on the technicals, there is a bunch more going on. The art and animation were absolutely brilliant. The fairies had an easy radiance to the way they were drawn, though more so the queen. It was kinda funny watching her eat the crepe. A little bit of schoolgirl showed up in her face, which is normally so regal and intense. The elven village was pretty standard as far as elven architecture goes, homes built in trees and all that. What was outstanding about that portion of the show was the animation. The spaghetti had serious attention paid to how it moved as it was twirled on the fork and picked up. Most anime would just show a spinning ball of noodle with a couple spare tips hanging about. This one animated every strand as it went, along with the detailed minced natto sauce. When she ordered the natto over rice, you could actually see the fermented slime strings on it. It moved naturally, and they played with how Fardania reacted to it. Her face had so many expressions to it, and it really looked like you could read her thought processes in that.

Fardania (Dawn Bennet) may not have had many lines, but which line she has were delivered well. There was a variety of different tones she worked with: Formal, relaxed, giddy, and nerd delving into their niche. She perfectly complemented the facial expressions of Fardania at the time. Similarly, Anastasia Muñoz worked with the emotes given her by Tiana’s animation. Even though she had more lines than Fardania, Tiana didn’t show as much of a range in expression. The voice actress did what she could with what she had, and I think it came out good. Also, some of the script that she read was oddly timed at a couple points, making her sound as if she jumped from one thought to another way too fast. This isn’t Muñoz’s fault, though. It was awkward timing in the animation, and ADR did the best they could.

This episode struggles to keep things fresh while still holding to the formula, and falls a bit behind for the attempt. What really sets it apart from the rest, though, is its animation. Natto ain’t easy to smell, look at, or animate, and they did an amazing job. Voice acting had good work in it, even if that work likely won’t wow those who aren’t looking for it. I give this episode seven plates of natto spaghetti out of ten. I don’t know if I could eat that anyways…

SCORE
7.0/10