English Dub Review: Restaurant to Another World “Spaghetti with Meat Sauce/Chocolate Parfait”

You eat tobasco on your spaghetti? Well, whatever floats your meatballs.

Spoilers Below

Thomas Alfade is the owner of a vast culinary empire. Built up from the simple ingredient of wheat pasta, his exquisite selection of sauces is bought in droves world ’round. Now, in his late years, he has retired and is passing the business on to his grandson, Sirius. He’s given the boy every ounce of training he can, but he’s got one more secret. The company’s cellar has a door to the Nekoya. There, he hands over a bag of ingredients to the Master and counts money from the till. This is the arrangement. In exchange for the Saturday proceeds and a free meal, Thomas gives the Master ingredients that can’t be found anywhere in our world. However, there’s one more thing he gets from the Nekoya. All of his sauces are limitations of the Master’s recipes. Sirius is astonished. Surely, this isn’t a fair trade. It doesn’t bother the Master one bit. He just wants to make food that makes everyone happy. Sirius has taken hold of his grandfather’s company, but has also taken his place as Nekoya’s regular “Spaghetti with Meat Sauce II”.

Princess Adelheid is not well. Sick with a mysterious and incurable disease, she’s also had to bury her grandfather. Now alone in his palace, depression is creeping in to kick her while she’s down. That’s when the door to the Nekoya appeared. Even though this leads to a different world, she has deep-seated memories of the restaurant. Once, when she was very little, her parents left her with her grandfather. She was lonely, so Wilhelm took her to Nekoya to eat parfait, which he called “clouds”. She orders this again, and the sweet connection to the happy memories she shared with him helps break up her depression. The next day, she is already seen to be recovering from her illness.

This episode actually made a few things click logically for me. I had wondered before how the Master handled the economies of the other world. Each different nation used its own coin, and none of those coins are honored in our world. Did he exchange them for their gold and silver value? Was there something in the other world he could trade for? Well, in a way, yes. He’s getting exclusive ingredients from that world to amp up his Saturday dishes. He’s totally getting fleeced, though. It is interesting to see the places where our two worlds differ. They don’t have tomatoes, but they have square, vine-grown fruit that is rather similar. They also don’t have coffee. HOW DO YOU LIVE THIS WAY? Both stories were interesting, and it does seem to be playing at the generational theme started in the previous episode. Here, we get to see the Master when he was young, as well as his grandfather, who owned Nekoya at the time. The story of Adelheid is simple, but sweet, and dusted with some melancholy.

The voice acting by Barry Yandell (Thomas) was good. There was a nasal quality to the voice, and he swallowed certain words. It gave him the air of someone who had a secret and was very proud of what that secret brought them. Jeannie Tirado as Adelheid had a regal warmth and elegance, without being a stuck-up ingenue. It made you feel more sympathetic to her. Her flashback to her first visit was beautifully animated and had an almost Ghibli-esque quality to it. The more I watch this show, the more I like it, even though it isn’t what I usually reach for. I give the episode eight parfaits out of ten, not because of any fault, but merely because of its lack of edge-of-your-seat suspense, drama, and action. Not everything should have action sequences, but I can see some people out there feeling bored while watching this. In the meantime, here’s what I had for dinner, a ground beef stir-fry on a bed of riced cauliflower and carrot. It wasn’t bad, but it needed salt, and there wasn’t a lot of the portion size. I know it looks like cat food, but it tasted great.

Again, eight out of ten.