Japanese celebrity chef and YouTuber Ryuji (リュウジ) has ignited a food-nerd debate online after commenting that recipes from the long-running cooking manga “Iron Wok Jan!” (鉄鍋のジャン) actually taste good when recreated in real kitchens, while dishes from the famous gourmet manga “Oishinbo” (美味しんぼ) often do not.
Responding to a fan on X (formerly Twitter), Ryuji clarified he wasn’t attacking the manga itself. “I never said that. I only said that ‘Iron Wok Jan!’ tastes good when you recreate it, but ‘Oishinbo’ doesn’t,” he wrote, adding that the gap likely comes down to whether a professional culinary supervisor was involved in developing the recipes.
The comment struck a nerve, and replies quickly piled up from users who had personally tried cooking scenes straight out of “Oishinbo.” Several said the manga skips crucial steps needed to make the dish actually taste good, while others argued the series prizes ingredient purity and restraint over seasoning, leaving results bland by modern standards. One user summed up the sentiment bluntly: “Oishinbo isn’t a cooking manga, it’s a philosophy manga.” By contrast, commenters noted that “Iron Wok Jan!,” despite its wildly exaggerated ingredient choices, tends to lean on generous seasoning that makes the dishes more approachable in practice.
The thread also surfaced personal horror stories, including one user who recalled a junior high home-ec class where a teacher, inspired by an “Oishinbo” episode about salt-only sausages, had students make the dish — reportedly resulting in a batch so unpleasant that some classmates vomited. Others pushed back in “Oishinbo’s” defense, pointing out fan-favorite dishes like its egg-on-rice bowl, sauce rice, and butter rice as genuinely tasty exceptions, and cautioned that painting the whole series as inedible wasn’t fair to its many well-regarded recipes.
Who is Ryuji?
Ryuji, who posts under the handle “Ryuji, the Recipe Uncle” (料理のおじさんバズレシピ), is one of Japan’s most prominent recipe YouTubers, known for fast, ingredient-light home cooking built around bold umami seasoning. He has built a massive following through his YouTube channel and “Buzz Recipe” cookbook series, and frequently weighs in online on food trends, techniques, and pop-culture cooking debates, making him a natural voice to fact-check manga cuisine against real-world results.
Author’s Comment
Of course a chef known for his umami-bomb, no-nonsense recipes would side-eye a manga famous for waxing poetic about the "true taste" of unseasoned ingredients. Oishinbo has spent decades preaching that flavor is basically a moral virtue you achieve through suffering and terroir, while Jan just throws MSG-adjacent chaos at the wok and calls it a day — and apparently chaos wins in the kitchen. I love that Japanese Twitter’s collective response to a celebrity chef’s offhand comment was "let me tell you about the time I made manga sausages and someone threw up." That’s the internet working exactly as intended.
