Restaurant to Another World (Light Novel), Vol. 1

This series has been sitting in my backlog for so long, and I picked it up today mainly due to hunger and work research. It's not quite what I expected. The book has twenty chapters and an extra, each titled after a tasty dish and features a character related to said dish. Since the concept is a restaurant linked to another world, the customers are of varying races. Humans, elves, lizardmen, vampires, you name it. It's a great setup for a meaningful, episodic slice-of-life series, but it's... not.

The main problem with this book is the lack of connectivity and how formulaic the chapters are. Once you're done with a chapter, you're really done with the character involved. They might appear again in another character's story to play a minor role, but that's about it. The pattern is the same for every single chapter too. A character's background is explained, they find the restaurant's door, they eat a meal there, fall in love with the food, and they either leave in satisfaction, become a regular, try to replicate the dish in their world, or all of those at once.

For twenty chapters.

It got so repetitive that by half of the book, not even the mouthwatering descriptions of the food was enough to keep me engaged. I guess it is a light read that can be enjoyed mindlessly so I might pick up the next volume when I'm in the mood for that. Just not for the time being.