As a child, Najika nearly drowned. She was rescued by a boy who gave her a treat to eat. Najika is determined to find that boy again and make him the best snack he’s ever tasted. But the thing is, the only clue she has to his identity is the spoon he gave to her, which belongs to a prestigious school.
The search for a “prince” based on a trinket left behind is a pretty common troupe in shoujo manga, but as overused as it might be, it doesn’t seem to take too much away from the story. After all, it is a classic device, used long before comics were popular in such fairy tales as Cinderella. However, it does begin setting the tone for Kitchen Princess: predictable, but warmly familiar so it can mostly be overlooked.
It’s some of the other tropes, such as the “poor” girl in a rich school being bullied, all the boys falling in love with her and causing all the girls to hate her that get tiresome quickly. However, the cast of characters help ease some of the agitation from seeing the same story yet again. Najika is extremely optimistic (she’s somewhat a combination of Usagi of Sailor Moon and Tsukushi of Boys over Flowers) but she occasionally suffers from doubts and tough decisions which keep her from being completely unbelievable. The various love interests have fairly set personalities (the serious intellectual, the supposedly care-free athlete, and the aggressive snob), but thankfully each archetype is slightly softened, allowing there to be at least a hint of mystique to them.
Where Kitchen Princess really shines, however, is not the story or characters, but rather in the art and the decision to include recipes of the foods featured in each chapter. The art isn’t terribly unusual, you can definitely pinpoint it as a mid-2000s shoujo series, but it’s always carefully drawn with a great deal of attention to details. And as for the recipes, it’s a very unique idea to include them, allowing readers to try to recreate the foods constructed by their beloved characters.
In the end, the series is utterly predictable, and yet, it doesn’t feel as if that’s a problem. You know who she’s going go choose from volume 1, but the path getting there is warm and familiar, like a trip down memory lane of shoujo manga. It isn’t tedious, but rather enjoyable. And even knowing what the ending would be, it was fun reading it. A nice addition to the reading list of any shoujo romance fan.
