With the strenuously fast pace of the early episodes of Food Wars! The Second Plate, I didn't expect to like it more than the original Food Wars! from last year. Maybe it compared favorably to the first season's lack of focus, endless stream of arbitrarily defined challenges, and shounen fighter tropes and, or maybe this was the season where the show decided to embrace its mindlessness and just commit to being entertaining. It's easy to see from the duels of The Second Plate's Autumn Selection tournament that even if Food Wars! is all about the objective qualities in food, the series' decision of who wins and who loses has all the rationality of a coin flip; for every duel it would've been easy to envision the opposite outcome with the same dishes, if the writers decided to flip the order they were presented. With all that taken into account, and realizing that the characters had always been personified stand-ins for their style of cooking, packing each episode with one or two dishes and compressing all the tension of the first season and more into half the number of episodes was probably the right decision.
In contrast to Food Wars!'s emphasis on the low-born but highly skilled Yukihira Souma making a name for himself in the high-brow culinary world of Tootsuki Culinary School, always a fairly conceited stage for a show to set for its protagonist, The Second Plate is about originality and carving a niche. It seems odd that a shounen show where every character specializes in one specific culinary aspect—often with the personality and fashion to back it up—would feel the need to stress over originality, but with Souma as a catch-all powerhouse who can beat anyone and everyone in his path, it's satisfying to see him struggle when faced with the task of making his individual mark as a chef. It starts with a duel between him and a copycat chef named Mimasaka, which itself is fairly uninteresting aside from the mark it leaves on Souma, and by the time of the Autumn Selection finals all of the central players from the first season have begun to confront this crucial issue in the professional world.
They carry this theme on after the Selection is over, with another contrived yet much more reasonable stage of the Tootsuki education system, where the new students are all sent out to real restaurants to sink or swim against real customers, staking not only their own careers but the lifeblood of the restaurant owners in the process. This season ends just at the end of the process, but while I hope this is the last in the ridiculous series of tests for the new students, who have faced more life-and-death elimination tests than the average Fortune 500 interview process, I do hope they develop this theme in the inevitable third season, as Souma returns to Tootsuki with hundreds of battle-ready upperclassmen looking for a chance to crush the cheeky freshman into the dirt with their well-honed skills.
Everything that made fans in the first season is back, from the literal food porn to the quirky personalities to the in-depth food terminology, but while I can't make any claims about the overall direction the series is headed, I can say that they've found a more comfortable pace and style, even if it's far from comfortable as of yet. While Souma himself was always a mixed bag in terms of enjoyment, The Second Plate's coverage of all the duels in the top 8 of the Selection gives us plenty of opportunities to watch the side cast in a context outside of Souma, where they sink or swim on their own merit without him casting his implicit shadow over their independence as chefs. As a bonus, in the semifinal match, for the first time since the very first episode of the franchise I felt myself getting hungry watching the dishes being served. Of course that shouldn't be a point of contention in a cooking show, but I guess it took the show backing off from the plot and just going nuts to get there, and so if it stays in this region I'd be willing to tolerate a few more cook-offs next year.