Today’s Menu for Emiya Family Review
Emiya-san Chi no Kyou no Gohan Review
衛宮さんちの今日のごはん review

I’m a sucker for the Fate franchise. Although the original Fate/stay night anime adaptation may not have been the best, the story and characters were quite good. As such, I’ve made it my mission to try to watch all of the Fate anime adaptations, including Carnival Phantasm. As such, Today’s Menu for Emiya Family became next on my list of Fate titles to watch.

The Series, In Brief

For those who don’t know, Today’s Menu for Emiya Family is adapted from the source manga of the same title. The series is set within the first route story of Fate/stay night. However, there’s no Holy Grail War going on. All of the FSN Servants, sans Gilgamesh, are here. They are all apparently still bonded to their TRUE Masters, but the Servants have more freedom to do what they will.

The central focus is around Shirou making some kind of dish or meal. Most of the time, this is done at the Emiya residence, but sometimes Shirou’s cooking skills are used in other places. There’s usually some sort of light adventure or even some comedic story that takes place before the cooking and eating starts.

Basically, I looked at the series as the perfect end to Fate/stay night. In many ways, it is if someone’s wish of the Holy Grail was for this peaceful coexistence between Servants to happen. And thus Caster is blissfully happy. Rider is happy. Saber is happy. Lancer is happy (working part-time jobs in town). Archer is happy, even if he still doesn’t like Shirou. Fake Assassin is satisfied. Berserker is calm. And Shirou is mostly happy cooking for everyone who comes by. It really is a lovely series.

Better Than the Manga

When it comes to anime adaptations of manga, I really do want them to be faithful. The issue with Today’s Menu for Emiya Family is that the source manga chapters are small. So even though ufotable has made these episodes under 15 minutes, that’s still a lot of time to fill.

As such, ufotable decided to have a mostly faithful adaptation of the source manga material. However, they flesh out the tiny story elements of the source manga chapters to make things much more entertaining, fun, humorous, and lovely.

For example, episode 7 of the anime was adapted from chapter 7 of the manga. The manga tells the core story–Shirou, Saber, and Rin go to a water park where they have fun, meet up with Rider, and then play volleyball until Lancer and Archer make a one panel cameo to show they booted Rin and Rider aside to battle Shirou and Saber.

The anime expands on this part of the manga, allowing us to see Lancer and Archer duking it out with Saber and Shirou. It was absolutely hilarious, and nearly on par with the comedy in some of the Carnival Phantasm episodes.

Of course, not everything is rooted in comedy. But where appropriate, ufotable mostly did a bang-up job when they had to pad out the source manga materials.

Crunchyroll/Aniplex Adaptatation

As expected, the Crunchyroll/Aniplex adaptation suffers from the idiotic thinking that Japanese honorifics are stupid, except when they aren’t. 🙄 So while Sakura properly addresses Shirou as “Senpai” in the subtitles, she improperly addresses Rin as “Rin” instead of “Nee-san”. Taiga gets properly addressed as “Taiga-nee” and one time, they let a “Fujimura-sensei” slip through.

Beyond that, the Japanese honorifics are removed ’cause “reasons you plebs couldn’t possibly hope to fathom.” 😑

For the most part, Japanese food names are left untouched by the adaptations. However, there are places where they get translated ’cause “reasons”. I would have preferred all Japanese dishes be left untranslated.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

In the end, ufotable does amazing work in adapting Today’s Menu for Emiya Family. I found the series to be quite charming, funny, entertaining, and just a joy to watch. I rather hope ufotable does more since the manga has more volumes and is still being produced. (I’ll review volume 1 of the manga in the near future.)