God of Cooking

I quite enjoyed God of Cooking. Right now I am on chapter 362, where things start to get exciting. To tell the truth, I was really invested in the Grand Chef arc. After that, the epicurean arc was boring to me. It did not start to get interesting to me until the Rose Island arc. I'm almost at the Paris arc so I'm looking forward to it. The way the author describes the cooking process is very detailed. Translation does not really bother me unless it really really bad, so the translation of the webnovel was fine to me. Great read, recommend for you to read it, and have patience with it as the story progresses quite slow in my opinion.

To me, GoC is a healing novel with wholesome characters. The MC is very mature, introspective and hardworking. His self-reflections and growth are the reason why I am giving this a 5-star.

Firstly, God of Cooking is pretty poorly translated. It's not bad enough that you can't figure out what's going on, but there are a lot of grammar mistakes and weird formatting that makes it difficult to read normally. However, I won't take away from the score since that's technically not the content and it wasn't absolutely horrendous.

So, God of Cooking is very entertaining for the first 150-200 chapters. Our main character gets a system for cooking and strives to reach the pinnacle of cooking once he gets transported to the past. Surprisingly, the author took a different route here, and the system is almost entirely passive. All it does is help him judge his dishes, ingredient quality, and his and other chefs' skills. The main advantage this gives him is the ability to create and simulate recipes, but other than that, the protagonist is not OP at all. He works hard for all of his achievements and you get a good sense of progression as you read. It's very entertaining if you like cooking. The author describes the cooking process and dishes in extremely high detail. This may just be me not knowing anything about cooking, but I do not even know 90% of the dishes being described, so either the author has a lot of culinary experience or they did an unimaginable amount of research. Either way, big props on this point! In summary, the content is definitely entertaining.

A side note here on the system, even after the author attempted explaining the scoring system, I'm still confused. Is the scoring difficulty of creation, tastiness, or what? Even after the main character tries to argue that it is just the difficulty, it is often used to judge taste, so it gets really confusing. Does not subtract too much from the story though

For the characters, there is some interesting chemistry and dialogue that occurs between the characters that are definitely entertaining. They feel like real people for sure, and that's another thing that's well done. The main character is a bit bland, but then again, he was a teacher, so he definitely gives off the mature and calm vibe that would normally be seen as quite bland.

Overall, if we were judging on the first half of the story, it would definitely be 4-5 stars no doubt. However, the content kind of slips into a slightly cringey romance story in the latter half. The story loses its intense moments and the flow it had before when it switches settings, but it fails to replace the competition that created the fun in reading with something equally entertaining. As such, it kind of falls off the more you read, and I can't say it was 4 stars anymore.

If you like cooking or food, I think you would definitely like the first half of the story. However, considering the story as a whole, I give it 3 stars.