Cooking Master Boy (aka Chuuka Ichiban 中華一番!) was a Japanese anime set in an alternate-reality 19th Century China, during the Manchu Dynasty. It is an era where top-rated chefs strive to better their skills and compete to become the best chef in China. The highest-rated chefs, called Super Chefs, are highly revered and are invested with authority over cooking matters. Cooking is serious business - any attempt to impersonate or disrespect a Super Chef will result in very dire consequences.
The tale focuses on Liu Mao Xing (劉昴星), a 13-year old boy living in Sichuan, China. The son of Sichuan's Fairy Chef Pai, Mao is imbued with eidetic taste memory - he remembers everything he has tasted, and can deconstruct the flavor of food that he's tasted into the individual ingredients. With a flair for innovation, an empathic ability to understand the needs of the people he's cooking for, and the uncanny ability to befriend all of his rivals, Mao embarks on a journey to become the best - and youngest Super Chef in history.
Cooking Master Boy first aired in Japan's Fuji Television on April 27, 1997. Its fifty-two episode run ended on September 13, 1998. The show was based on a 17-volume manga published from 1995 to 1999 - as a result the true ending of the manga was never animated. The show gained international exposure when it aired on AXN Asia, introducing viewers from the Asia-Pacific region to the show.
The anime received a fansub on 2003, with Anime-Keep utilizing VCD sources with Cantonese and (later on) Mandarin audio. No release with Japanese audio was ever made, due to the unavailability of higher-quality Japanese raws. Until February 22, 2006, that is, with the release of a DVD boxset.
This page is not designed to be an informative site where you can find character profiles, episode guides, fan fiction, and other related media. If you were looking for those, please visit the Links page. It is our goal to have the absolute best quality release that we can manage, a goal we hoped we achieved in early 2012. If you have found any major errors, we will be happy to hear from your corrections in our forum!
visitors from October 25, 2008