Before I wrote my first TV review, I spent a decade as a dining reporter. I found that truly terrible restaurants are relatively rare, but the vast majority are merely mediocre. Some meals begin with a particularly creative and delicious appetizer, only to continue with a bland entrée and sickly sweet dessert, and there’s nothing so disappointing as realizing that the best bites are already behind you. Unfortunately, Get Jiro, Adult Swim’s adaptation of the graphic novel from Kitchen Confidential author and No Reservations host Anthony Bourdain, progresses like one of those meals.
Bourdain and Joel Rose co-wrote Get Jiro! in 2012, imagining a future Los Angeles where status is defined by the best restaurant reservations you can secure and the competition between chefs regularly turns violent. When the mysterious newcomer Jiro (Brian Tee) attracts attention for serving flawless omakase in a simple strip mall in the city’s Outer Ring, the most powerful restaurateurs decide he’s a tool they can use to shift the balance of power.
In the first episode, Jiro explains that he doesn’t have a secret ingredient but crafts his sublime sushi by devoting equal care to each ingredient. Likewise, the first four episodes of the show are a perfect blend of John Wick and Delicious in Dungeon, setting Jiro up as a sushi chef samurai like Kill Bill’s Hattori Hanzō. The bloody, action-packed thriller is stewed in rich cooking references. The ruthless head chef Bob (Bosch star Titus Welliver) explains his contempt for brunch customers while drowning an underling in hollandaise. Bob’s vegan rival Rose (Alison Pill of Devs) tries to seduce Jiro while biting into a freshly picked tomato.
Showrunners Alessandro Tanaka and Brian Gatewood expertly lay out the stakes and develop the supporting cast, blending absurd situations with sincere musings about the power of food. Highlights include a hilarious chase sequence involving mercenary food truck operators fighting with kebab skewers, an assassin who bakes the pieces of her sniper rifle into baguettes, and a roving biker gang that raids a roadside restaurant for barbecue sauce. Bob and Rose are both deeply relatable if ruthless villains, and Jiro comes to understand his enemies and potential allies through the meals they share together.
I would have gorged myself on these stories, but the showrunners dramatically change direction halfway through the 10-episode season as they pivot to integrating material from Bourdain and Rose’s 2015 prequel, Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi. Rather than maintain the focus on food that makes the series so flavorful, these flashbacks explore Jiro’s ties to Japan’s criminal underworld and make for a far thinner gruel of crime drama clichés. After setting up enemies who were so good at chewing scenery, the show pushes them aside to make way for Jiro’s psychopathic brother Ichi, whose own food connection isn’t given enough time to simmer. Get Jiro’s vibrant cyberpunk version of Tokyo looks awesome, but the arc puts style over substance like an Instagram influencer.
Tanaka and Gatewood should have maintained Jiro’s relentless commitment to the balance of ingredients, because the show falters every time it focuses more on the action than the food. An episode set in a prison run by a spiteful evangelical clumsily attempts to build out the world’s lore and winds up just wasting a bunch of chef cameos. The series momentarily gets back on track by paying homage to Hannibal, but the fresh infusion of flavor quickly fades and is replaced by multiple servings of the same tired revenge tropes.
While Bourdain invented Get Jiro’s absurd world where restaurant staff beat each other to death with kitchen utensils, many of the Adult Swim series’ best parts aren’t from the comics at all. Tanaka and Gatewood made this decadent version of Los Angeles feel alive by adding family restaurants just trying to get by, a disciplined health inspector looking for justice, and an overeager young apprentice for Jiro. They pack original humor into scenes involving hungry beat cops, corrupt politicians, and frustrated investors. The season ends by teasing an entirely new adventure, and I would gladly sit down for another serving to see what the showrunners could do if they weren’t rushing to cram two graphic novels into 10 episodes.
In one of the best scenes, the ruthless chef Bob explains that he doesn’t believe he’s personally capable of the level of perfection achieved by the best chefs. He’s not disciplined enough to keep practicing until he can make flawless pasta, but he’s accepted that a messy preparation can sometimes be good enough. Maybe that’s good enough for Get Jiro too. But I also think that if they have more time to cook up a second season, Tanaka and Gatewood could tweak their recipe and create a series that would really leave audiences hungry for more.
Get Jiro premieres on Adult Swim on Oct. 3 and HBO Max on Oct. 4. New episodes release at midnight Saturdays through Dec. 5.
