ミノスのビーフ100%

If you've ever watched Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and wondered what it would be like if they replaced Guy Fieri with cute monster girls, then have I got the manga for you.

This is a spinoff of the main Jashin-chan series where Minos, the friendly Minotaur girl, takes all her friends to a variety of beef restaurants (despite being a cow herself). I should emphasize, all the restaurants they go to are real restaurants, to the point that they actually give you the street address, phone number, and hours of operation at the end of each chapter, so it's kind of a product placement, and kind of an edutainment about all the different ways to cook Japanese beef. It's an odd choice given how unhinged the main series is, but the oddness kind of fits the franchise's quirky character and despite being written and drawn by a different author, it still captures the feel and dynamic of the characters.

Despite the main series being a pretty easy read, this spin-off is a fair bit tougher than the main volumes, due to the really specific meat and cooking vocabulary. You'll get a crash course in the Japanese names of all the different cuts, cooking methods, and terms describing various textures and flavors. Words like "subcutaneous fat" and "alkaline acids" are commonplace here and it's written with the specificity that only a manga by an author with a really specific obsession that they want to tell everyone about can provide. The food drawings are beautiful by the way, if you're on a diet or trying to fast, this is brutal and it definitely makes me want to try all these different foods if I ever get to Japan, so the advertising aspect definitely works.

The format is a bit one-note, so I think it's fine that there's only one volume, but it was fun taking a tour of Japan's beef industry and looking at some really good drawings of meat.