Kitchen Princess by Ando Natsumi is a really cute shoujo manga centered around cooking. This is a classic for me, it was originally published by DelRey, I believe, in America and after DelRey shut down, it was rescued by Kodansha, who published it in Japan. It is 10 volumes long, originally DelRey's publishing, but now it is available as a 4 volume omnibus series with Kodansha. There is a light novel that accompanies it but unfortunately Kodansha hasn't rescued that yet, I'm hoping that they will. Although, I'm really glad they brought this series back, it caused a spark in me, leading me to love flan!
Our main girlie this time is Kazami Najika, who is the daughter of two famous pastry chefs who had passed away prior to the story. Najika, now orphaned, is sent to live at the "Lavender House" in Hokkaido, an orphanage run by a sweet old lady, Hagio-sensei. Najika meets a boy soon after arriving at "Lavender House," who cheers her up with some flan, after she had been crying, missing her parents. The boy is dubbed her "Flan Prince," saving her from her own despair with flan.
The spoon that she had eaten the flan with, she kept it, is the only clue as to finding him now after all those years. Najika, now a teen and with an extraordinary sense of taste, has enrolled in Seika Academy, which has the same emblem as the spoon she has, to find her long lost prince. She had also promised him that she would make him "the most delicious dessert in the whole world!" This is where her journey begins...
(SPOILER WARNING! START)
Najika arrives at the academy, all dressed up in Hagio-sensei's old clothes, and meets Kitazawa Daichi and Kitazawa Sora on her first day while helping a girl remake her flan. It's revealed that Najika is going to be part of class 1-A, which sends everyone into a tizzy because class A is the special class for special people, having won contests and done performances and the like. Everyone is confused with how Najika is in the class because she doesn't appear to be special and are kind of mad about that fact. Daichi winds up to be her classmate and sits near her, which makes Kishida Akane, a famous model for a magazine and a childhood friend of the brothers', angry as well.
Akane subtly bullies Najika, trying to get her to leave the academy, pretending to be her friend but then turning around and playing the victim to the rest of the class so that they turn on Najika as well. No one likes her and are nice to her except Sora and Daichi. Najika ends up working at Fujita Diner, one of the two eatery options on campus, because she wants people to eat her cooking. Students start to flock there, after a stunt that Akane pulled to get her to leave the academy, including Sora and Daichi, which angers Akane even further, so at a school event she reveals the brothers are the academy director's sons and that she hated Najika from the beginning. Najika tries to leave the academy to go home, but is stopped by the boys, telling her to stay and don't let the class bring her down. During which, Sora reveals to Daichi that Najika has "an absolute sense of taste," being able to remember the taste and how it's cooked after only eating it once, and provides a demonstration with three different teas. The Nakiri Erina before Nakiri Erina.
Najika stays and things start to get a bit better. She helps Akane, who had developed an eating disorder due to modeling work, and after an outright fight between the two, they start to reconcile and slowly becomes friends. All while this is happening, Najika falls for Sora, and somewhere in there he tells her that he's her Flan Prince, and enters a competition to try and complete her parents' dream. She passes the first two rounds and the academy director makes his appearance, a cold hearted bastard with no love for anyone but his academy, using Najika and her parents' deaths to further the academy's reputation. Najika is heartbroken because the papers all talk about her "tragic upbringing" and write about her like some damsel in distress, similar to what happened to Daphne and Regina "plucked from East Riverside." If you get that reference, thank you. Sora tries to put a stop to his father doing such things, even though he's the one that's been manipulating Najika for his father. She finds this out and it takes Sora to make a mille-feuille for them to make up. Najika confesses her feelings for Sora to which he answers that he'll tell her his feelings after the end of the competition.
She decides to make a flan for the last part of the competition, which turned out to be a big pudding cake. Sora found a store that sold Madagascar vanilla beans and told her that he would meet her outside the building where the competition is being held with the beans. On his way to her, a huge truck hits him, he is taken to the hospital and everyone is there: Fujita-san, Daichi, Akane and Najika. The doctor informs them that Sora wasn't going to make it and Najika got to talk to him before he passed, telling her that he wasn't really her Flan Prince and that he is sorry. He flatlines and the shock of his death caused her to lose her sense of taste. She goes to the competition anyways and completes the pudding cake without tasting it once and proceeds to collapse. She wakes up in the hospital a day later, finding out that she lost.
There is a funeral service for Sora and his father absolutely loathes Najika at this point, telling her to leave the academy. Due to rumors that Sora died because of her, everyone hates her even further, losing customers at Fujita Diner. Daichi steps up to keep her there, taking over all of Sora's duties and Najika is demoted to class D. The director brings someone else to replace Najika, Mizuno Seiya, who insults her cooking and looks like Sora! They compete a lot throughout the rest of the story because it was drilled into Seiya that you need to be perfect in everything you do, but he kept losing to Najika. He relearns that fact that cooking is fun after spending a couple of weeks working at Fujita Diner and asks out Najika. She ultimately rejects him and discovers her feelings for Daichi. At one point she thought that Seiya was her Flan Prince due to the flan that he made her, but he tells her that he is not, despite knowing her from when he was younger, stalking her through the window of Lavender House.
Najika is really confused now, not having any leads on who her Flan Prince is. During all this, Akane confesses her feelings to Daichi with a cake she made, to which Daichi rejects her because he loves Najika. Akane is now able to move forward and finds solace in Seiya, somehow. Now, Daichi finds a photo album in his father's office and opens it up, finding a picture of him and Sora in Hokkaido the summer their mother passed, but he has no recollection of the trip and he smell of lavender in the office causes him to collapse while chasing his father, who walked in on him with the album but then walked out. Daichi's memories returned to him about that summer and what really happened to his mother, thinking all these years that she had completed suicide but she really didn't, she died saving Daichi. So, all these years he resented his father, who was rumoured to be the reason behind her "suicide" and remarried, and Sora, who approved of the marriage.
Najika and Seiya enter a competition that is to take place in Paris, but before they leave, the director shows that he is human too and gains help from Najika because Daichi wasn't eating. Daichi realizes that he can't keep his feelings for her any longer, she had already confessed to him and he rejected her out of guilt for his brother, but is informed that she left for Paris already. While in Paris, Najika receives a phone call telling her that Hagio-sensei collapsed and was hospitalized, needing a risky surgery that she might not survive. Seiya arranges for her to go back to Hokkaido and tells her that he'll win for both of them. Hagio-sensei survives the surgery and finds out that Daichi is in Hokkaido too. She searches for him and she asks him an important question, with his response being yes, he is her Flan Prince, now that all of his memories are back, he remembers the event from six years ago clearly. He tells her that he thought he couldn't be happy with her, leaving Sora behind, but he realized that he didn't want to lose anything important to him anymore so he finally told her that he loved her.
Hagio-sensei is awake when they get back and the TV is showing the competition in Paris, showing that Seiya won and he used Najika's recipe for a collaboration and gives credit where credit is due, name dropping her in the interview and calling the cake "Najika." Anyways, Najika goes on to fulfill her promise to Daichi and makes him creme brulee, a French style flan.
(SPOILER WARNING! END)
This manga is an absolute roller coaster in the fun way. It had its ups and definitely its downs. This had a big impact in my life when I was younger, considering I read fluffy heartwarming manga without any Soras happening and the fact that it was about cooking. I love to cook, I like to do it when I can and this manga showed me how fun cooking was and introduced me to the cooking world in a sense. Nowadays the young'uns have Food Wars! but this is the original to me, not as competitive as the other either. Even after all these years I haven't been able to try out the recipes in the back, but I definitely am going to try them out after rereading this.
This series is really for you if you love food or love to cook in general. It very heartwarming with doki-doki moments and other fwa-fwa moments, too. This is not in my top favourites list but it is something I really enjoy reading from time to time. Thank you for reading my blog every week. I know I say this at the end of every one of my posts but I do appreciate you guys reading my thought and caring enough about what I have to say to keep coming back. Thank you, please comment below your thoughts! I will reply to every one of them! Can't wait for you guys to read the next one!
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