Each Friday, we'll be letting a different DC.com writer share what they'll be reading over the weekend and why you might want to check it out. Here's this week's suggestion for a perfect Weekend Escape!
Get Jiro!, Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose’s ultra-violent parody of restaurant culture, initially launched as a graphic novel in 2012. The co-writers then introduced a prequel in 2015, but did not revisit the world again before Bourdain’s death in 2018. Now, Adult Swim is bringing the series to life again via a ten-episode animated series debuting Oct. 3. It features Brian Tee as the eponymous Jiro, plus Titus Welliver, Alison Pill and Justin Kirk. If you want to see where the concept began, Get Jiro! is a quick, fun read that’s easy to devour in a single sitting.
The Premise:
Get Jiro! takes place in a near-future Los Angeles where both the entertainment and arts industries are no longer of any consequence and only food matters. Citizens vie for the hottest restaurant reservations, going to lengths even more extreme than Patrick Batman trying to get into Dorsia’s.
While Gotham City has Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Maroni, this gastro-obsessed metropolis has Bob, a traditional French chef, and Rose, a crunchy granola vegan who’s obsessed with local ingredients. They rule the city with iron fists, locking smaller, independent restaurants into their restrictive regimes to access ingredients. Chefs can be punished for breaking culinary laws, such as serving out-of-season dishes, even if a customer demands it.
In the middle is Jiro, a stoic sushi chef operating out of a strip mall, as many of L.A.’s best chefs often do. His shop is located in the Outer Ring, a wasteland far removed from the middle-class Inner Ring and the fine-dining Center.
We meet Jiro when he beheads a patron for bad sushi etiquette—first, mixing wasabi into his soy sauce, then dipping the rice into the sauce when you’re meant to only lightly dip the fish. The final straw is when his buddy inquires about California rolls, a North American invention that prestigious sushi restaurants refuse to serve.
This is a nod to L.A. lore, by the way. Sushi chef Kazunori Nozawa has banned celebrities, including Charlize Theron, for refusing to follow his rules. These insider food jokes permeate the story, which sees Jiro stuck between the two factions in a brutal, bloody war.
Let’s Talk Talent:
Well, there’s chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain, who really needs no introduction as one of the biggest household names of the food world. Co-writer Joel Rose’s credits include a fair amount of the grit you’ll see in Get Jiro—thrillers Kill Kill Faster Faster and The Blackest Bird, urban fiction novel Kill the Poor, and TV shows “Kojak” and “Miami Vice.” They’d been friends for some 35 years, meeting when, according to Rose, Bourdain showed up at his door seeking help becoming a better writer. After their second Get Jiro! graphic novel, the pair collaborated one last time on Hungry Ghosts, a graphic novel in which each tale tells a horror story linking Japanese folklore and food.
Artist Langdon Foss manages to make the food look more appetizing than the rest of the often over-the-top, grotesque world, and much of the humor comes through in his details (the activist slogans on the T-shirts Rose’s team wears being one example).
So, if you want to see what two talented writers and an artist can spin around Bourdain’s extensive preoccupation with and knowledge of the food world, it’s definitely worth a look—especially if you yourself have an interest in cooking.
A Few Reasons to Read:
- If you love learning about food, there’s plenty of fun tidbits throughout the book as characters talk about their preferred cuisines. In one scene, they eat ortolans, small, endangered songbirds that are drowned in Armagnac, roasted, then devoured whole—bones and all—in a practice considered so gluttonous and cruel that it’s customary for diners to cover their heads with a napkin, supposedly in part to hide their shame from God. The practice is now outlawed in France and banned elsewhere, but Bourdain described eating an ortolan in his book Medium Raw.
- I spent some time writing about the L.A. food scene, so I’m no stranger to rooms of self-appointed foodies gleefully chirping “yes, chef” and waxing about the greatest pre-fixe tasting menu they’d ever had or whatever. It made me appreciate The Menu’s ribbing of fine dining so much more, and there’s a lot of that same humor here.
- It’s violent, if you like that sort of thing. Jiro may be a sushi chef, but he operates more like a spaghetti western antihero and solves his problems two ways: subterfuge, but more often a sharp knife.
- For as much violence and backstabbing as we see, I really enjoyed the relationship the stony Jiro has with several side characters, including an older French chef who describes how to make a pot-au-feu in such detail it made me want to make one now that it’s autumn, and a sous chef Jiro frees from the sexism that often runs rampant in the restaurant scene.
Why It’s Worth Your Time:
If you’re a Bourdain fan or a foodie who admits it can be pretentious, you’ll get a kick out of this quick read. Plus, it’ll prep you for the Adult Swim series, which looks like it could be a lot of fun. I mean, the trailer has someone being drowned in what looks like beurre blanc. It also seems like it might add new characters and expand on the world, which there’s certainly room to as Get Jiro!’s only follow-up was a prequel. Bon appetit!
Get Jiro! by Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose, Langdon Foss and José Villarrubia is available in bookstores, comic shops, libraries and digital retailers as a softcover graphic novel. It can also be read in full on DC UNIVERSE INFINITE.
Juliet Bennett Rylah writes about horror, Vertigo and the dark side of superheroes for DC.com. Follow her on Bluesky at @JBRylah.
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Juliet Bennett Rylah and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.
