Solid cooking tournament series! Starts off with a bang, but after the main characters settle in, they just tear through the enemy cooks like a machine gun at a shooting gallery. I was left unsatisfied that the lovely art and funny writing fell into such a predictable formula, although the core element of surprising food ideas stays compelling through to the end.
I'm happy I read it and I'm recommending it on the basis of the very strong 90s art and appealing character writing. Jan, the mega-asshole, flamboyantly demolishes and mocks the opposition in a way that's always fun to watch. The author does not baby Jan; he is regularly subject to blowback and humiliation, which he admirably sustains. Still, the series suffers because Jan's harsh training occurred before the series begins, so it's just amusing to watch him wipe the floor with lesser braggarts -- amusing but not gripping, because they never have a ghost of a chance. The villains are by and large not afforded sympathetic personalities or much time to flesh out their gimmicks.
Bringing back the evil judge Otani again and again is a dissatisfying bellwether of the series' limited structural progression. A lot of these fights you could read in any order. The central element, the food choices, again, remain fresh to the end and ramp up in intensity, which is great. I was still a little disappointed that when we're finally given a convincing major threat, he turns into an anti-villain. It's unfortunate that all of Jan's rivals must end up as his sidekicks to avoid compromising either's reputation, with the end result of downgrading them. (cf DBZ) Still, the less-mean deuteragonists/rivals retain plenty of skill and interest to make them fun to root for.
Well, it is about traditional Chinese cooking, so it does get a tad mean with the graphic animal death, eating things while they're alive et cetera. To me, the foreigner, it comes across as funny to see such merciless, ghastly imagery juxtaposed with the series' pretty characters and relatively mild vanilla humor. It's an interesting twist in the series' complicated relationship with cruelty.
The art is nice and bold, a bit of a horniness victim. The writing is welcoming and supportive of women; Jan's foil (and our viewpoint, sorta) Kiriko is especially likable as the firebrand fight-hungry goody-two-shoes Vegeta figure, reliable for respectable wins and endlessly determined to crush the titular character.
...but it's tough to submit IWJ as a feminist manga as the author Saijyo pulls a bit of an Oda and sneakily begins to draw his strong heroines with colossal balloon titties. (Their waists shrink as thin as a neck, but Jan's does too, so that comes across as a less bonerrific affectation.) The writing doesn't sully itself by following suit, and the character art is still cool-looking, so it's not a dealbreaker, but if you're not slowing down to actually make all these recipes, you're gonna end up less interested in the plot than in seeing just how big Saijyou is going to go with the way he draws racks. Spoiler: Startlingly big!