In the world of Delicious in Dungeon, particularly inside the titular dungeon, death is not final.  Adventurers who expire in the dungeon can have their corpses retrieved and resurrected.  Fortune and glory await those willing to delve into caverns, and while death is still a possibility, is much less of a threat than usual.  

 

One problem is that if your corpse is unrecoverable, you cannot be revived.  That's the issue that Laios and company now face as his sister, Falin, was swallowed by a dragon during one encounter and the rest of the party was incapacitated.  Only through Falin's last-second magical intervention was the party able to exit the dungeon at all.  The dragon retreats to the depths of the dungeon.  If Laios can reclaim his sister's body before the dragon digests her, she will be saved, and thus, he mounts a recovery mission.  Given the whole party wipe thing, Laios' group is a little short on funds for supplies and equipment.  In an effort to cut down on expenses, he proposes that the group obtain their food from the dungeon itself, namely, from the monsters within.  

 

Laios, however, is not an experienced cook and all he has is a monster manual of questionable accuracy to instruct himself with.  Marcille is very hesitant to partake of the meager offerings, not only because she doesn't want to eat monsters (who may or may not have consumed humans, among other things), but also because Laios is, well, bad at cooking.  Chilchuck is less hesitant than Marcille in using monsters for sustenance but still plays the straight man to the party's antics and draws a line at what he'll eat too.  As any of us can attest, food goes down much easier when it is prepared in a manner that tastes good.  When it's a squiggly, squishy monster, it's even more important to make things palatable.  Enter Senshi, who comes across the group and the travesty that is their attempt at cooking monsters.  Senshi is a cook with more than ten years of making monster meals under his belt and he decides to come along, much to the party's glee.  Senshi can not only hold his own in the kitchen but battle too, with a giant wok that doubles as a shield.  

 

And that's the basics of Delicious in Dungeon for you.  The party goes deeper and deeper into the dungeon in hunt of the dragon.  They encounter plenty of monsters and eat them too.  You'll find some parallels between food in our world and the food that Senshi prepares, so don't be surprised if Delicious in Dungeon gets your stomach growling.  

 

With Studio Trigger, Delicious in Dungeon is in good hands.  Trigger has always been good at mixing great animation with humor, and Delicious in Dungeon is no exception.  It's a perfect match for the studio.  This is actually not the first time Trigger has worked on Delicious in Dungeon: back in 2019, they released a thirty-second commercial in honor of the manga's eighth volume.

 

The first episode of the anime covers the first two chapters of the manga.  It was a lot of fun seeing our heroes in motion: Laios with his heavy curiosity when it comes to monsters as food, Marcille's extreme aversion to eating it up until she takes the first bite (you're going to be hearing a lot of "oishii!"), Senshi and his matter-of-fact cooking where monsters are just ingredients and not something weird to eat.  The anime helps further all of these things and really breathes life into the group.  Cast-wise, I don't think you could have picked a better lineup.  Each voice actor and actress matches what I thought their characters would sound like.  Animation is top-notch and the monsters are well-animated in a way that makes them even more gross when you consider they're going to be food in a moment.  

 

Delicious in Dungeon will be released in January on Netflix.  If you're a fan of the manga to begin with or are looking for a good fantasy/comedy, I would give it a watch.  Given Netflix's penchant of releasing whole seasons at once, you'll be able to binge the whole season immediately.  Quite fitting for a show about food, don't you think?