Cooking

2022 · Roguelike · PC / Steam

Plate Up! combines the frantic kitchen chaos of Overcooked with roguelike progression and automation systems, creating a cooking game with surprising depth that keeps pulling you back for one more run.

2024 · 1 Season · Tokyo MX · Fantasy / Comedy / Adventure

Dungeon Meshi takes the seemingly absurd premise of eating monsters in a dungeon and builds from it one of the most creatively rich fantasy anime in years. Studio Trigger delivers expressive animation that brings both the cooking and the combat to vivid life, while the world-building underneath the comedy reveals surprising depth. The show makes you genuinely curious about what dragon tastes like and how a living armor's ecology works, and that combination of culinary creativity, fantasy world-building, and real character stakes is something no other anime offers.

2021 · Party / Co-op · PC / Steam

Overcooked! All You Can Eat bundles two of the best co-op party games into a single package and remasers everything for a smoother, better-looking experience. The kitchen chaos that made the series famous is fully intact, and the sheer volume of content makes this the definitive version. Solo play is functional but misses the point entirely, and the online netcode can stumble, but grab a few friends and this is one of the most reliably fun evenings in gaming.

2000 · Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages · Memoir

Anthony Bourdain's 2000 memoir ripped the curtain off the restaurant industry and revealed a world of chaos, addiction, brilliance, and terrible behavior that the dining public never saw. His voice is electric on the page, his stories are outrageous and frequently very funny, and his love for the craft of cooking comes through even when he's describing its worst excesses. Some of the shock value has faded with time, and the book's structure is loose in places. But Bourdain's writing has an energy and honesty that most food writing still can't touch, and reading it now carries an additional weight that he couldn't have anticipated.

2022 · 4 Seasons · FX (on Hulu) · Comedy-Drama

The Bear built its reputation on two seasons of extraordinary television, driven by performances and filmmaking that set a new standard for how stories about work, grief, and family could be told on screen. Jeremy Allen White anchors a cast that brings real emotional weight to every frame, and the show's portrayal of kitchen culture feels lived-in and honest. Season 3's stumble into pacing issues and narrative drift is a real blemish, not an imagined one, though Season 4 clawed back meaningful ground. Taken as a whole, this is a show that reaches genuine greatness more often than it falls short, and its best stretches rank among the finest hours of modern television.

2018 · Party / Cooking Simulation · PC / Steam

Overcooked! 2 is controlled chaos at its finest, a co-op cooking game that turns simple meal preparation into hilarious, friendship-testing teamwork challenges across increasingly absurd kitchen designs.

2018 · Simulation

Good Pizza Great Pizza is a surprisingly deep cooking sim wrapped in a cheerful, accessible package. The pizza-making mechanics are intuitive and satisfying, the story mode adds genuine personality, and the free-to-play model is among the fairest on mobile. It loses steam in the late chapters when order complexity outpaces the fun, but the journey there is well worth taking for anyone who enjoys a relaxing management game with actual charm.

2009 · Nora Ephron · 123 min · Comedy / Drama

Julie & Julia braids two true stories across half a century, Julia Child discovering her calling in postwar Paris and a frustrated blogger cooking through Child's entire cookbook in a Queens apartment, and one half of the braid is among the great biographical performances ever filmed. Meryl Streep's Julia, warbling, towering, and radiantly in love with food, her husband, and her own late-blooming purpose, earns every frame, with Stanley Tucci matching her as the marriage the genre still measures itself against. The blog half is thinner by every measure, and the film knows it. Watch it for Paris, butter, and the best marriage Nora Ephron ever put on screen.

2009 · Food Network · Reality / Competition

Chopped distilled the cooking competition to its perfect atomic unit, four chefs, three rounds, one basket of ingredients chosen by a sadist with a sense of humor, and has run that formula for hundreds of episodes without the engine ever seizing. Ted Allen's steady hosting, a rotating bench of straight-shooting judges, and the mystery basket's endless capacity for chaos, gummy bears meet duck breast, make it television's most reliable competition comfort food. The drama edits run standard reality issue and the formula never once varies. That's precisely why it works at episode four hundred, and why it will outlive us all.

2014 · Simulation

Cooking Fever delivers a frenetic time-management cooking experience with diverse restaurant themes and satisfying upgrade loops. The free-to-play model gates progress behind premium currency that's painfully slow to earn, creating a constant tension between fun gameplay and frustrating monetization.

2015 · Casual / Cooking Simulation

Cooking Mama: Let's Cook! captures the charm of the original handheld series with bite-sized cooking mini-games that are perfect for killing a few minutes. The step-by-step recipe format works naturally on touchscreen, and Mama's enthusiastic reactions still make you want to earn that perfect score. The ad interruptions and energy system drag the experience down from what could have been a clean, simple cooking game. There's not enough depth to hold you for more than a few weeks, and the recipes start to blur together. But as a free casual game that delivers exactly what it promises, it fills a specific niche well.

2018 · Simulation

Cooking Diary builds on the time-management cooking formula with restaurant decoration and a light social layer, but buries the fun under aggressive monetization, energy systems, and constant event pressure that makes free play increasingly tedious.