I haven’t read manga much recently, but Delicious in Dungeon (ダンジョン飯, literally “Dungeon Food”) caught my eye and I picked up the first three volumes. It’s been out for a few years now, so many of you have probably already heard of it, but I wanted to introduce it to those like me who hadn’t. There’s also an English translation available.
Delicious in Dungeon (hmm…D in D) is a comedy manga that is a delightful 
mashup of fantasy adventure and cooking manga. The premise is an adventuring party barely making it out from their last adventure. Having lost most of their money and supplies, they’re caught between trying to rescue the main character Laios’s sister, who was eaten by a dragon, and actually having the resources to do so.
To strike a balance between the two goals, Laios proposes they eat what can be found in the dungeon; namely monsters. The party halfling rogue Chilchuck is fairly open minded to the idea, but the elven mage Marcille is thoroughly against it. She’ll often begrudgingly try some and find it surprisingly tasty. Sensi, a dwarven dungeon gourmet with years of experience, soon joins the party and teaches them how to cook. Much of the humor comes from the characters reactions Laios’s antics, but it’s also just fun to see what they’ll cook up the next.
From the tools required to survive in the dungeon to monster ecologies, there’s a lot of creativity that goes into the manga. More than once I found myself thinking about the logistics an actual dungeon delve would require.
Delicious in Dungeon does a great job of exploring fantasy tropes and taking them to their logical extremes. For example, there are people who traverse the dungeon looking for dead adventurers that need resurrection, which itself is a common occurrence.
The manga of course uses a lot of cooking and fantasy words, but the illustrations make it easy to understand. The more obscure words have furigana.
肉食の魔物がいればその糧となる草食の魔物が！
草食の魔物が食う植物に植物の栄養となる水や光や土が！
すなわち人間も迷宮で食っていけるということだ！
If there are carnivorous monsters, there must be herbivores!
And there must be water, light, and soil for the plants that the herbivores eat!
That is to say that humans, too, can eat in the dungeon!
The first volume can be read online
| Japanese Edition | English Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Ryoko Kui | |
| Publisher | Kadokawa BEAM | Yen Press |
| Online Retailer | Amazon Japan | Amazon US |
| Read for free online |