Restaurant to Another World is... bizarre. I mean after all, the execution of the anime is exactly as the title says; it's a restaurant to another world. It's a bit challenging to even call this an isekai in a traditional sense, but rather it takes the form of the blending and merging of worlds and cultures.
For the unitiated, the series follows a restaurant which operates regularly in the modern/real world almost every day of the week. Though on the day of Satur (the 7th day of the week, Saturday), its doors open in all sorts of locations strewn about another world. It is clear that there is a force manipulating the restaurant in where these doors might appear, though the magic and power surrounding the restaurant won't be the focus of this review.
The series takes on an episodic format. Each episode the list of regulars at the restaurant expands as we continue to see the same faces enter on the 7th day of each week, each with their own signature meal that they order and feel adamantly is the best on the menu. Each with some reason why they feel so strongly about that meal. When a customer orders a meal, we learn about their life through what they say or through their trip to the restaurant. For a series in which the main characters almost never leave the restaurant, this series has some of the greatest world building I've seen in an anime within this genre.
I caught myself towards the end of these series having a moment to recognize that as this restaurant was sitting on my screen showcasing the banter between customers, I knew and had come to like every customer there. I knew their stories, I felt fondly of them. Though in a way that felt natural. Through the characters, you begin to understand the world. You understand their behavior and their interactions.
The series does a fantastic job at capitalizing on this in order to expand the world further and add some additional depth to our main chef and waitresses.
The light novels for this series release so infrequently compared to others, and are the author's only active project. While other light novel authors may have multiple ongoing light novel projects, write their novels in both webnovel and light novel formats at the same time, or enter into regularly serialized contracts for the frequency of releases, this doesn't appear to be the case here. At no discredit to the series that follow the aforementioned format, the time taken for what seems to be yearly releases for the light novels of Restaurant to Another World is noticeable. The care and attention given to each customer's story, the energy of the characters and how naturally they seem to blend into the world, and the overall atmosphere.
I'm not sure that there's much more than that to say about this anime, but I think that's a good thing. It's so simple in concept, so comforting to watch; yet also so much more heartwarming, special, and expansive than I could have imagined. We're not here to solve the problems of the fantasy world. We're just here to offer a warm meal to those that are.