Soma Yukihira's dad runs a small restaurant with delicious takes on traditional Japanese food. Soma hopes to someday out-cook his father, and he plans to start practicing in the family kitchens as soon as he graduates from middle school. Unbeknownst to him, however, his father has a different course mapped out – he will go to the prestigious Totsuki Saryo Culinary Institute and learn to be a top-class chef. But the school has a fearsome reputation, a (deliberately) low retention rate, and is full of snobs! Will underdog Soma prevail? And is he even aware that he's been cast as the underdog in this story?