Yes, they really turned it into a movie. Across 10 seasons of TV Tokyo’s “The Solitary Gourmet,” salaryman Goro Inogashira (Yutaka Matsushige) has chomped and slurped his way through more than 100 restaurants, often with little but his inner monologue for company.
Based on a manga by Masayuki Qusumi and Jiro Taniguchi, the series is pure comfort food and an obvious forerunner to what’s now known as ambient TV. Little of lasting consequence ever happens in “The Solitary Gourmet”; even when it does, it’s no match for a rumbling stomach. As with kung fu movies or adult videos, the dialogue scenes are just foreplay before the important stuff — and in this case, it’s all about the eating.
It’s the least likely contender for a theatrical outing since the equally uneventful “Fictitious Girl’s Diary” made the same transition in 2020. Matsushige pulls up his regular seat at the table as Goro, but also occupies the director’s chair for the first time in his career, in addition to sharing screenwriting duties with series mainstay Yoshihiro Taguchi.
