“Choose your next life hero, will you become a swordsman, a magician, or a pizza maker to the elves!” Kaito isn’t exactly sure what’s going on but he’s pretty sure that the food delivery bike he saw barreling towards him has in fact managed to kill him. But while he’s pondering his choices for his second life (it’s a toss-up between “the Holy Rose Knight, the garlanded guardian” and “the Lightning Wizard,” because who wants to be known as the “High-Calorie Hero” anyway) the overworked Goddess of Reincarnation learns that the first two jobs are taken and by default Kaito is whisked off to the land of the elves to be their savior, the “high-calorie hero!”
This one-shot is very silly but I like that the American light novel market is large enough to now support more “parody” titles as well as the more traditional stories! The Hero and His Elf Bride Open a Pizza Parlor in Another World functions more like a series of short stories rather than one long story which makes for “light” reading as you can pick it up for a quick chapter or two and then put it back down until you have more time. The story is about as straightforward as you can imagine: now that Kaito has been placed among the elves to save them from their bland and unimaginative diet of plain salad greens there’s nothing else for him to do but make pizza and try to get his pizza parlor off the ground. While there were some details that did the opposite of making me laugh, Queen Elanora of the elves is too much of a stereotypical tsundere to elicit a laugh and the reoccurring gag about Kaito’s “elf bride” Lilia’s bottomless stomach gets old quickly. Overall this volume was a fun read and free of more problematic details (like slavery and sexual assault) which seem to be popping up in more and more light novels these days.
I’ll admit it does seem a bit lazy on the part of writer Kaya Kizaki to literally give Kaito a bag of holding that includes many of his initial ingredients and recipe cards that allow him to “level up” his pizza making (or cards that tell him what “quest” he needs to undertake to unlock the knowledge to make a new type of pizza) but it’s clearly supposed to be funny when Kaito starts spouting off dozens of pizza-related facts that he wasn’t aware of before he reincarnated. I bring this detail up since it is getting tiring to see video game mechanics in basically all light novels these days and Pizza Parlor goes right up to the line for what a “video game mechanic” is (but there is no status screen at least!).
While I don’t see myself returning to Pizza Parlor again, both because the story wraps itself up quite well and also because I don’t think I would get much out of reading it, I certainly had fun with it and would recommend it to fans who are starting to get a bit tired of “serious” isekai stories and want something a bit silly and all about food.