Anime-inspired food festival at Little Soi in Coimbatore

The food festival is a flavourful integration of food and popular culture.  | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Naurto’s hot bowl of ramen noodles with the iconic Narutomaki fish cakes or Luffy’s favourite lucious meat on the bone: choose your pick among your favourite anime dishes at Little Soi’s anime food festival. 

The food festival has brought the globally-loved anime culture to Coimbatore mixed in with an Asian fine-dining culinary experience. 

Little Soi boasts of diverse Asian cuisines such as Thai, Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Adding on to that, their festival menu offers more Asian delectables to be enjoyed by both anime and food enthusiasts. 

The dining experience starts off with a bowl of Thai tom kha soup made with creamy coconut milk blended with aromatic lemongrass, making it a perfect fusion of rich and refreshing flavours.  

In anime inspired appetisers we are served Sanji’s Okonomiyaki, a type of Japanese pancake. A cook for the Straw Hat Pirates in the anime One Piece, Sanji is a character popular for creating this Japanese pancake with toppings like tofu, seafood, cabbage, avocado and then drizzled with Japanese mayonnaise. 

This is followed by another One Piece inspired dish, Luffy’s meat on the bone. It is a meat heavy dish with minced chicken wrapped around boiled eggs and then skewered with a drumstick bone. The crispy chicken covering and the sauces gave us an authentic taste of modern Japanese cuisine. 

We are then served Rengoku’s bento box. A character from Demon Slayer, some of Renguko’s favourite foods are chicken in shoyu sauce, sushi rice, teriyaki glazed tofu and shrimp prawn. All these are packed in a bento box, which is famous in Japan for everyday lunches. It is the perfect combination of aesthetic pleasure and practical functionality. 

Though these dishes are meat based, Little Soi has also included tofu and avocado variations for the vegetarians without altering the authenticity of Asian flavours.

Apart from anime food choices, the beverage menu offers a variety of bubble teas. In the popping boba options they have refreshing flavours such as mango, passionfruit and strawberry. While the chewy boba drinks include creamy flavours of lotus biscoff and taro. 

The meal ends with their signature dessert, the Little Soi sphere. A scoop of butterscotch ice-cream encased within a hollow chocolate sphere which melts when hot chocolate is poured on it: the serving of the dessert is an experience in itself. 

Posters and laptop stickers are given away to customers who indulge in this flavourful integration of food and popular culture.

Little Soi is located at Lakshmi Mills Urban Center, Avinashi Road. A meal for two costs approximately ₹1500. Open for lunch from 12 to 3.30pm, for dinner from 7pm to 10.30pm. For reservations, call 8098252640