Drawn by Youichi Tsukahara using characters created by Yoshito Usui of Crayon Shin-chan, this series has run since 4 December 2015. The lead is not the boy but his father, Hiroshi Nohara, and the setting is not a kindergarten but the restaurants around an office.
A chapter is simple: Hiroshi thinks about what to eat at lunch, decides, and eats it. What sits on top of that is the situation of a thirty-five-year-old salaryman. Money left this month, what the afternoon holds, what he ate yesterday, whether to take a junior colleague along or go alone. Almost none of the original’s gag register survives; what replaces it is a serious account of how much of a working day one meal takes up.
Borrowing a familiar cast for a completely different genre is disorienting at first, and then not, if you have ever chosen lunch near an office. Still running.
