Oishinbo Is Coming Back as 'Shin Oishinbo,' Decades After the Original Anime Ended
Some manga never really leave the cultural conversation even after they stop being read week to week, and Oishinbo is about as good an example of that as Japanese food media has. The gourmet drama has been sitting on an extended hiatus since 2014, with no new chapters and no clean ending, and yet it's remained the reference point practically every food manga that followed has been measured against. That's what makes the announcement out of ABEMA Anime Matsuri 2026 land as hard as it does: Oishinbo is getting a new TV anime, titled "Shin Oishinbo" ("New Oishinbo"), roughly three and a half decades after the original series left the air.
Here's everything that's actually been confirmed about the announcement, plus a full rundown of what Oishinbo is for anyone who's never picked up the manga or caught the original 1988-1992 anime.
What was announced
The reveal came during Shin-Ei Animation's own stage presentation at ABEMA Anime Matsuri 2026, an event held September 19-20, 2026, according to Anime News Network and GIGAZINE. The stage was tied to Shin-Ei's 50th-anniversary celebrations, and the studio used the slot to unveil "Shin Oishinbo" alongside a teaser PV. Beyond the title and the teaser, the announcement was light on hard production details — there's no premiere date, no confirmed voice cast, and no full staff list attached to it yet.
It's worth being precise about Shin-Ei's role here. The studio produced the original Oishinbo TV series back in the late '80s and early '90s, and it made this new announcement at its own anniversary event — but the reporting doesn't spell out Shin-Ei's involvement in producing "Shin Oishinbo" itself with the same clean certainty. What's solid is that Shin-Ei, the studio behind the original series and also known for long-running franchises like Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan, is the one that brought the revival into the world at its own celebratory stage show.
What Oishinbo actually is
For readers who've never encountered it, Oishinbo is a long-running gourmet manga written by Tetsu Kariya with art by Akira Hanasaki. It launched in 1983 in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits and grew into one of the defining works of Japanese food fiction — a series that helped establish the entire "gourmet manga" genre as something more than a niche curiosity, long before food-focused anime and manga became as common as they are now.
The story follows Yamaoka Shirō, a newspaper reporter introduced as cynical, chronically unmotivated, and generally allergic to enthusiasm about most things in his life — except food, where his palate and technical knowledge turn out to be genuinely exceptional. Yamaoka is assigned to a project at his newspaper called the "Ultimate Menu," an effort to assemble a meal that represents the absolute pinnacle of Japanese cuisine. That assignment puts him on a collision course with Yūzan Kaibara, a rival gourmand leading a competing team tasked with building the "Supreme Menu." The two projects, and the two men behind them, become the series' long-running engine: a food-journalism rivalry that plays out across debates over ingredients, technique, regional specialties, and what "the best" meal could even mean.
Why the Ultimate Menu vs. Supreme Menu rivalry mattered
What made Oishinbo distinct from a lot of food media, both at the time and since, is that it treated cuisine as a subject worth genuine intellectual argument rather than just a backdrop for melodrama. Yamaoka and Kaibara's rivalry wasn't just a plot device to generate conflict — it became a structure the series could use to dig into real culinary history, regional Japanese cooking traditions, and questions about authenticity and craft, episode after episode, volume after volume. That approach is a big part of why Oishinbo built the reputation it has: it wasn't just a story that happened to involve food, it was a series genuinely invested in food as its subject matter, decades before that became a familiar format.
A manga that's been on hold since 2014
Part of what makes this announcement notable is where the manga itself currently stands. Oishinbo has been on hiatus since May 2014, and its most recent collected volume — the 111th — was published that December. There's been no new material published since, and nothing in the current reporting around "Shin Oishinbo" indicates that the manga's hiatus is ending or that new chapters are coming alongside the anime announcement. The anime revival and the manga's publication status appear to be two separate tracks right now: one moving forward, the other still paused exactly where it's been for over a decade.
That's a detail worth sitting with, because it means "Shin Oishinbo" isn't launching off the back of a freshly resumed manga building buzz in real time. It's a new anime attached to a series that, on the page, has effectively been frozen since 2014 — which makes Shin-Ei's decision to revisit it now feel less like riding momentum and more like a deliberate choice to bring a dormant classic back into circulation on its own terms.
The original anime, and what came after it
The original Oishinbo TV anime was also produced by Shin-Ei Animation, running 136 episodes plus two specials from 1988 through 1992. That's a substantial run by any standard, and it's the version of Oishinbo most anime-only viewers who remember the franchise at all would have encountered. Depending on how the math is framed, outlets have described the gap between that series ending and "Shin Oishinbo" being announced as somewhere in the mid-thirties in years — 2026 marks 34 years since the original anime concluded in 1992, and some outlets, including AnimeTV-JP and finalweapon, have rounded that up to "35 years" in their own coverage. Either way, it's a gap measured in decades, not years.
Beyond the TV series, there's a less firmly sourced piece of the adaptation history worth flagging carefully. Anitrendz has reported that Oishinbo also received two anime films from Studio Deen, released in 1992 and 1993, along with a live-action film in 1996. That claim hasn't been corroborated by Anime News Network's coverage of the "Shin Oishinbo" announcement, so it's worth treating as a single-sourced detail rather than confirmed fact until a second outlet backs it up — real history for the franchise if accurate, but not yet verified to the same standard as the TV series and hiatus details.
Where English-language readers can find the manga
For readers outside Japan who want to catch up on the source material ahead of whatever "Shin Oishinbo" turns out to be, VIZ Media has published English releases of the manga under the compilation title "Oishinbo À La Carte." That release repackages selections from the original 111-volume run into themed collections, rather than translating the series in its original volume-by-volume format — a structure that's made the manga at least somewhat accessible to English-speaking readers even without a complete, cover-to-cover translation existing.
What's confirmed versus what's still unknown
To lay it out plainly: what's confirmed is the title "Shin Oishinbo," the September 19, 2026 announcement at ABEMA Anime Matsuri during Shin-Ei Animation's 50th-anniversary stage, the accompanying teaser PV, and Shin-Ei's history as the studio behind the original 1988-1992 TV series. What isn't confirmed yet includes the premiere date, the voice cast, the director and other core staff, the episode count, and which streaming platform, if any, will carry the series. There's also no confirmation of how closely "Shin Oishinbo" will hew to the original manga's storyline, whether it will draw from material published before the 2014 hiatus, or whether it's positioned as a continuation, a remake, or something else entirely.
That's a lot of open territory for an announcement this early, but it's a familiar pattern — reveals like this tend to lock in a title and a teaser first, with staff, cast, and scheduling details following in subsequent waves as the production gets closer to airing.
Bottom line
"Shin Oishinbo" is real, it's coming from a Shin-Ei Animation stage event built around the studio's own 50th anniversary, and it's arriving roughly three and a half decades after the original TV anime wrapped its 136-episode run. For a manga that's been sitting in an unresolved hiatus since 2014, and an anime franchise that's been dormant even longer, that's a significant vote of confidence in Yamaoka Shirō and the Ultimate Menu's staying power. Whether "Shin Oishinbo" ends up retelling the classic Ultimate Menu vs. Supreme Menu rivalry from the beginning, picking up somewhere later in the manga's run, or charting its own path entirely is still genuinely unknown — and won't be clear until Shin-Ei follows up with more concrete production details.
No premiere date, cast, or staff have been confirmed yet; expect Shin-Ei to roll out production details in follow-up announcements tied to its 50th-anniversary celebrations.