Meng Qi Shi Shen

The budget put into animation quality and graphical quality is pretty self explanatory, too bad the source material holds the art back. Its a rather straightforward work overall, you can see hints of its origins as a wuxia/xianxia if you're familiar with the genre, but the worst the original work was removed.

Art & Sound 8/10
The food and cooking is fantastic, with appropriate musical accompaniment. My only complaint is that there isn't enough of it. They barely manage a cooking scene an episode and its really the only reason to watch this anime.

Writing 2/10
Really just nothing much in the writing at all. The first arc is ... an episodic isekai standard of getting to know the world, with a pretty unappealing romantic plot including multiple scenes of the heroine going "wow i really like this handsome guy" as he straight up threatens her. Its made more ridiculous when she actually has more chemistry with a character introduced in the second arc of the season (not that that's much of a romance either, its a low bar). The second arc sort of implies some dramatic plot points will be brought up but it goes no where as does the rest of the plot.

The biggest issue is that there's no feeling of conflict, which is most likely because the original source material just lacked anything substantial.
The first arc is never really explained properly, the conflict ending up pretty much just being a background detail.
The second arc lacks any significant conflict (which is what i feel the series should have just been from the start, just an episodic cooking adventure).
There's the overarcing drama, which is resolved unceremoniously with the sudden appearance of some goons, to generate a damsel in distress rescue.
And there are 2 instances of cooking competition where they barely pretend that the heroine will lose.

Overall its not like it isn't enjoyable, its easy to ignore the lack of any significant writing if you're just in it for the food scenes. There are some rather unfortunate stereotypical issues around playing character sexual orientation for comedy towards the end, which isn't great. Its a good effort on part of the production company and director for improving on what i would have considered an unsalvageable property.

Stockholm syndrome the anime.

Girl gets isekai'd upon dying from her own cooking, finds herself in a body much like her own in ancient China, proceeds to be kidnapped then just starts cooking (you know, after she died from her own cooking, let's just brush that away)

This anime should be above average, while I'm certainly not the target audience for the tropes I can still accept that this should be above average. . . but the girl got kidnapped and was practically making token resistance towards her captors. Since this is romance, I bet she ends up with one of them too.

Again, story beats are ... not for me, but I hate the fact that this girl didn't fight, poison everyone in the camp, they're practically bandits and they allowed her to handle the food. In the first place she already managed to kill herself. Kill everyone you weak minded MC!

oh dear god. the Art: beautiful / Sound: pretty good...but it's all blown away and made irrelevant by how annoying the MC is. not only is her character whiny and unintelligent - her voice matches. I had to drop this halfway through the episode bc her voice is so whiny and she always seems to play up being a brainless damsel in distress all the time. I've dropped a chinese drama for the same reason. when my friends speak in mandarin they don't sound whiny as hell (it sounds nice!) but for some reason in chinese shows they seem to think it's cute to sound ... like a 2-year old throwing a tantrum. the guys are fine (love Mo Dao Zu Shi). chinese shows also seem to make their female characters' personalities suck...they're just completely unlikable. don't even bother with this anime...it's painful to watch (and listen to)