Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de

Reiko Houshou, heiress to a large conglomerate, seems like any other wealthy lady. However, not many people know that she is a rookie detective for the Kunitachi Police Department. In addition, she hides her identity from her incompetent boss, Kyouichirou Kazamatsuri, a flashy heir to his family's motor business.

During an investigation involving her college friends, Reiko has trouble identifying the culprit and their motive. Out of nowhere, a man approaches Reiko and introduces himself as Kageyama, her newly assigned butler. As soon as Reiko confides in him about her worries, he criticizes her lack of deduction skills and helps her quickly crack the case. Now with the sharp-tongued Kageyama at her side, Reiko may just become the detective she desires to be.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kazamatsuri, Kyouichirou Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Kageyama Main

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Houshou, Reiko Main

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Kanbara, Satoshi Supporting

Kawamoto, Katsuhiko Japanese

Shibayama, Satoru Supporting

Miyamoto, Takahiro Japanese

Kanbara, Shiho Supporting

Ohara, Sayaka Japanese

Williams, Leo Supporting

Hamano, Daiki Japanese

Nagae, Kouji Supporting

Yoshida, Kenji Japanese

Actor Supporting

Hayakawa, Takeshi Japanese

Ishiguro, Ryouta Supporting

Maedou, Tomoaki Japanese

Takeeda, Yoshinori Producer

Nishi, Kei Producer

Taguchi, Ayuri Producer

Hattori, Yuuta Producer

Reviews

Jun 21, 2025

5iv3_

Recommended

To be honest, this show was not what I had imagined this show was gonna be, but I really enjoyed it! It's honestly just a lot of fun comedy with a bunch of different little mysteries to solve (this show did make me realize i'm so bad at mysteries though, omg).

The artstyle is fun and very comic book-y, animation is pretty nice. Nothing over the top, but it's better than decent. Plot was fun and I think the characters are quite entertaining and make for some fun interactions. Truly, it's a fun show. (don't understand why it isn't liked :/. it's funn).

Also, as ... a little tidbit, i cried a bit (granted I cry really easily haha. i have a soft heart 💕) But the episodes that were a little sad/bittersweet were really well done (Episode 6 especially).


Anyways, It's a good show 👍 You 🫵 should watch it :)

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jul 11, 2025

patkarunungan

Mixed Feelings

Having enjoyed Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective, this seems to be yet another female detective anime. Without knowing anything about the already released 2011 jdorama, I assumed based on the key visual that 'The Dinner Table Detective' is about a smart, classy lady detective. I anticipated that if Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective was good, this anime might be even better. I was disappointed.


§ Overview

Houshou Reiko is an upper-class heiress who chose to work as a detective. She is an okay but mediocre detective. In fact, she is the butt of jokes of the real genius behind this show, her butler Kageyama, who is clearly the ... titular character and by coincidence bears the surname of the genius setter in Haikyuu!!

She hides her identity from her incompetent superior, Kazamatsuri Kyouichirou, who is the heir of a motor business.


§ Notes


1. The art style itself is a bit jarring because it is not the usual style employed by many anime today. It's a bit of a throwback to some of the styles used in the 90s. It feels more like watching a graphic novel move than a regular anime.

If Ameku uses standard art style filled with great art direction, 'The Dinner Table Detective' has a similar æsthetic to that used in Trillion Game — liking this look is an acquired taste.


2. The mysteries are a bit easier to guess or, at the very least, not impossible to guess, unlike in the mysteries in Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective, where the solution actually requires knowledge of medicine.


3. In some episodes, the mystery ends in the middle of the episode, and a new one starts, but only in some cases does the mystery end by the time an episode actually ends.

There are pros and cons. If the mystery ends mid-episode, the new episode might hook the viewer who would have otherwise dropped the anime and continue to the next episode. This is a clever use of the Zeigarnik Effect. In brief, this is the nagging feeling of having an interrupted or incomplete task. People tend to remember the incomplete tasks more than the completed tasks.

On the other hand, the format feels jarring. When a mystery ends and completes the episode, it gives you a sense of emotional payoff. That's the format that good mysteries like Detective Conan, Ameku: Doctor Detective, and 'Professor Chuuzenji's Lectures on Monsters' usually use.

Whilst my personal judgement of this format is that it's jarring, I reckon it really depends on whether you find this format better than the traditional formats. Some might even enjoy both formats.


4. As hinted earlier, Reiko's boss, Kyouichirou, is an insufferable twat. I can't stand him. The way he acts is the stereotypical nouveau riche, always flaunting his wristwatch and always bragging about his wealth and his travels. This he does, thinking that Reiko is an average girl who gets easily impressed by wealth.

In other words, his flamboyance degrades what would otherwise be a decent anime. He is not funny at all. He is the reason I am only giving this a 4 out of 10. Without him, I might give this a 5 or even a 6.


5. Narratively, his function is similar to Mr Mori from Detective Conan. He raises hypotheses that are often wrong. In some sense, he may be a stand-in for the viewers who might have hypothesised something similar.

Like I said, I don't like him. I believe he is put there to also add humour, which I recognise might land with other people, but not me. It's just a matter of taste, as a friend of mine likes him and this show. If the tone is a little bit more serious, it is sufficient that Reiko poses such wrong theories in the presence of Kageyama, who, in turn, will correct her.


6. Speaking of which, I mentioned earlier that their dynamic is one of a fool and the real genius. Reiko is the butt of jokes. Some might complain that this is misogyny, but this anime makes fun of both Reiko and Kyouichirou, so there is gender equality. Regardless of whether you feel that this is misogyny or not, this is the part where it is somewhat funny.

(For an anime that shows a similar dynamic between Reiko and Kageyama but without a character identical to Kyouichirou, check out 'Professor Chuuzenji's Lectures on Monsters.' In that anime, which I deem a superior show to this, a similar dynamic can be found between Kanna and Chuuzenji-sensei.)


§ Conclusion

'The Dinner Table Detective' is a somewhat acceptable detective show. Your enjoyment of it really hinges on whether you can tolerate or even enjoy the (lame) humour brought about by Kyouichirou.


NOTA BENE: A grade of 4 out of 10 means I got some enjoyment out of this anime, but the issues are glaring, or simply I rank it higher than my 3's but below my 5's.

My enjoyment spectrum lies from 4 to 10. If I have scored an anime below 4, I actively dislike it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Jun 20, 2025

KANLen09

Not Recommended

The Dinner Table Detective — Solving detective cases at the comfort of your own dining table? Now that's something never done before, where the stakes of life are tantamount to the judgment of what's on the table.

Listen, I dig detective stories like the plague, and throughout the last few years or so, we've been through some of the best detective-esque settings that the AniManga industry has to offer, the likes of Summer 2023's Undead Girl Murder Farce and the series of Yuukoku no Moriarty a.k.a Moriarty the Patriot, which saw both seasons in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, respectively. However, not every detective show is ... a whiz out from the mystery hat, which is why we find ourselves underwhelmed by the mystery shows this Spring 2025 season: from the famed mystery author of Aki Shimizu's Chuuzenji-sensei Mononoke Kougiroku: Sensei ga Nazo wo Hodoite Shimau kara. a.k.a The Mononoke Lecture Logs of Chuzenji-sensei: He Just Solves All the Mysteries, to the crux of this show of novelist Tokuya Higashikawa's Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de a.k.a The Dinner Table Detective, which saw a rather short run from late 2010 to 2012, and the rather weird decision to have Madhouse's adaptation a full 15 years apart.

In the predictable but ever so elusive vision of the detective mystery world, you'd have your Sherlock Holmes - Watson duo plays with the antagonist of James Moriarty, or you'd have the more simple but still complex and enjoyable ones from the likes of Detective Conan and Inspector Gadget. However, it's the fictional character of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, created by the famous English writer Agatha Christie, her most famous and longest-running character, who has produced countless novels and stories, that only a relatively few of the most literature-based minds will know. And it's in this setting where we find the series's titular group of not-so-ordinary characters: a wealthy heiress who works double duty with her rookie detective job for the police, which is supervised by a rather eccentric boss that exudes forced comedy for the sake of his glamour, and accompanied by a rather ordinary-looking butler that's as humble as he comes, taking Chuuzenji-sensei's rhetoric as the one whom "He Just Solves All the Mysteries."

For one, for those well in the know about Hercule Poirot's character and how Agatha Christie portrays him to be, that's who the dignified heiress of Reiko Hosho has to deal with: Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri is an inspector serving the Kunitachi Police Department and also the heir to his own family-run car company. This is probably one of a fair few times that you would see literate heirs secretly running their side gig (though not so much with Kazamatsuri), though the outcomes are very different when compared against each other. On the outset, Reiko is as proud as a high-pitched crow as an heiress of sizable reputation, largely because she HAS to maintain her image in front of friends and clients, though this is in stark contrast to how much she tries to maintain this to her cool, calm, and collected butler, who's simply named Kageyama, who is the ONLY one "allowed" to dig her grave when she's trying to rack her brain into solving the usual detective cases and gives her advice on how those cases can be solved, always. Compare that to Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri, and he's the total opposite of how Hercule Poirot carries himself despite his short height and weird body and facial contraptions, but done with dignity. Rude, narcissistic, bombarding — call Kazamatsuri whatever you want, but his role as an inspector, I feel, is a major disservice in regard to how he's supposed to mentor Reiko, yet feels every bit like he was supposed to be portrayed as Batman's Joker character in Sherlock Holmes's body to the female Watson, who, despite her good looks and hidden clumsiness, at least is a decent character at best. I love eccentricity, especially when done right, and this variation of Undead Girl Murder Farce's Tsugaru Shinuchi, Aya Rindo, and Shizuku Hasei are gravely not the case here.

There was a time when series were in episodic form, and there are still series amping that very same rhetoric, which I guess plays its fiddle well to the detective setting it corroborates efforts from, and one that I'll give credit to. The stories here are quite the mixed bag of simple but weird or complex but stupidly compounded. For sure, this is not a series where you want to attach the "detective mystery" genre to it, but if it's for pure entertainment, I guess they'll do.

While I'm not surprised to find Madhouse working on this project, which, to be fair, looks decent and alright for the entity that's been dabbing on different genres of works since post-COVID, it's the choice of the staff team that intrigues me, most particularly the veteran in-house director Mitsuyuki Masuhara. The Diamond no Ace a.k.a Ace of Diamond series' director, has not been around since Act II's adaptation in the pre-COVID days, which is quite a sizable time away from any form of major involvement towards the studio itself. And although he did make a short return with the 2023 movie adaptation of Nao Iwamoto's Kin no Kuni Mizu no Kuni a.k.a Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom and as episode director for Madhouse's most recent series of Chi. Chikyuu no Undou ni Tsuite a.k.a Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, to be picked to helm this show, it feels like a cop-out that Masuhara wanted to pick up his directorial skills again, but there's little to no work scheduled for him, so this show is what he had to work with for the time being (while Madhouse focuses all their efforts on Season 2 of Sousou no Frieren: Beyond Journey's End).

The music is rather plentiful and fine, though if you're like me and are sensitive to even the most repetitive of sounds, Kento Nakajima's OP, composed by the man, the myth, and the legend of Hiroyuki Sawano himself, I don't know about you, but the OP song feels so egregiously overdone with the usual [nZk] twerks for what should be a relatively calm song at best. And while I appreciate that change with Billy Boo's ED song, it too was just alright. But to my ears, definitely the better song of the two.

If you'd come into this show for anything else but the story itself, Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de a.k.a The Dinner Table Detective is one that gives you entertainment aplenty for the most part, thanks to its unhinged comedy. However, as a detective series, if the short run of the 3-volume-long novel itself isn't a red flag of an indication enough that the series just goes nowhere with the mystery plot, then you're in the wrong place trying to enjoy some police-and-thief action.

It's like having expensive cheese and caviar, but without the complimentary biscuits to support and hold it altogether. What a shame.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 ) KANLen09 - Apr 4	83 replies	by UglyBastardNTR »» Oct 9, 10:30 AM
	Poll: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de Episode 12 Discussion KANLen09 - Jun 20	32 replies	by Vi- »» Aug 7, 10:41 AM
	Poll: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de Episode 6 Discussion tsubasalover - May 9	26 replies	by imjayhime »» Jul 31, 7:36 PM
	Should I watch it? Vitolia - Jun 26	11 replies	by amentet »» Jun 26, 10:52 PM
	Poll: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de Episode 11 Discussion tsubasalover - Jun 13	21 replies	by SithSteel »» Jun 20, 11:13 PM