The Returning Hero's Restaurant

MC hiding his power from everyone till like chapter 90 and being weaker since coming back gets really unbearable. I managed to get to chapter 100 (end of season 1) but basically skimmed after chapter 50.

Dropped at Ch. 67, but honestly I could have dropped it sooner and I mostly skimmed after chapter 50.

The beginning made me think this one was going to be amazing. Very likeable mc, likeable motivation, likeable side characters. The cooking thing is cute, his relationship with his mom was really refreshing, and his relationship with some of the folks who came into the restaurant was fun. Then I read the rest and enjoyed it up to... chapter 30 maybe? Though I see others saying they lost interest sooner, but I have a high boring-ness threshold for dungeon manhwa lol.

Somewhere in there they start spending multiple chapters on backstory for characters we haven't even been convinced to care about, and spend more time focusing on side characters instead of the mc. For me, the mc was one of the main attractions of this story--I found his personality to be pretty nuanced and refreshing for this genre, and I wanted to see more of his adventures to get fancy ingredients. If we had more time with the mc before becoming heavily invested in the backstories of minor side characters I don't think I would have minded as much, it just happened way before the story got its footing.

In the most recently translated chapters (it looks like Luminous is not translating it anymore as they probably got bored with it too lol)

multiple side characters start becoming insufferable. It seems like there's almost no one who treats the mc well? I mean he was missing for 10 years, but his "best friend" treats him like sh*t and his mom (who was originally portrayed as very loving) just lets everyone else walk all over him and doesn't correct any of their misconceptions about him or the situation. They have this new cook in the restaurant and for some reason the author thought it would be cute to make her also really look down on the mc? And the mom never corrected the new cook's misconception that the mc didn't know how to cook even though he was the whole reason why they had to hire another chef since he cooked for famous people and they got a lot of exposure? It's kind of confusing if you haven't read it yet, but the new cook is kind of "on loan" and technically works for this group where the son of the CEO is the one who tried our mc's cooking and is the reason why they're expanding the restaurant, so her not knowing that he can cook really makes no sense. I often overlook inconsistencies like these in manhwa because I'm sure it's hard to keep track of them all, but I feel like it really exemplifies the issues with the relationships in this one. Maybe the author really likes degradation? lmao

Anyway, tl;dr of this spoiler rant is that there is not enough actual connection anymore in the relationships portrayed for me to remain interested, and the disjointed plot does not make up for the bad characterization.

Not bad starting out but soon after it gets boring and it seems nothing happens chapter after chapter. You could read the early chapters and come back later to the current chapters and not much has happened. There seems no real goal or plot movement other than hide the MC's power. Which is garbage.

I guess I'm somewhat biased since my pet peeve of hide your power annoys me to know ends for a reasonable time allotment.

I started off enjoying this well enough, but in ch. 9 things really took a dive. :sadface:

EDIT: Things start making even less sense as the manhwa continues, such as things being inconsistent with what we know happened when the MC was away for 10 years.