Much of the first volume is devoted to episodes where Jan and Kiriko demonstrate their expertise. Each display of skill is treated like a showdown (you feel like whistling a Ennio Morricone theme every time one of the cooks gets challenged), with much aggressive posturing and braggadocio. ("I'll make you realize that cooking is about heart and not competition," Kiriko proclaims at one point, looking as if she'd like to cram that lesson down Jan's throat, while Jan is shown tauntingly laughing at his cooking inferiors.) But the best of them are also cooking puzzles: how, for instance, can Jan cook an odorless stir-fry dish using pork liver, "the smelliest internal organ"?
In a way, the chapters of Iron Wok Jan! are structured like an old Silver Age superhero comic: we have a problem and our cooking hero solves it, then explains how s/he solved it to the other chefs and the reader. (Only thing that differentiates it from a Mort Weisinger-edited tale is the absence of a panel showing the lead winking at the reader.) In two chapters, for instance, both Jan and Kiriko are separately challenged by a mercenary food critic to serve him something he will not be able to identify. They both succeed, though Kiriko does so in a way designed to preserve the old fraud's dignity, while Jan naturally rubs his nose in it, making an enemy of the critic in the process.
Because the boy and girl leads are sixteen when the story opens (as is a third character, Okonogi, an inept trainee who mainly serves to ask, "What's goin' on?" for the reader), we know that both still need to grow to become true chefs. As a complete series, Iron Wok Jan! spans some twenty-seven volumes, so clearly this isn't something that's gonna happen overnight. Midway into the first volume, we learn part of Jan's history: that his training as a cook was accompanied with much not-so-grandfatherly abuse, that the dying man's sent Jan to the restaurant as "an assassin to destroy" Kiriko's grandfather, the owner of Gobancha and himself a master of Chinese cooking. In addition to the two young cooks, then, the series also contrasts two different mentoring styles. In the last chapter of volume one, Mutsuju Gobancha comes down to the kitchen to demonstrate teaching by example. The older, harsher ways of teaching are no good, he says, since they only serve to drive students away from cooking.
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