English Dub Review: Bartender: Glass of God “The True Face”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Yukari announces her sudden engagement and Ryu plays matchmaker with a couple of strangers at his bar.

OUR TAKE

Well, I already went on my kinda sorta rant on how I’m not really having very much fun covering this show about drink preparation, but if I belabor the point for seven more episodes I’m just going to make this not fun for any poor soul who happens upon these reviews. And thankfully this episode is a bit of an improvement, if only just. And that only slight improvement is the somewhat charming premise of Ryu helping mend fences between a guy and a girl who have a bit of an altercation when the woman is holding a smoking cigar and the man is just stressed from work and tries taking it from her. Not the most interesting meet cute, but hey it’s something. After Ryu tells him about how stressful the woman’s job as a doctor is too, they eventually meet again at the same place and start kindling something between them while Ryu drowns them in booze and booze trivia. And since we’re halfway through the show now, I can pretty safely say that this episodic format of Ryu meeting strangers and giving them a drink to hyperfixate about is kinda flawed. At the beginning, it was kinda neat because I was curious at how they could mix the facts with the story, but so far these ingredients feel like they’re not mixed very well.

On a semi-related note, the loosely connected side plot involves Yukari announcing getting engaged…and then calling it off off-screen, as she apparently decided that wanting to get married just to please her dying grandmother was not a good reason. Apparently this was not something we needed to see and there were supposedly no moments in that personal journey that were deemed important enough to show us, which feels odd because Yukari is supposed to be one of the more recurring characters in this show, so you would think that stuff going on with her might be considered worth exploring. I guess in the allegory of mixing drinks, it is a drink that does not taste good because it was not made well. But I would still say it is a step up from last week, if only relative to this series, because finding love through drinks is a pretty common experience that they managed to tap into just a little bit, even if they didn’t go anywhere near into it that they could have.