Yeah, around ep 4 they stop making it like a cooking show and it starts to get interesting. They still have those little cooking montages, but it stops being the focus.
Those montages and deep dives into monster mechanics and biology are my favorite parts of the show.
I love that peeling away the layers of fantasy. It feels like a DnD campaign where the players wanted to get really weird with stretching the rules while staying within them and the DM enthusiastically agreed and joined the party with their dwarf that had been doing that for years.
Another one that I found gave a kinda similar feel is Dr Stone.
Though instead of diving deep into fantasy mechanics, that one is based on real world physics (well, other than some characters having super-human levels of skill) and rebuilding a modern society from scratch.
I find them similar due to their attention to detail and using their environment to build up their capabilities. The overall plot is very different and DinD has a bit more charm. Not that Dr Stone doesn't have charm.
If I could choose which one I want to see one more season of right now, I'd pick DinD. If I could choose which one gets seen through to the end, I'd pick Dr Stone.
I just couldn't get into the groove with Dr. Stone. I felt it required a much greater degree of suspension of disbelief since the setting is rooted in our reality, but they hand-wave over a lot of infrastructure needed to create the technologies they produce. When they got to cell phones/radios I just had to stop.
Yeah, I think they shouldn't have called them cell phones, they looked like just AM radios, which aren't that complicated. Just need a microphone (membrane attached to a magnet), amplifier (they used vacuum tubes), and an antenna (whose length would determine the frequency). Receiver is the same thing but backwards (with adjusted geometry on the mic/speaker, but they are electrically the same). If they had the vacuum tubes, copper wire, and magnets (which they could make more of once they had one), then I don't think that part was that far fetched (though I could be missing something big tbf). But a cell phone is a lot more than a 2-way AM radio, even if you're talking about a simple phone with no display.
Biggest issue I had with suspension of disbelief was when they used a vehicle without a road system. Roads came before cars in our history and had to be good enough for horses to pull carts. Using a two stroke steam engine to generate enough torque for offroading with those basic tires was a big hand wave IMO.
Oh also the whole using a celebrity impersonation to convince some of the other side that the US was back up and running was a weak tactic. Like I'm glad they had it immediately get noticed, but a better way to do that bluff would have been to just have other "radio chatter" going on to make it sound like they had joined up with others, at which point they could have talked about all kinds of technologies that might have taken the fight out of people from the modern era.