Season 2 of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End premiered in the U.S. on January 16, 2026. Since this is my favorite anime, I had to celebrate by making food from the show. My husband and I invited some friends over for a Frieren watch party!

Food Featured in the Frieren Anime

Frieren and her companions eat a lot of food along their journey. Especially sweets. There are so many different foods that appear in this anime, but I chose the most iconic and unique ones:

• Hamburg Steak
• Jumbo Berry Special
• Merkur Pudding

Some honorable mentions that didn’t make it onto the menu include the omurice (Japanese omelette rice) that Stark eats in the nice restaurant they all go to after the First Class Mage Exam; a ridiculous number of donuts (a favorite of Fern and Laufen); and the cake Frieren chooses over a dance with Sein.

Hamburg Steak

There’s actually a surprising amount of lore attached to Hamburg Steak. It appears in Episode 12, “A Real Hero,” when Frieren makes it for Stark’s birthday. She explains that Eisen always made the dish for birthdays during their quest to defeat the Demon King. This triggers a memory for Stark: his older brother Stoltz used to make the same thing for his birthday when he was a child.

Eisen said a Hamburg Steak is a reward for warriors, and anyone who works hard is a warrior. This dish has great significance in the lore of Frieren.

I used a recipe for Japanese Hamburger Steak (Hambagu) from Just One Cookbook, and it was fantastic! An ingredient I didn’t expect was nutmeg, but it lent a nice delicate flavor that I really enjoyed.

Jumbo Berry Special

Ah, the ever meme-worthy Jumbo Berry Special. Stark orders this disappointingly small ice cream sundae upon arriving in the city of Waal in Episode 6, “The Hero of the Village.” We get some sweet backstory about the time Eisen took his young apprentice to Waal and the two of them split a Jumbo Berry Special. Stark remarks that everything seemed so much bigger when he was a child, even Eisen’s stature.

Staying true to the anime, I made these “Jumbo” Berry Specials small. But that’s ok, because this wasn’t our only dessert.

Merkur Pudding

In Episode 3, “Killing Magic,” Frieren takes Fern out for sweets to celebrate her birthday. While the elf mage ponders what to order, her human apprentice correctly guesses that she’s in the mood for Merkur Pudding. This makes Frieren think back to the time Himmel guessed she would order the same dessert. It was at this moment that Frieren realized how little she knew about her companions at the time.

Now all these years later, she apologizes to Fern for not knowing her well despite her efforts to learn more about humans. Fern explains that she is delighted that Frieren tried to get to know her, regardless of how successful the attempt was. This is a key revelation in Frieren’s journey to understand humans better.

Merkur Pudding was tricky to recreate. I gathered it was some type of pudding, but what kind? At first I thought it was a Japanese caramel pudding, but then I came across a YouTube video that identified it as bavarois, a French pudding thickened with gelatin and lightened up with whipped cream. Special thanks to Mio Japan for the video identifying Merkur Pudding! I ultimately followed a recipe from Japanese Cooking 101.

The Vital Role of Food in Worldbuilding

Food may seem like a superfluous detail when creating a fantasy world, but it’s usually the little details that make a setting feel immersive. The food lore of Frieren brings the world to life and gives us insight into the characters’ personalities.

For example, Fern has a mega sweet tooth (yet mysteriously never seems to gain weight; must be all that walking) and Frieren is apparently on the carnivore diet with the amount of meat she eats.

Recreating iconic dishes from my favorite fandoms brings me great joy and makes me feel more connected to these stories. It was so fun to eat like an elf mage who has lived for over a thousand years.

Frieren Season 2, Episode 1 Review

We’re off to a quiet start in Season 2, with a return to the slice-of-life format that worked so well in Season 1. Fern and Stark’s relationship seems to be deepening. I appreciated the beautiful scene toward the end of the episode where Fern thinks about Stark as she gazes happily at the bracelet he gifted her.

There was also a lovely flashback to a time when Himmel and his companions fled a monster and he carried Frieren out of harm’s way. Knowing how much she meant to him imparted a tenderness to the moment.

Despite the monster encounter in the cave toward the beginning, this was a slower and more reflective episode. Since the season will only be 10 episodes, I think it will wrap up before the Golden Land Arc, and Season 3 will tackle that part of the story.

While many fans are disappointed, I’m content to wait patiently for the manga to come back from hiatus. I’d rather have high-quality content at a slower pace than be fed a steady stream of episodes churned out without much care or attention to detail. And of course, the manga creators need to prioritize their health. Their well-being is far more important than their fans’ entertainment. At the end of the day, their content will be all the better for having time to recover too.

Best wishes to Kanehito-san and Tsukasa-san for a full recovery! I’m looking forward to the rest of Season 2.