Souma Yukihira

Sōuma Yukihira is the main protagonist of Shokugeki no Soma anime and manga.

Souma is the son of Jōichirō Yukihira, the proud owner of Restaurant Yukihira. He is a 92nd Tōtsuki Generation student and a resident of Polar Star Dormitory. He is currently the 1st seat of the Elite Ten Council.

Appearance
Sōma is a young teenage boy with yellow eyes and a vertical scar on his left eyebrow. It is shown that Sōma has had this scar as far back as elementary school. He has spiky dark-red hair with short bangs. After the Stagiaire event, Soma's bangs grew in length, now reaching just below his cheeks and has more volume overall. Four months after the Régiment de Cuisine, Soma cut his hair short with a similar hairstyle from his initial appearance.

Sōma's main outfit is his Restaurant Yukihira cooking uniform, consisting of a black shirt with the restaurant's logo on the back and left chest area of his shirt. Whenever he cooks, he wears a white apron over his waist. While at Tōtsuki, Sōma wears a black coat summer school uniform over his Yukihira cooking uniform. Sōma also ties his trademark white headband around his forehead whenever he cooks. If he is not cooking or bathing, he wears his headband around his left wrist. Compared to his fellow Tōtsuki students, Sōma dresses very casually; in his free time, he sports a hanten jacket with a simple white shirt beneath it and a striped track pants at his places of residence. Sōma states that dressing in his hanten calms him down.

Personality
Sōma is an energetic and optimistic boy who has the constant drive to improve his cooking, mostly due to his strong relationship and rivalry with his father, Jōichirō Yukihira. He is confident in his skills and always seeks to challenge others to prove his abilities and test the limits of his cooking. Because of this, Sōma constantly finds himself in very difficult situations in his various duels and challenges which would break the spirits of most chefs. However, he remains positive and cool under pressure, never backing down from a challenge and is always constantly thinking and evolving his cooking. Sōma is also flexible and innovative, able to break away from ordinary procedures to cook dishes, thus allowing him to make his own solutions when he needs to find an edge. As such, he can create some of the most unorthodox, but also incredibly delicious dishes the school has never seen.

Sōma is courageous and even reckless, often getting himself into very dangerous situations that could jeopardize his entire cooking career. For three Shokugekis, Sōma risked being expelled from Tōtsuki if he lost, while in another Shokugeki he faced giving up being a chef in general forever. Because of his unknown humble origins, Sōma is never the favorite to win most of his matches as he constantly faces fellow classmates of more noteworthy backgrounds, most of which do not consider him a threat because of their own advantages. Time and time again, Sōma has proven that he is more than capable of overcoming the most difficult challenges with the steepest handicaps. Jōichirō attributes Sōma's strength not to natural cooking talent, but to his courage that allows him to boldly face whoever challenges him, no matter how much of a genius they are or whatever disadvantages they may throw at him. Sōma is not afraid to admit that his opponent is better than him at that moment and that he is not perfect, but he refuses to give up. As such he is not afraid to examine his own deficiencies, and is even eager to learn whatever he needs to in order to overcome them. Sōma's lifelong goal is to become a better chef than his father and thus will fight to the very end to achieve his dream. He will plunge head first into trial and error until he gets to the end results that he displays in his duels, spending days or even weeks exhausting every possible option until he finds the best one. Even in defeat, Sōma takes it as a sign that there is still much more for him to learn.

Even though many of his classmates had hostile feelings towards him, mainly due to his entrance speech, Sōma is a very friendly individual. He has struck up friendships with everyone in the Polar Star Dormitory within the first few hours in the dorm. He also has strong charisma, able to turn former rivals into allies and friends including Ikumi Mito, Takumi Aldini, Alice Nakiri, Subaru Mimasaka, and Hisako Arato. He is always willing to help out a friend, even at the risk of his place in Tōtsuki for them, and is more than willing to assist anyone in need. At the same time, Sōma has a natural charm around him that causes people to believe in his ability to win even the most hopeless of duels. Even Hisako noted that Sōma's ability to get people to believe in him in is astounding. Sōma does not believe that one's background should dictate their skills, and thus, treats his classmates more as equals, something that was rarely reciprocated. While he is constantly belittled by others, namely Erina, either he is not aware of the fact that they are insulting him or chooses not to respond to it. Either way, Sōma never retorts when insulted and usually uses his cooking to do the talking for him. Whenever Sōma wins, he seldom gloats his victories and even takes time to help his opponents see what they did wrong, thus helping them become better chefs themselves.

Cooking Style
Sōma is a skilled chef, being mostly self taught by observing his father Jōichirō, who is himself a legendary chef. Towards the end of his first year, Sōma even won the 1st Seat of the Elite Ten, an unprecedented feat. Despite his skill, Sōma has not been able to win a single match against his father. Nevertheless, he loves to engage in Shokugekis and competitions and will go all out. Although he did suffer few defeats, Sōma will analyze his failures and create new dishes out of them. He also has a knack for defeating his opponents in their own tactics and specialities. During his first year itself, Sōma has by himself defeated four members of the Elite Ten (Etsuya Eizan, Akira Hayama, Nene Kinokuni, Somei Saitou). He gave a tough fight to Terunori Kuga and even though he lost, Sōma won Kuga's respect. In the final bout of the Regiment de Cuisine, Sōma and Erina defeated Eishi and Rindou, the 1st and 2nd seats from the Elite Ten respectively.
 * Yukihira Style - Sōma's main cooking style is a completely original style developed by his father, Jōichirō Yukihira. The main feature of this style is that it borrows different styles, techniques, and cuisine types from around the world. To Sōma's end, he has spent at least twelve years developing his craft in this style and continues to evolve it as the story progresses. Sōma has shown immense levels of creativity, taking inspirations from the most unexpected places to overcome roadblocks when making his dishes. While they appear and taste like extravagant dishes, they are very simple in concept and are designed mainly to appeal to the sort of patrons at Restaurant Yukihira. Nevertheless, Sōma has emerged out of almost every duel and assignment successfully when he is in control. However, it takes a lot of trial and error for Sōma to make his end results.

Skills

 * Japanese Cuisine - Due to his experience working at his family restaurant, Sōma is highly skilled at making comfort food that the Japanese masses consume on a daily basis. Overall, his dishes tend to add innovated twists to traditional dishes. According to Satoshi, Sōma often makes savory dishes that feature risotto in some manner.
 * French Cuisine - Sōma had minimal training in French cooking style while working with his father in his Restaurant. As a result, he had only a few techniques under his belt before entering Tōtsuki such as using Poêlé, an advanced French technique to remove the bad smell from cooking fish. During his Stagiaire, he was personally trained by Kojirō Shinomiya in French cooking, becoming more adept and has used the techniques he has learned immediately into practice.


 * Excellent Sous Chef - After working for years in Restaurant Yukihira under the tutelage of his father, Sōma has spent years assisting his father as a sous chef. Sōma can assist just about anyone without getting in their way, slowing down their work, or deviating from their intended recipe. As noted by several of the Tōtsuki Academy Alumni, Sōma's skill was beyond that of an average Tōtsuki student. His abilities impressed Eishi Tsukasa enough for him to ask Sōma to become his right hand man, since Eishi believed his cooking would further improve with Sōma's support.


 * Live Cooking - Live cooking is the preparation of a dish in front of a client rather than serving the finished product alone. Also known as "Showman Cooking." Because of this, Sōma demonstrates an excellent sense of showmanship and knows how to draw in a crowd. He used this in the Breakfast 200 Dish challenge during the fourth day of the Friendship and Rapport Training Camp to overcome the unfortunate handicap given to him by his Mini Soufflé Omelette.
 * Adaptation - Like Mimasaka's trace, Sōma too adapts to others' cooking style and infuses it in his own style and this can be best explained by his Butter pilaf dish against Somei in the Régiment de Cuisine which had inspirations from Yūki, Hayama, Megumi,etc.


 * Vegetable Carving - Vegetable carving is an artistic skill of carving vegetables into artistic shapes such as flowers and animals. Sōma was able to carve roses out of carrots and mix other vegetables with a carrot to create a miniature scale model of a Gundam.


 * Culinary Creativity - Sōma is natural when it comes to this ability, he loves to create dishes that added more creative feeling. He is a creative chef that adapts and experiment with any dishes he doesn't know.
 * Culinary Logic - Sōma just learned this special ability from Erina's Hokkaido seminar when he began thinking on logical ways of how to utilize bear meat to create Mincemeat Katsu against Akira.

Trivia

 * Sōma ranked 1st in the first popularity poll with 956 votes. He ranked first again in the second popularity poll, with 6451 votes. In the 3rd popularity poll, he dropped down to 4th with 2795 votes.
 * Sōma, using the kanji for "creation" (Sō) and "true" (Ma), could mean "true creation", a reflection of his boundless creativity. Yukihira, using the kanji for "blessing" (yuki) and "common" or "ordinary" (Hira), could roughly translate as "blessing of the ordinary", a reflection of his humble origins compared to his classmates.
 * Sōma is the only student to be appointed as the 1st Seat of the Elite Ten in his first year. He has surpassed Azami who became 3rd Seat in his first year and 1st Seat in his second year.
 * Sōma's One-shot version of himself is relatively the same, however his hair is a different color and is much shorter.
 * Sōma's voice actor in the Vomic, Yūki Ono, voices Isami Aldini in the anime.
 * According to Subaru Mimasaka's investigations by the time of the Tōtsuki Autumn Election, Sōma:
 * is 171 cm tall;
 * weighs 57 kg;
 * has blood type B;
 * has a shoe size of 26.5 cm;
 * slept an average of 6 hours and 14 minutes in the past month;
 * junior high classes were 1-5, 2-2 and 3-7
 * has five pairs of shoes;
 * tends to start brushing his teeth from his lower right molar;
 * has a habit of lifting one of his eyebrow when observing someone.


 * The Volume 23 bonus feature revealed that Sōma:
 * likes to do laundry;
 * likes spacious bathtubs.