The Get Jiro ending Bourdain wrote 14 years ago — and what the Adult Swim series keeps of it

Get Jiro!, the graphic novel Bourdain co-wrote with Joel Rose and Langdon Foss drew, came out from DC's Vertigo imprint in July 2012. Fourteen years later, and eight years after Bourdain's death, it's a 10-episode animated series. Adult Swim premiered it on October 3, 2026, in its Toonami block, with episodes streaming on HBO Max the next day.

Brian Tee voices Jiro, and Alessandro Tanaka and Brian Gatewood developed the show. Half the season has aired, and the show is already heading somewhere the book didn't go.

Bourdain was the first to admit the book's weak spot. He once said of writing it, "I find plot difficult," and the ending he and Rose landed on still divides readers.

The city Bourdain built

The book's Los Angeles is a city where, in Vertigo's words, people "literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants." Two chef warlords split it between them, per Bleeding Cool's 2015 review:

• Bob: Runs the side built on imported, international ingredients.
• Rose: Runs the side built on local produce and vegetables.
• Jiro: A Japanese sushi chef with a small restaurant and a very particular way with rice, who wants neither of them.

Both warlords try to recruit Jiro, and he refuses to pick a side. Tanaka has said the comic "feels a lot like 'Yojimbo,'" per Bleeding Cool, and the comparison holds. Like Kurosawa's wandering samurai, Jiro walks into a town with two gangs and starts working them against each other.

How the book ends

From here on, spoilers for the 2012 graphic novel. Reviews of the book rarely spell the ending out, so this comes from the ones that do, which agree on the shape even when they disagree on the details:

• The double-cross: Jiro works for each gang, then betrays both and turns them on each other, per Collected Editions.
• The warlords: The city's independent cooks drive Bob and Rose out of town, one Goodreads reviewer writes. Kei's Kitchen describes the two former enemies becoming friends in the final pages and riding off into the sunset, and Collected Editions picks out a key image: the enemies "coming together in the end over a basic taco cart."
• Jiro: He survives a beating from Bob and loses a friend who died protecting him. He ends up back in business, cooking in a restaurant owned by one of the few friends he has left.

Not every reader bought it. Kei's Kitchen asked why the warring chefs "should become friends in the final pages," and one Goodreads reviewer called Jiro destroying two gangs that practically run the planet impossible.

Bourdain spent his career arguing for street food over fine dining. In his own dystopia, the warlords of haute cuisine make peace over a taco cart.

What the series keeps

Five episodes in, the show has kept the book's skeleton:

• The city: A post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where, in Adult Swim's logline, "the world's most powerful figures are chefs," split into Bob's inner ring and the Outer Ring, where Jiro opens his shop.
• The rivalry: Bob and Rose are still the two warlords, and both still try to hire Jiro in the first episode, per Film Fugitives. He turns them both down.
• The rules: Jiro still serves no soy sauce. In the premiere, Bob's supplier ignores the rule and loses his head.
• The food: Matt Goulding, a friend and former colleague of Bourdain's, checked scripts, animatics and episodes for culinary accuracy.

The A.V. Club's Leila Latif gave the season an A- and wrote that the series "sees the same darkness, beauty, and absurdity in the world that he did."

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What the series adds

Tanaka put the brief simply: "We had to expand on what was already there." The expansion mostly goes into Jiro himself:

• The revenge: Adult Swim describes Jiro as "a mysterious sushi chef on a quest for vengeance." The premiere ends on a murder board in his room covered with photos of Bob, Rose and their associates, next to an old picture of a young Jiro with an older man.
• The past: In episode 5, Bob knocks Jiro out and finds yakuza tattoos covering his back, per Adult Swim Central. That's ground from Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi, the 2015 prequel set in Tokyo, where Jiro works for his father's mob by day and cooks in secret at night.
• The cast: New characters include Detective Cynda Lynn, sisters Maria and Cam, whose diner sits across from Jiro's shop, and a new villain Tanaka calls "the cannibal."

The biggest change is timing. In the book, Bob and Rose become allies at the very end. In the series they're already working together by episode 5, when Rose answers Bob's call and the two arrive by helicopter to take Jiro down. Then Maria shows up with relatives, her father's friends and local food vendors to fight Bob's crew, which looks a lot like the street-food uprising the book saved for its finale.

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Where it goes from here

Five episodes remain, and episode 5 ends with Jiro in the back of a police car, arrested for the Ortolan murders. The show has already used up the book's alliance twist. Now it has to decide whether its revenge story ends where Bourdain's satire did, with the city's cooks winning and Jiro going back to work.

"What a pleasure to spend a little more time with him there."

— Leila Latif, The A.V. Club, on Bourdain and Get Jiro