Get Jiro is what happens when somebody takes the sentence “food is life” and decides, no, screw that, food is death, and also maybe a katana, and possibly a flamethrower, and definitely a very sharp sushi knife. This is a cartoon about a future Los Angeles where chefs have become mob bosses, restaurants are criminal fiefdoms and culinary standards are enforced with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for organized crime. Anthony Bourdain, who knew something about kitchens, violence and the mythology of both, co-created the original graphic novel with Joel Rose. The resulting Adult Swim series is a wonderfully deranged idea that occasionally threatens to become something more than a joke.

The setup is gloriously stupid in precisely the right way. Jiro (Brian Tee) is a taciturn sushi chef whose idea of a good evening is making perfect food and being left alone. Then some idiot dips nigiri in soy sauce, rice-side down, and Jiro responds with the only reasonable solution available in this particular universe: off with his head. Nobody is terribly surprised. In the Outer Ring, decapitation is apparently less offensive than culinary sacrilege.

From there, Get Jiro launches into a turf war between Bob (Titus Welliver), a French-cuisine crime lord, and Rose (Allison Pill), a vegan revolutionary whose disciples have somehow combined ethical eating with automatic weapons. The show proceeds to turn every sacred object of food culture into ammunition. People are tortured with sauces. Weapons are smuggled inside baguettes. Food trucks become rolling death machines. Somebody gets “hollandaise-boarded.” It is the kind of material that makes you wonder whether the writers were laughing themselves sick or simply hadn't slept in three days.

And for a while, the sheer velocity of the insanity is enough. The episodes run around 20 minutes, which may be Get Jiro's greatest structural advantage. Just when the show's metaphors start looking like they've been marinated too long, another chase, stabbing or culinary atrocity comes screaming through the kitchen door. The series is a pulpy collision of food obsession and ultraviolent neo-noir, and that's exactly where it works best: when it stops explaining itself and simply throws another bloody entrée at the wall.

But here's the problem: underneath all that arterial spray is a fairly conventional crime story. Jiro is more archetype than fully developed character, a ronin with excellent knife skills and a mysterious past. The supporting players sometimes feel like people who wandered in from other cartoons. The animation, too, can't always match the grotesque visual punch of Langdon Foss's original comic art; at its weakest, it looks less like a lavish nightmare than a particularly ambitious Flash animation.

Yet Get Jiro keeps finding its pulse whenever it remembers what Bourdain actually cared about. Beneath the macho swagger was an obsessive respect for craft—the labor, history and cultural meaning packed into something as apparently simple as a plate of food. The series turns arguments about authenticity, commerce, gentrification and cultural appropriation into literal life-and-death struggles. The joke is ridiculous; the underlying argument isn't.

That's why this bloody little cartoon winds up feeling strangely affectionate. Bourdain understood that food could be pretentious, political, tribal, sensual and absurd all at once. Get Jiro understands the absurd part with a chainsaw. It isn't consistently elegant, and sometimes its metaphors come staggering into the room drunk. But when the knife flashes, the sushi gleams and some pompous bastard gets punished for committing an unforgivable crime against dinner, the show finds something unmistakably Bourdainian: a hatred of bullshit paired with a genuine reverence for the thing underneath it.

Food matters. Apparently, in this Los Angeles, it matters enough to kill for.

And honestly? Pass the soy sauce.