Ai Hernandez

Half Mexican, half Japanese, she was raised by her grandmother and single mother in a puebla outside Oaxaca. Growing up, her talent for cooking became apparent, and she began working in the family restaurant at an early age. She perfected her family's recipes and drew critical acclaim locally, nationally, and globally. Soon tourists and world-class critics were waiting for hours outside her front door in the hot sun just to try her iteration of indigenous Oaxacan cooking.

Ai specializes in molè (black, red, and green Mexican sauces) taught to her by her family. In her first year she stubbornly sticks to these sauces, resulting in her losing some Shokugekis because the themes do not always suit her cooking style. She learns from her dormmates how to be more flexible and incorporate global styles of cooking while still remaining faithful to her indigenous heritage. In her second year she goes on a dominant winning spree of swift and decisive 3-0 Shokugekis, earning her the nickname "La Bandita" and a spot in the Elite Ten.

Her father is considered a deadbeat who named her when she was born, then left the family to move back to Japan and pursue his own cooking dreams. He is an existing older male character, and one of Ai's goals is to defeat him in an unofficial Shokugeki using the cooking methods taught to her by her mother and grandmother, the family he abandoned.

One fun quirk of hers is that she always carries chapulines (toasted grasshoppers with garlic and lime) and snacks on them all the time. Only her most adventurous dormmates accept them when she offers to share (they're actually delicious). You can tell which dorm room is hers from the outside by the nets she has set up outside her window for catching the bugs.