Sōma Yukihira

Sōma Yukihira (, Yukihira Sōma?) is the main protagonist of Shokugeki no Soma. He 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.

Appearances
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.

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.