English Dub Review: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable “Let’s Go Eat Some Italian Food!”

Mama mia!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

On their way back from school, Josuke and Okuyasu spot “Italian Cuisine Trendy” near the cemetery and decide to go in. Okuyasu is too hungry to stop himself, but Josuke is suspicious. Inside, they meet Tonio Trendy, an Italian chef who’s world traveled and stopped in Morioh to open his restaurant, though it has no menu. Instead, he serves food depending on the customer and makes comments about how Okuyasu apparently had barely any sleep and diarrhea. He leaves them with water and goes to prepare the food, but something’s odd about the water…it tastes great. Okuyasu loves it so much that he sheds tears. Then a whole river!

Things are seriously ringing alarm bells for Josuke, but Tonio just tells them it’s because of Okuyasu’s sleep deprivation. Sure enough, he starts feeling like he’s well rested, so I guess it was no big deal. Tonio then leaves the first dish, an arrangement of low-fat cheese and tomato, which Okuyasu loves to pieces. But then, his neck begins itching like crazy, creating balls of dead skin that flake off. And yet…his shoulders aren’t stiff anymore, which was Tonio’s apparent true intention. Josuke still thinks something off about him, though…

Tonio brings out the next dish, genuine Italian pasta (this specific recipe apparently being originally associated with prostitutes, according to the narrator), but Okuyasu finds it’s way too spicy. It’s here that Josuke begins putting his foot down, making clear that he suspects Tonio of doing something weird to the food. He uses Shining Diamond to pound the noodles so as to figure out the ingredients and finds demonic tomatoes hiding amongst them, which settles that Tonio’s a stand user. Josuke storms into the kitchen, finding Tonio feeding a different dish to his dog, but then the dog’s insides burst from it. Tonio flies into a mad rage, presumably about to kill Josuke for finding out his secret!…

…but really, he’s just made Josuke came in without washing his hands. Turns out the dog and Okuyasu are just fine. Tonio really is just a kind-hearted chef who wants his customers to have a good and healthy meal. He didn’t know he had a Stand, which Josuke fills him in on, but it seems he got his powers out of the blue while traveling around the world.

Meanwhile, Jotaro receives word that Joseph Joestar will be coming to Morioh soon.

OUR TAKE

I had seen clips of this episode in videos talking about this season, and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to reaching it. Now that we finally have some downtime before the next big plot turn, I was honestly expecting a pretty disposable filler adventure about a chef who was turned to evil for some such reason and has been using his Stand to take revenge against the world, but Josuke shows him the error of his ways and it all works out. What I got was an actually pretty brilliant side story that completely upended by expectations and every turn and had been dumbfounded I hadn’t seen anything like it until now. Building off what I said last week, seeing little landmarks throughout Morioh really helps to give it a sense of feeling real, and now we have a restaurant that is so very Jojo’s.

Tonio turns out to not be a bad guy or minor minion like I thought, but I genuinely a good-natured guy who wants to make people better with his food and has the power to do so. That said, Josuke’s suspicions are understandable, given how he’s become used to weird situations turning into fights for his life pretty quickly on top of all these new Stand users popping up wherever he goes. Just last week, one tried to kidnap his friend, so you can’t really blame him for thinking something’s up when the guy who’s going to be preparing his food seems to have some odd knowledge about his other friend’s stomach problems. Plus, he did end up being right about him being a Stand user, but even Tonio didn’t know that.

I expected a rather uninspired “twist” that the food was actually trying to kill them, but the real twist of this whole thing was that the food was really good for them, even though it had a weird way of messing with bodies as it did its work. Similar to Okuyasu having the ability to erase things from existence, Tonio can make his food do whatever he wants, but is too well-intentioned to do anything nefarious just like Okuyasu is too simple to use his power for evil. And what we get from that is a surprisingly wholesome non-battle that uses self-awareness of the shows patented overblown drama to heighten both the tension and the comedy while also making me really hungry for some pasta.