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Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Episode 5 of One Piece.If the last two episodes left you grossed out with all that chunky blue soup, never fear: the Baratie mini-arc is here to make up for it. But be warned, Episode 5, « Eat at Baratie! » is not one to watch when you’re hungry. Though we don’t get to the good stuff right away, starting the episode right where we left off, with the crew realizing Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) is Garp’s (Vincent Regan) grandson. A short flashback reveals that Garp once had aspirations of Luffy joining the Marines, but Luffy has always been a pirate through and through.
Garp fires on the brand-new Going Merry, smashing a chunk of their banister, and the crew is finally facing their first skirmish at sea. Luffy orders Usopp (Jacob Romero) to load the canon and fire, while Nami (Emily Rudd) takes point with Zoro (Mackenyu) in getting their ship as far away from the Marines as they can. They have plenty of pluck and heart, but the one thing the crew lacks is coordination, and they don’t manage to get off a single shot before Garp lobs a cannonball at them by hand. Luffy inflates his chest and bounces the volley back, taking out Garp’s sail and buying them enough time to get away, which makes Garp proud, confusing the hell out of Koby (Morgan Davies) and Helmeppo (Aidan Scott).
Nami sails the crew away, into a dense cloud of fog. Though it helps keep them hidden, Nami can’t do much else either, navigation-wise. While they wait it out, she and Usopp nominate Zoro, as First Mate, to go talk to Luffy and see how he’s holding up after coming face to face with his grandfather. Though it’s obvious in the small moments that Zoro gets along with everyone, he isn’t exactly the talking and feelings type, and when Luffy won’t openly share how he feels, Zoro is happy to drop matters immediately. But while Nami might not be able to navigate in the fog, Luffy suddenly becomes a master navigator and pulls them out of the fog by following his nose right to the front door of Baratie, a fish-shaped restaurant in the middle of the sea.
Figuring they might as well eat while they’re here, the gang gets all dressed up and heads over to Baratie. Luffy and Usopp’s attempts to win over the maître d’ by telling him Luffy is the future king of pirates go poorly, with Nami slipping him a little money to get them seated instead. They settle into a large booth, and while logically I know Zoro moves to sit next to Nami because that side of the table more easily accommodates his three katanas, my shipper heart would like to thank the storytelling gods for throwing these two characters together so often this season.
Over in the kitchen, we get our first look at Sanji (Taz Skylar) — or, rather, Sanji’s hands as he meticulously prepares a delicious-looking True Bluefin Sauté. Fellow chef Patty (Brashaad Mayweather) warns him that Chef Zeff (Craig Fairbrass) won’t be too happy with Sanji going off menu, and he is proven correct almost immediately when Zeff disposes of the dish and throws Sanji out of the kitchen to wait tables instead. Though given that Sanji did call « order up » when he was done cooking, I have to wonder if some poor patron is going to sit there wondering what became of their dinner.
In the dining room, Sanji quickly ends a fight between two patrons, kicking both to the floor when smooth-talking doesn’t work, a sight that immediately impresses Luffy. He proceeds to give them quite possibly the worst sales pitch in the history of the culinary arts, until Nami catches his attention, and it’s all smooth and suave from there. The change in attitude does not go unnoticed by the rest of the crew, who tease Nami about it the second Sanji is out of earshot. As much as she pretends to hate the teasing, a small smile betrays the fact that this kind of gentle ribbing doesn’t really happen to her all too often, and she finally has the chance to let her guard down just a tiny bit.
With Garp’s ship out of commission for a couple of days, he decides against calling in reinforcements from other Marines, opting to call in the big guns instead. Or rather, the comically big sword. He calls (transponder-snails?) Dracule Mihawk (Steven Ward), a pirate with a cancelled bounty, asking him to chase down Luffy. Mihawk is a tad preoccupied, eliminating Don Krieg (Milton Schorr) and his entire fleet using only Yoru, the massive sword he wears strapped to his back, a blade so impressive, the force of wind it generates is enough to split Krieg’s ship in two. However, Garp’s pitch is just intriguing enough that Mihawk accepts the job.
Despite Sanji’s insistence that the food at Baratie isn’t worth eating, the Straw Hats are all full to bursting, when Luffy proposes a toast to their victory. Because no one else is willing to address it, Nami calls out the crew for being wildly unprepared and uncoordinated when the Marines came calling, and Luffy specifically for keeping the truth about Garp to himself. Before any of them can do much more than brush off her concerns, Sanji brings their bill to the table, as they’ve run up quite the tab. Luffy is unconcerned and signs it, prompting a smile from Sanji, not for any kind of tip Luffy left him, but because Zeff’s fury is about to be unleashed in another direction.
Luffy attempts to explain to the furious chef that he will pay for their food eventually, once he finds the One Piece, but that’s not good enough. Zeff puts him to work washing dishes for the next year to pay it off, which really begs the question about 1) how much they spent and 2) how poorly Baratie pays its kitchen staff if it’s going to take that long to pay off. Sanji tries to fight his way back into the kitchen, but Zeff is having none of it, telling him if he doesn’t like it, he’s free to walk. Zeff might not want Sanji cooking in his kitchen, but if the look on Luffy’s face after trying Sanji’s discarded tuna sauté is any indication, the pirate has other plans.
The chaos proves too exhausting for the rest of the crew, who head to Baratie’s bar to drink it off. Nami is still hung up on Luffy’s lie-by-ommission, but Zoro reasons that with all the other enemies they’ve been facing, a Vice Admiral in the Marines doesn’t leave them any worse off. That’s not enough for Nami, who accidentally lets slip that she has more skin in the game than she’s been letting on, saying she’s too close to get caught now. She heads to the bar ostensibly to buy another round, but discretely asks where she can book passage to the Conomi Islands for herself, without the rest of the crew.
Back on Garp’s ship, Koby admits to Helmeppo that he might have been right about Garp using him to track down Luffy, then asks him if he’s ever heard of someone named Mihawk. Helmeppo explains that Mihawk is the greatest living swordsman, and one of the Seven Warlords of the Seas: seven powerful pirates who once ruled the seas, who have now allied themselves with the World Government. In exchange for carrying out the more unsavory work the Marines don’t want to do, the Warlords were given free rein to do as they liked. The idea of the government sanctioning pirate activity horrifies Koby, and he heads off to confront Garp.
He finds Garp eating an astonishing number of steaks — Luffy’s love of meat is apparently genetic — and expresses his disappointment at the hypocrisy that exists within the Marines and the World Government, which given all that he’s seen is starting to feel a touch naive. But the way the Marines don’t uniformly uphold the law is starting to get to him, and Koby wonders if he should just walk away. Garp tells him that the law isn’t fair, and Koby has to decide if he can live with that. The Marines, he says, stand between order and anarchy despite the unfairness, which is a very strange way to be looking at things given how complicit in said anarchy the Marines are, but apparently, this is enough for Koby who decides that yes, he can live with it.
At the end of the night, Sanji and Luffy are the only two left in the kitchen, and even Sanji’s bitterness is no match for Luffy’s relentless optimism. After Luffy compliments his cooking, Sanji vents that by all rights he should be running Baratie, but clarifies his dream isn’t to actually run the restaurant. Instead, what he wants to do is head out to find a place called the All Blue, a hidden location that has ingredients from all four seas, and even some that have never been tasted before. When Luffy suggests Sanji up and leave, the chef shrugs it off, saying it’s not so simple because nothing ever is. The two are interrupted by Gin (Litha Bam), a shaken-up pirate who has been stranded and starving for a week.
No questions asked, Sanji springs into action and whips him up some food, ignoring Patty’s insistence that Zeff is going to be angry when he finds out. Impressed, Luffy offers Sanji a position on his crew while they head out to find the One Piece. Sanji declines, but the mention of the famous treasure catches Gin’s attention. He tells them his crew was searching for it too, but the entire fleet is dead now, with him as the only survivor.
Back at the bar, Usopp is really feeling both the music and the effects of drinking far more than he’s used to. Romero is easily the most underrated part of the season, with his well-timed comedic delivery and performance sliding in under all the more over-the-top drama and action to add just the right touch of levity. While he hits the dance floor, Nami and Zoro use the time to bond, each betting that the other doesn’t know them as well as they think they do. It’s a sweet scene interrupted too soon by the arrival of Mihawk, led over to their table by a very drunken Usopp who accidentally tells him everything he wants to know. Nami plays it vague, not wanting to give anything away, but Zoro recognizes Mihawk at once. He challenges him to a duel to the death, knowing that to defeat Mihawk will make him the greatest swordsman in the world. Nami and Usopp are shocked, but Mihawk accepts the challenge, figuring he can wait to grab Luffy once the duel is over.
Zeff finds Luffy alone in the kitchen, and though the chef has calmed down considerably Luffy is ready to fight. He tells Zeff that despite the ban on Sanji cooking, he prepared a meal for a starving pirate, and that feeding a hungry man was more important than obeying Zeff’s rules. The fight immediately drains out of Luffy when Zeff brightens proudly at the news. Usopp barges in to find Luffy, hoping he can talk Zoro out of dueling with Mihawk. But Zoro won’t be swayed, explaining that this duel is how he’ll be able to achieve his dream. Those are the magic words for Luffy, who backs off at once and encourages him to go for it. Nami makes a last bid to get him to rethink it, telling him she doesn’t want to see a friend die, but he reminds her she doesn’t have any friends. That does it for Nami, who packs her bag, grabs the map to the Grand Line and takes off for the ship that promised her passage.
The boys meet Mihawk by the front door of Baratie at dawn, where the Warlord seems surprised at how unassuming Luffy is. Zoro doesn’t want to waste any more time, and draws his swords, while Mihawk draws the tiniest possible dagger, which in his hands is still enough to throw Zoro for a loop. Zoro expends a lot of energy trying to get a strike in, but it all comes to a stop when Mihawk stabs him in the chest just in time for Nami to show up and see things come to a stop.
Zoro tells him he can’t retreat or risk losing out on his dream, and Mihawk commends him for his bravery, deciding to kill him with Yoru instead. Zoro draws the Wado Ichimonji, and faces Mihawk with all three of his swords, but York is powerful enough to shatter his two usual blades, leaving him with only his most prized one. Zoro concedes the fight, offering up his chest for Mihawk to strike, not wanting the shame of swordmarks on his back. Doubly impressed, Mihawk deals him a serious, if non-lethal, blow. He tells Zoro to heal, grow stronger, and then come back to face him again, and he also opts to let Luffy go, figuring the world needs more wild cards. Garp’s not going to be too impressed, but when you hire a pirate whose M.O. is chaos and anarchy, I’m not entirely sure what you expect. As the rest of the crew worries about Zoro’s prospects for survival, he vows on Wado Ichimonji that he will never lose another fight, training to become strong enough to defeat Mihawk. A tall order for a man who can barely hold a sword upright, but this crew is nothing if not determined.
All eight episodes of One Piece are streaming now on Netflix.
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