JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E10 Review: Spaghetti Aglio Olio

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 10: Let's Go Eat Some Italian Food 

One of the things that Diamond is Unbreakable does pretty early on is showing that not all Stand users are enemies, a stark departure from the first three parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure where basically every antagonist is clearly an enemy. This time around, though, it's just Josuke and Okuyasu encountering a pretty bizarre Stand in Morioh Town, and Josuke in particular gets super-duper tense as he starts suspecting the proprietor of the Italian restaurant, Tonio, of being a hostile Stand user. Granted, it's not unfounded paranoia considering practically every other Stand user they've met have been hostile, but still.

The audience, by the way, also gets fooled into a sense of "oh no, an enemy" with the cold open of Tonio being shot from an ominous angle as he brutally cuts things -- and shooting Tonio from ominous angles as he holds a bloody knife is going to be a way for this chunk of the story both in the anime and manga to trick the audience into perceiving Tonio as being a deranged murderer despite it just being an effect of lighting and lack of context.

Anyway, after a bit of a fun Stardust-Crusaders-style 'random trivia' intro dump about Italian cuisine, Josuke and Okuyasu end up grabbing some lunch at Trattoria Trussadi, a restaurant ran by an Italian man, and it has no menu -- Tonio's going to cook up food depending on the customer. He quickly runs through all the health problems Okuyasu has, and promises him that he's going to make food to get through those.

And the resulting sequence is basically something straight out of a super-duper-hammy cooking manga that'll give Toriko and Shokugeki no Souma a run for its money, except all of the 'healthy' parts of Tonio's treatment is utter malarkey. Something we'll handwave with Stand powers. First up, Okuyasu drinks water that's so clear and pure that he starts crying... then he cries so hard his eyeballs shrink (oh no, enemy Stand!) but then apparently that's just the water flushing out his eyeballs to relieve his insomnia. The episode goes back and forth about that -- Okuyasu seems to be in pain as something attacks him, but that then food just cures one of his problems.

The next dish is a mozzarella tomato salad, with some culture differences as Okuyasu questions just how different Italian cuisine is from Japanese cuisine... and apparently this dish stimulates the thyroid gland so much that it causes Okuyasu to scratch his shoulder so hard that the flesh seems to be ripped off. This is apparently just dead skin cells, and through some completely non-medical mumbo jumbo, Okuyasu's dead cells have been expelled out as dead skin, curing his stiff shoulders.

And then as Okuyasu eats the "harlot's spaghetti", he refuses on grounds that he doesn't like spicy food (a man after my own heart) but then he gets so engrossed that he eats the entire plate in-between Josuke's monologue about his suspicions, and that causes his hole-y teeth to fall off and get replaced with new ones. Crazy Diamond then reverts the pasta back into its ingredients... and apparently Tonio cuts up his Stand, and uses them as part of the sauce? Tonio's Stand are these cute little floating tomato-leek gremlins, who fly back to Tonio's kitchen.

And in another "JJBA Hates Dogs" moment, Tonio appears to be feeding a piece of the main course, a steak, to a dog... whose intestines then blow up. And then Okuyasu comes into the kitchen and his stomach blows up too. Josuke and Tonio face off against each other, with Tonio clearly being furious about Josuke barging in. Hell, we even have the 'colours change' portion of the anime, something that we've not seen too much since the back end of Stardust Crusaders...  and it's apparently just Tonio being angry that Josuke entered the kitchen without washing his hands.

Turns out that, of course, Tonio isn't hostile, and he's just an Italian chef who happens to have a Stand. It's clearly non-combatant, though, so like The Lock, Tonio's not going to join the main cast of fighters against Red Hot Chili Pepper or anything... and after the past couple of more standalone episodes, next episode is going to be plot heavy as Jotaro is informed by a Speedwagon agent that Joseph Joestar is coming to Morioh Town.

Overall, Tonio Trussadi and Pearl Jam are genuinely one of my favourite once-off Stand uses due to how utterly absurd the way his Stand works, and the sheer ridiculousness  of how it manages to cure Okuyasu's medical problems. Also, the anime makes those food really look good -- I kinda want to go for some Italian food right now.

The JoJo Playlist:

• Tonio Trussadi borrows his name from the fashion company Trussadi -- JJBA's writer, Hirohiko Araki, is also an avid follower of fashion, and while fashion-related references don't show up that often, sometimes they do. 
• Tonio's Stand, Pearl Jam, isn't named in the episode proper outside of the commercial 'stat blocks', and it borrows its name from the 90's American grunge rock band of the same name. Some of their more memorable songs include Jeremy, Black, Yellow Bedletter and I Am Mine.