In the Plantar household, Anne and Johan were in the kitchen, preparing pizza. After the disaster with the pizza at the annual pot lock, they decided to restart and take their time without having to worry about the pressure of a competition. Sprig was busy tossing up the dough. "There you go. Now you're getting it," said Johan. He immediately changed his mind when the boy frog dropped the dough and it landed on his face.

"Anne, wanna chop us some veggies for me?"

"You got it, HP." Anne placed an onion on the countertop, cut it into perfect slices and placed the slices in a bowl.

"Wow, where'd you learn to cut like that?"

"Let's just say JoJo's not the only one who worked in the restaurant business," said Anne. "My parents actually owned a Thai restaurant back home." She showed the Plantars and JoJo a photo of Domino on her phone. "Ah, whoops. Hold on."

"Anne," Johan said as she shuffled through the photos. "I think you have too much cat photos."

"You can never have too much cat photos, JoJo! Ah, here it is." She showed them a photo of a small restaurant with a big red sign on the roof that said "Thai Go". "I used to work there all the time and help out. I hope they're doing okay without me."

Hearing that, Johan thought, "I hope Dad is doing fine."

Before anyone could respond, the stove exploded. Sprig, his face covered in ashes, coughed. "Yep, I blew up the pizza."

Johan's eye twitched. "Do you people enjoy destroying my home culture before my eyes?"

"Oh, dang it, Sprig," grumbled Hop Pop. "Well, looks like this meal's a bust. Who wants to eat out?"

Their first choice was Stumpy's. "Oh, wow. This place is not to code," said Anne. There was mold growing on the ceiling, rats crawling on the tables and eating customers' food, and a skeleton sitting in the corner. Anne and the Plantars sat down at their table. "Oh, man. The font on these menus is way too small. Rookie mistake."

Stumpy showed up and placed four bowls of slop on their table. "Here you are. Four bowls of slop. Enjoy. Or don't. Makes no difference to me."

Johan got angry. He shouted, "STUMPY!" The old frog chef popped his head out of the kitchen. "What the hell happened to the renovators I hired?! I told them to have this place fixed up before I can sell the absinthe here!"

Stumpy let out an exhausted sigh. "Apparently, after that little adventure you had with Joan Jett, they needed to take a long vacation and rethink their lives. At least that's what they wrote in this letter."

Johan's veins nearly burst out of his forehead when he heard that. "THEY WHAT?!" He inhaled and exhaled and then slammed a fist on the counter. "DO THOSE IDIOTS KNOW HOW MUCH I'M PAYING THEM?!"

"JoJo, calm down. You're making a scene. GULP!" JoJo grabbed Anne by the throat and shouted, "Anne! I spent a shit ton of money on this renovation project! If I don't make the money back, Passione will lose a lot of business deals and our reputation will be in the crapper!" Sprig doused him with water. "Thank you, Rametto. I needed that." He wiped the water off his face and sniffed it. "This is dish water!"

"Excuse me, hello. Over here. Yoo hoo!"

Johan turned to the source of the annoying voice. "Hey, isn't that the DJ from the Firefly Formal?"

Stumpy approached the yellow newt. "There be a problem, sir?"

"Um, yes, there's only one fly in my soup," said Albus Duckweed. "There should be dozens. I mean, how hard is it to run a restaurant, anyway? You just put food on tables. A tadpole can do it."

Hop Pop said in response to Johan's question, "That's what he does as a side job. His real job is writing reviews in the newspaper."

"They have comic strips sometimes," said Sprig.

Polly stuck her tongue out. "Blah! He thinks he's better than everyone else just 'cause he talks good."

"It's true," said Hop Pop.

"So, he's a critic," said Johan.

Anne groaned in annoyance. "I hate food critics. Say no more. We dealt with snobs like him all the time back home. Just listening to him is driving me crazy." She groaned again. "I can't take this anymore."

Johan tried to stop her as she approached Duckweed. "Anne, wait!"

"I mean, seriously, look at this place," snapped Duckweed.

Anne came to Stumpy's defense. "Hey. Lay off, buddy. Running a restaurant is hard."

Johan said, "Well, she's not wrong. Especially when you have only one employee."

"Kids, what are you doing?" muttered Stumpy nervously.

"Ha! Well, what do creatures like you know about running a restaurant?" mocked Duckweed.

"Well, what does a little lizard like you know about anything? Besides, my parents ran a restaurant back home and JoJo worked in a restaurant where he came from, so we know what we're talking about."

"Let's not use the 'We' word so loosely," said Johan.

"Well, if your parents are anything like you, I'm sure their restaurant was terrible."

Johan suddenly pulled out his gun and fired it at Duckweed's hat, blowing a hole through it. "Never. Insult. My father. In front of me."

"You said it, JoJo!" said Anne. "Tell you what, Dickweed. Why don't you come back in, I don't know, two days or something? And we'll have completely turned this place around."

Stumpy went on edge when he heard that. "I, uh, I beg your pardon. What?"

Duckweed got over his fright of being nearly shot and his arrogance returned. "Oh, a wager, is it? Fine, I'll be back in two days. Looking forward to writing my review and shutting this place down."

When Duckweed left with a smug smile, Johan's proud look turned into a look of horror. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, ANNE?! If the restaurant gets shut down, I'm going to lose money and Passione's reputation will be in jeopardy! We'll be a laughing stock!"

"Hey!" Anne slapped him in the face. "What kind of talk is that?! We are two restauranteurs! We know what we're doing! Sure, I probably should have just minded my own business, but you said it yourself! You put too much money in this renovation project, so now you're going to get it back! Right, Stumpy? What do you say?"

"I say... you just put me out of business," Stumpy said sadly. He took off his apron and slumped out of the building. "Bound to happen eventually, I suppose."

The Plantars looked at Anne and Johan with a little worry.

"Anne, JoJo, did you just promise to save this restaurant?"

"In two days?"

"By yourself?"

Anne realized her mistake. "Yep. That's, uh, that's pretty much what just happened. Uh, me and my big mouth."

"Well, we may as well get started," said Johan. "With my renovators gone, it's going to take a very painful time to get this place into shape. I mean, what's to worry? I mean, my reputation as a gang leader and my money is on the line, but no pressure, right?"

"You stink at pep talk," said Polly.

Early the next morning, Stumpy returned to the restaurant with a freshly killed crocodile. He opened the backdoor and turned on the lights, only for it to fizzle out. "Dang mushroom needs replacing. Not that it matters anymore." It was at then he saw Anne and Johan, smiling crazily in a corner. "Mother of pearl!"

"Hey, Stumpy," said Anne cheerfully.

"How long you two been here?"

"All night," said Johan. "I kept ourselves all night using DARE. No coffee for me, thanks!"

"So, you ready to beat that critic?" asked Anne eagerly.

Stumpy scoffed as he placed the crocodile on a table. "Creepy kids."

"What do you wanna start with? Change the menu, redecorate?" asked Anne.

The ceiling collapsed and sludge fell into the sink.

"Burn this place to the ground and start over?" asked Johan.

"Look, kids, you're on your own. Do whatever you want," said Stumpy. "It's not gonna make a difference in the end, anyway."

Johan sighed. "When did you become so depressed, when did you become such a pessimist?"

"The day I lost three of my limbs." Stumpy gestured to his hook hands and peg leg. "It was also the same day I ate them."

"Oh, God."

Anne selected the "Hard Work Montage Playlist" on her phone and she and JoJo began their hard work by mopping the floors. Oh, and chasing out Wally, who had been using it as a hobo hangout.

"E stai fuori!"

"Your funny language won't keep me from returning, JoJo!" BANG! BANG! BANG! "But your gun might!"

Next, Anne and Johan pulled out ten giant garbage bags full of horrible, horrible trash out of the restaurant and into an open dumpster. And then they screamed when the "dumpster" turned out to be a giant lizard with a giant mouth. Johan grabbed his gun and fired repeatedly into its mouth.

Stumpy, who was watching from a window, chuckled. "I knew about that garbage lizard."

When Anne entered the kitchen, she sighed at the sight of the large pile of dirty dishes. She grabbed one and began to spray it down with the hose eel, only for her to lose her grip on it and it sprayed her in the face and the dish pile. It was about to land on her when Stumpy came in and stopped it from collapsing with his hooks. The two of them shared a smile before they washed the dishes together.

Johan, his green tunic, brown trousers and brown shoes covered in grime, wiped his brow as he observed his work. All the tables were sparkly clean and with Anne's help, so were the floors.

"I gotta hand it to you, kids," said Stumpy. "This place looks great. We even scrubbed the Wally out."

"That's what you think!"

"MUDA!" Johan punched the hobo out the door. "Ti avevo detto di stare fuori!"

"The critic is gonna be blown away," said Stumpy.

"Hardly," said Johan. "All we did was mop the floors and wash the dishes. This place should have been condemned years ago. The structure isn't sound, the roof has holes in it, the windows are broken and the sign is falling apart. If Gordon Ramsay or Jon Taffer were here to see this, you'd get chewed out for years of neglect."

"Harsh, but on point. By the way, who are Gordon Ramsay and Jon Taffer?"

"JoJo is right," said Anne. "If we're gonna impress that critic, we've got a lot more work to do. We need a complete and total transformation."

"What do you mean?" asked Stumpy. "Like placemats?"

"Bigger."

"Oh. I'm gonna need me hammer hand for this." Stumpy replaced one of his hooks with a hammer.

"We're also going to have to give this place a new theme," said Johan. "Maybe something like the restaurants I went to back in Napoli."

"No, it should be Thai, like the one my family ran."

Anne and Johan gave each other the stink eye before the latter exhaled and reached into his pocket. "Look, I really want to argue with you, but we literally don't have the time, so we'll settle this the old fashioned way." He took out a copper. "Heads, it's Thai. Tails, it's Italian." He flipped the coin up in the air and caught it in his hand. To Anne's delight it came up heads. "Maledizione. Fine. But make sure you include the absinthe in the menu. It's Passione's money maker."

"Deal."

The next day, a crowd gathered at Stumpy's. The transformation was stunning. It had a new, shiny log, a flower fountain just outside the front door and a new large sign that advertised "New Lily Pad Thai". The crowd entered the restaurant and the first thing they were greeted with was Anne and Johan, both garbed in traditional Thai clothing. "Swadi-ka," she said in Thai as she and Johan bowed. "And welcome to Stumpy's! Wartwood's first frog-Thai fusion restaurant, now with napkins."

"And toilet paper that isn't made of rope," said Johan.

Business was booming. It didn't take long for everyone to grab a table and start ordering food and within a few minutes, the place was packed and filled with the sounds of happy frogs chatting and eating.

"Need a refill of fly ice tea? On the house, sweetie," Anne said, refilling one customer's glass.

"Who ordered the absinthe and hot, crispy pill bugs?" Johan called out with a platter in his hand. One of the frogs grabbed the platter with his tongue. "Yuck."

Anne laid out three plates of curry on another table. "Order up. Enjoy!"

Johan took Sadie Croaker's order. "I'll take the maggot larb. Did I say that right? Larb?"

"According to Anne, it's pronounced 'laab'," he said.

"Well, how about that? One foot in the grave and still learning new things."

"Grim."

Stumpy handed Anne a plate of bugs and noodles. He had an impressed look on his face. "I've never seen this place so packed. What- What's this weird feeling in me chest?"

"That is called hope. I think we might actually pull this off, dude."

The Plantars and the Sundews entered the restaurant and Sprig started dinging the bell. "I'll get this," Johan said as he approached them. Sprig still rang the bell. Johan frowned and snatched it away from him. "Alright, enough with the bell. Stop with the bell!"

"JoJo, this place is amazing," said Sprig.

"I'll admit, I had my doubts," said Sylvia. "But this is the best this place has looked in years. Even when I was a tadpole, it never was this...clean!"

"You and Anne weren't kidding when you said you were good at this," said Hop Pop.

Johan made a smile and gave Anne an OK sign. She cheered. "Oh, yeah! Score one for Anne and JoJo!"

"So, table for six," said Felicia.

"Ooh," said Johan awkwardly. "Sorry, we have a full house." He said to himself, "I told Anne we should have included the patio!"

In a corner, a frog cleared his throat and tore off his clothes, revealing himself to be Albus Duckweed in disguise. "They can have my table. I am done here."

Johan's eyebrows raised a little. "Oh caro."

Anne and Stumpy gasped. "It's..."

"Duckweed! He's here!"

Sadie Croaker raised a hand. "I have another question."

Anne and Stumpy ran past her. "Thanks for coming."

"Okay, great, see ya."

Anne, Johan and Stumpy approached Duckweed's table and the former asked him, "Duckweed...What's with the disguise?"

"Oh, this? It's kind of a critic thing."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. It's to guarantee that we get a genuine experience, you know?"

"Oh, interesting."

"If you knew it was me, you'd probably zhuzh it up a bit, make it a little bit better. But in a disguise, you're just gonna serve me like anyone else."

"He does have a point," said Johan.

"Thank you!"

"So, what do you think of the place?" he asked Duckweed.

"Well...I don't like it!" Anne and Stumpy winced. "I found the experience had no cohesion, like one thing was clumsily grafted on top of another. And when I publish my review, your restaurant will be ruined. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I love my job."

Johan noticed Anne and Stumpy sweating nervously. "Uh, would you give us a minute?" He dragged them into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him. "Okay, so we got a critic who's very hard to please. Anyone got any bright ideas?"

"I haven't got any," Stumpy exclaimed. "The second that review goes out, we're finished!"

Anne slapped him in the face. "Pull yourself together, man. We can do this. It's time to bring out the big guns. My parents' squid and basil special. No critic in town could resist."

"Okay." Anne slapped him again. "I already said okay!"

The trio ran out the kitchen and out the door. "Hey, we've got a special dinner just for you. Be right back," said Anne.

"Don't go anywhere," said Stumpy.

"Try the absinthe," called out Johan.

Duckweed dented his fingers together and said, "Amusing. All right, I'll play your little game."

"So..." said Hop Pop awkwardly. "Does this mean we can't have your table?"

The humans and Stumpy came back with a freshly killed giant squid. "Freshwater giant squid," Johan grunted as they dragged it into the kitchen. "Never thought I'd see the day."

"It's not a squid," said Stumpy. "It's a kraken."

"Eh, potato, tomato," said Anne.

Together they got to work on the kraken and basil special. First, Johan started a fire and placed a large sauté pan over it. As he poured in the oil for the basil, Anne cut up the vegetables and threw them in. Then, the two worked together to throw the kraken into the pan. Anne took over the cooking, pouring in an entire bottle's worth of Arroy Arroy fish sauce as Johan and Stumpy took care of the last few steps. When they were finished, they put the kraken on a platter and covered it.

Anne and Johan pushed the dish out on a tray and stopped in front of Duckweed's table. "All right, dude. Get ready to be blown away," said Anne as she lifted the cover.

"Oh, my...What an exotic selection," said Duckweed as he picked up his fork.

Now, there's something about squid and basil you should know. You see, for squid and basil, you're usually supposed to cut up the squid. But Anne forgot to do it. And to make matters worse, it turns out the kraken wasn't exactly dead yet. It opened its eye, making Duckweed scream. It grabbed him in one of his tentacles and roared as it flailed its tentacles about. "Assassinating your critics, I love it," said Polly.

Then the kraken grabbed the Plantars and the Sundews while Anne, Johan and Stumpy ducked behind a counter to avoid another tentacle. The kraken roared again. Johan peeked from behind the counter before ducking back down. "Okay, so the food is going to eat us. Ironic, isn't it?"

Anne beat herself up. "Okay, this is a disaster. I never should have made this dumb wager."

"Anne, calm down," said Stumpy. "Maybe we can't save the restaurant, but we sure can save those people's lives. What do you say?"

"I say...let's crush this calamari." Anne peeked her head up and eyed a giant slice of lemon. "I've got an idea."

A tentacle slammed down on the counter, making them roll out of the way. Stumpy replaced one of his hooks with a meat tenderizer and slammed the kraken in the face. It retaliated by spraying ink in his face. He licked it and said, "Mm... Oh, that's good."

Anne inhaled, charged up her Ripple and grabbed the lemon. "Pad See Ew, you later." She squeezed the lemon and the Ripple Effect caused the juice to shoot out with the velocity of a bullet. It hit the kraken right in the eye and it let out a screech of pain as it let go of the frogs and Duckweed. It wiped the juice out of its eye just as Johan summoned DARE who proceeded to pummel it.

"MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA, MUDA!"

With one last "MUDA!", the squid flew up into ceiling and fell back down. It did not move.

Sprig poked it in the eye. "Yeah, I don't think this thing's getting back up."

Everyone let out an exhale of relief.

"So, Duckweed," said Anne to the critic. "Guess you got a bad review to write, huh?"

"Bad...Bad? That was incredible!" That caught everyone by surprise. "A food that tries to eat you? The irony, the ecstasy! I simply must tell everyone. To the message board!" Duckweed ran out of the building.

Everyone applauded.

"You go, girl!" said Sprig.

"Go, Anne!" cheered Polly.

"Go, JoJo," cheered Ivy.

"She lives in my basement," said Hop Pop.

"And that boy is my number one employee," said Sylvia.

"Wait, you guys have a message board?" asked Anne.

"Sure do. It's a literal board," said Sprig.

Anne and Johan looked at the mess the kraken made. "Well, guess we better clean this place up. Again," said Johan.

Anne turned to the fat chef. "Stumpy, I'm sorry about all this. I took things way too far."

"No way, Anne. This whole thing was a big success. You even convinced this old grump to actually care. If your parents could see this, I'm sure they'd be proud." Stumpy turned to Johan. "And JoJo, your father would be proud too if he could see all the effort you put in this place and even the town."

The human kids smiled. "Thanks Stumpy," said Johan as he shook Stumpy's hook hand. "Ooh, that actually feels nice. What's it made of? Oak? Mahogany?"

"It's carved from the bones of me missing hand."

"AAAAAAHHHHH!"

To Be Continued...