Miuneru, Noruju and Tomoshika Run a Shared Restaurant and Earn a Bigger One

VOMS — Haneuzu Miuneru, Uemine Noruju and Hikasa Tomoshika, all of the agency VOMS, spent Thursday evening running a restaurant together in the cooperative cooking game Doubutsu no Machi no Shokudo Monogatari (どうぶつの町の食堂物語), which the streamers said is called PAO PAO abroad. All three streamed it from their own channels, and by the end of the 3-hour-26-minute broadcast the restaurant had a first star, a second one and a bigger floor.

The game gave them no head start. Miuneru opened with the group’s usual greeting and the three met up in town, only to find that the restaurant was locked. The postal worker who held the key said the letter hiring them looked suspicious and asked them to serve at least five customers first. They spent the opening stretch hunting for the house they had been assigned, working out the map and buying carrots, tomatoes and catfish, then cooked their first orders in a kitchen so cramped that, as one of them put it, customers simply walked through the cooks. Once the five customers were served, they got the key.

“We’re going to run this restaurant, the three of us.” — Haneuzu Miuneru, Uemine Noruju and Hikasa Tomoshika, at the start of the stream

From there the work was about speed and mess. Customers announced themselves with a squeak on the floor and were handed their dishes almost as soon as they sat down, and the three kept mopping and putting out small fires from the stove. They added a spring salad to the catfish sashimi and, after a letter arrived with the restaurant’s first star, took on fishing, farming plots beside their homes and a pike grill, the dish the second star required. The game briefly dropped one of them offline midway through, and they carried on once the player was back. At one point they found that vegetables on town stalls could be taken, and the town answered by setting traps.

Between orders the conversation drifted to Harry Potter, set off by a repairman character named Cedric. The three compared which Hogwarts houses they might belong to and quizzed one another on the plot, with one of them admitting to knowing very little of the series. A Super Chat arrived with a five-star review of the restaurant, which the streamers read aloud.

In the last hour they paid for an upgrade, and the next requirement, for a third star, turned out to be apple pie. They bought a mixer, an oven and extra tables and served the pie to a steady line of customers. When the work was finished, the restaurant was larger, with a counter down the middle of the floor. Miuneru then asked whether anyone had anything left to say, and the three closed with a round of the spell Alohomora.