While grabbing a club room key, Mako and Shinon get asked by Ota-sensei if the Food Culture Research Club will participate in the school’s upcoming Culture Festival. After some deliberating, the club collectively decides to run a stall at the event, feeling it’d be a good opportunity for them. Mako and Kurea agree to handle cooking. Tsutsuji and Nana are assigned the task of promoting the club. Shinon designates herself as the taste tester and “special coordinator”, which is obviously her attempt to slack off. To her credit, she does actually taste test for the club and she does put in a good amount of work for the stall.
Mako and Kurea quickly settle on serving curry for the festival. When their first experiment proves to be too generic, they decide they need to add some pizazz to the recipe. True(?) to her role as “special coordinator”, Shinon comes up with the admittedly and genuinely smart idea of asking Sakura for help. Sakura once again gives the Food Club permission to use the Agriculture Club’s crops but not only that, she shows the club a good place where they can purchase some wild game for their cooking. Apparently, Sakura is a member of the hunter’s association, even carrying a license to use a hunting rifle. I’m kind of disappointed that this doesn’t lead to Sakura getting fresh meat for her friends but it’s a fun bit of info nonetheless. Anyway, after experimenting with the new ingredients, Mako and Kurea manage to create a second dish that the others really enjoy, leading the club to settle on using that for the festival.
Parallel to the cooking experiments, Nana is struck by the horrific realization that her job for the festival would entail her talking to strangers. Tsutsuji tries to help her by getting her to talk to random students on campus and while this plan works about as well as you’d expect, the girls do discover that Nana can talk just fine if she doesn’t have to make eye contact with the person in question. This leads to Tsutsuji to craft a full body animal costume for Nana to wear during the festival. Frankly, I find the costume to look pretty darn cursed but I’d also argue that its appearance works in its favor. One, it befits the fact that Tsutsuji slapped it together at the last minute. And two, the fact that Nana feels more comfortable wearing that than in her regular attire is really funny to think about. The jokes on me anyway as it does enable Nana to pass out flyers and successfully promote the stall to various passerby.
The curry dish proves to be a huge success, so much so that it sells out at the end of the first day. I don’t really get why the club decides to close shop prematurely. I mean, what’s really stopping them from buying more ingredients for the next day? It honestly feels like they call it quits simply because the episode itself is about to end. Still, cutting it short sort of adds weight to a really nice takeaway the girls have after the festival. They’re bummed that they can’t run the stall anymore but that bitterness makes it more apparent to them how much they enjoyed the experience and how much they’ll cherish it for the foreseeable future.
Probably the best joke in the entire episode is the revelation that Mokotaro themselves actually attends the culture festival. There’s a very funny exchange between them and Tsutsuji, with Tsutsuji being both taken aback by the mascot yet also somehow finding the character familiar, presumably due to her conversations with Mako. Even better though is Mako finding out after the festival that Mokotaro tried her curry dish and she somehow completely missed getting to meet them in person. I’m guessing someone in Mokotaro’s crew bought the dish for them because it’s otherwise insane that Mako failed to notice her idol in the crowd. Come to think of it, I wonder if we’ll eventually learn about Mokotaro’s identity. I’m fine if the mascot really is a separate character but it being a familiar face seems like the kind of twist to pull at the end of the show. Admittedly, there aren’t exactly a lot of candidates to pick from. I guess Sakura could fit the bill since she seems to be full of surprises but that’s about it.
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