Anise

**Anise** (ユーカリ) is a food truck operator in *World Tree Marché: Gourmet Story*. She specializes in breadmaking, and operates a truck called Puffy Cheeks (こんがりほっぺ) at the marché.

## Navigation

📷 Sprites: **Anise/Sprites**
❤️ Chat transcripts: **Anise/Chats**
## History

### Early Life

Anise grew up in a town in the middle of a valley, between two large mountains. She lives with her grandpa, grandma, mother, father, and two sisters. Her family worked at one of the local factories. The area was well known for having many factories and for being a trading hotspot because of it being an ordeal to climb over the mountains to go to the other side. Because it was so popular with visiting traders, the town became a popular place for kitchen trucks to visit.

Anise had loved bread since she was very young, so much that her parents say that she "prefered bread over milk". She admired the bakers who would come to her town in their kitchen trucks because they smelled wonderfully of freshly baked bread, and so she dreamed of one day becoming a kitchen truck chef herself.

### Apprenticeship

Anise had applied to her top choice of factory - the Royal Baguette - but failed her trial because the bread that she baked came out so well that she ate it all before it got to the judges. She ultimately learned her bread making craft apprenticing at the toughest bread factory in her town instead.

Anise initially made many mistakes at the factory because she was still learning, and brought all her imperfect bread home to her family, who put on a lot of weight as a result. Her little sister became so angry that Anise "made her fat" that her sister didn't talk to her for a long time. As an apprentice, she had to conform to the factory's hierarchy and obey her seniors - she had to clean and do laundry for over 100 workers each day - but her seniors trained her each day and she continued to improve. While working on her apprenticeship, she saved her wages to put towards buying a food truck of her own.

### Pre-Revival

After purchasing her food truck, Anise became a member of the World Tree Marché long before Lunch's revival. The Marché used to be a bustling area that was packed with kitchen trucks, but since the Gourmand Corporation went global, buying food from all over the world has become so convenient that it reduced the popularity of marchés and the World Tree Marché shrank to just six trucks (the six chefs who returned during Lunch's revival), which eventually dwindled to just Anise alone.

### World Tree Marché 1

When Lunch arrived at the World Tree Marché to revive it, Anise was the only food truck chef still working there. She closely supported Lunch in her task to revive the Marché, and warmly greeted each chef who returned as the Marché began to prosper once more, gaining notoriety around the kingdoms for having extremely unique recipes available.

The group learned that the Gourmand Corporation had been stealing the Neo-Recipes created by Lunch and selling them at his seven-star restaurant. Mr Onion, the head of the Gourmand Corporation, wanted the World Tree Marché to fail because of it being held as collateral against the kingdom's debt, and if it failed, he could tear down the Marché to build a luxury hotel. He approached the food truck chefs and offered them a bribe in exchange for leaving - to Anise, he offered her dream job: the position of head baker at the best bakery in the kingdom, the Royal Baguette. After some consideration, Anise and the other chefs turned down Mr. Onion's offers and instead support Lunch in continuing rebuilding the Marché, with Anise saying that "Baking the best bread there is in this Marché makes me proud enough just where I am!"

As the Marché grew, they eventually gained enough funds that they could pay off the kingdom's debt. This achievement unfortunately coincided with Lunch discovering that Julie, tree spirit of the World Tree, needed a special fruit called the Fruit of Life to survive, but the fruit had been stolen by the Gourmand Corporation. Despite none of the other chefs being able to see Julie, they trusted Lunch, and didn't want Julie to die. The group contacted Mr. Onion, who agreed to give them the Fruit of Life for 5,000,000G, the same amount as the Prince's debt - if they bought the Fruit of Life from him, they would not be able to pay off the debt, and the Marché would become the property of the Gourmand Corporation so Mr. Onion could build his luxury hotel. The group supported Lunch's decision to buy the Fruit of Life from him, and Julie's strength was restored. The group's selfless act meant that all the chefs could now see Julie, including Anise.

Luckily, Saffron and the Prince arrived in the nick of time and offered Mr. Onion 5,000,000G of rare ingredients and expensive wine from the Royal Vault in exchange for paying off the debt, and saved the Marché from demolition. Because the Marché was now revived, Saffron decided that Lunch had no reason to stay anymore, and Lunch go back to the palace. Despite all the chefs being devastated to see Lunch leave, they all knew that this would not be the last time they would ever see her.

## Personality

Anise is a positive, happy-go-lucky person who is nearly always cheerful. Anise is food-oriented to the extreme, eating such huge portions of bread and snacks that she becomes obese by each evening, but expends so much energy kneading bread during the evening that by the following morning she has returned to normal size. She is a very hard worker, sometimes working a full day without taking a single break, relying on snacking on huge portions of bread to get her through the day. When she worked as an apprentice breadmaker, she worked so hard that she ate up to 5 meals per day.

Anise is the heart of the Marché, and she acts as a caring sister to all of the chefs - they returned to the Marché during Lunch's revival largely because they wanted to work with her again, and she was there to warmly greet each one of them when they returned - in particular Majoram, who nicknamed Anise "Annie", came back because her relationship with Anise is so close. She is extremely well-loved by everyone at the Marché, customers and chefs alike. Many male customers have crushes on Anise because she is so warm and kind. After the female chefs and Lunch overheard an interaction Anise had with a male customer and mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that she was leaving to get married to him, they were absolutely devastated and openly weeping at the thought of her going.

## Kitchen Truck

Anise's truck is called "Puffy Cheeks", likely a double pun based on having full hamster-cheeks from eating mouthfuls of delicious bread, but also refering to Anise's chubby-cheeks when she overeats. In the original Japanese, it is called Kongari Hoppe (こんがりほっぺ). It is likely a combination of Kongari (こんがり) meaning "browned" or "well-baked", and Hoppe (ほっぺ) from the saying Hoppe ga ochi-sō (ほっぺがおちそう) which literally means "This is so delicious", but is a figure of speech which literally means "My cheek is almost falling down".

Her truck is pre-owned because she could not afford a brand new truck. It was previously owned by an ex-sumo wrestler who used it to make Sumo Stew. Because of this, the truck is abnormally oversized, but has large tires which can rotate 360 degrees which make it each to manoeuvre despite its size. Anise chose the truck because she uses a lot of ingredients when baking, so she chose a big truck with an oven so that she could easily store all her ingredients and serve fresh bread at any time.

## Name Etymology

Anise, also known as aniseed, is a type of edible plant. Anise is sweet and aromatic, and the seeds are often used to flavor teas, liquor, confectionary, and medicines. In Japanese, Anise's name is Yuukari (ユーカリ), which is the Japanese word for the Eucalyptus tree. Eucalyptus is the primary food source of koalas. As an ingredient, eucalyptus oil can be found in confectionary and some medicines, and the nectar of eucalyptus plants can be turned into honey.