Baratie

The Baratie is a restaurant on a ship. Or rather: is a ship that is a restaurant.

If was founded by an old pirate with a noble mission: that no one starved at sea. This mission was born from personal experience, as the pirate himself starved to death after his ship drawned. He made a promise to himself that, if he survived the ordeal, he would use his treasure to build a restaurand in the sea so that no one suffered starvation again.

The Baratie staff is noted for being a staff of outcasts, exiles and pirate types. The chefs on board the Baratie are well-known for fighting in the restaurant, usually against pirates who come to try to steal food. But they are not bad people, they are simply rough.

Fun fact: Eiichiiro Oda work in the Baratie in real life

Eiichiiro Oda, the writer of One Piece, worked part-time at a restaurant named "Baratei" (薔薇亭) in his hometown: Kumamoto. The restaurant is still open today, as you can see in Google Maps:

It's clear that the Baratie is inspired on the Baratei. But if anyone needed more evidente, here you can see a scene where one of the employees of the restaurant is in the bathroom. In the mirror, at the bottom right, you can see Oda's signature.

So this is a very clear reference to his personal experience in life. And I think that this is quite universal. Most of us have found ourselves commited to jobs that we had to endure to make some money. In Oda's case, he obviously wanted to be a manga artist, a writer, but he had to work as a waiter until that worked out.

The pursuit of a dream against the duty of a regular job

The coolest thing in this arch is that Luffy gets into quite a pickle. He destroys the restaurant by accident, while trying to divert a cannonball:

Luffy goes and apologizes to the restaurant owner, who demands payment for the damages to both the boat and himself. Luffy of course has no money, so the owner of the restaurant tries to force him to work for free as a waiter for a full year, to repay his debt. Luffy refuses:

After waiting 10 years to become a pirate, I can't spend one year here

This is surely something Oda himself must have felt while working at his own Baratie. Maybe he felt like he was neglecting his dream. He, life Luffy, had to struggle between the duty of working to make money and the pursuit of his dream.

And again, I think that this is very common. Many people can relate to this situation. Sometimes we get caught in duty, which is important and necessary. People have to work, we all have to put in our work to be useful members of society, to be able to support our families and to provide services.

But if you happen to have a clear goal, a dream about doing something else, then you also have a dutty towards that. So it's a collision between two duties, two impulses about how to be a good person, that pull you toward different directions.

It is very important to state that this is not about denigrating the job of the people who run restaurants. Restaurants are very important and it's not an easy job to do. In fact, the founder of the restaurant had the dream of running a restaurant. That was his dream. For him, being a pirate would be renouncing his dream. But for Luffy, who's dream is to become the King of Pirates, working on a restaurant is renouncing his dream.

And sometimes you need to compromise. Oda compromised: he did work as a waiter. And we all compromise and temporarily set aside our dreams. But finding the right balance is complicated, and one may get to complacent and delay the pursuit of their dream for a very long time. When that happens, it's not good.