>HR may have set himself up for failure by telling us his plan, but he redeems himself a bit here by moving his Plan B into place (or, well, it’s probably Plan D or E at this point) and just giving us enough of a hint to guess at it.

Phil’s tongue-in-cheek ending to the scene, where we assign our greatest dramatic weight to what HR is ordering for lunch, still makes me chuckle. Yeah, the spice is a metaphor, but even so.

There’s a Sawatdee Thai in our area and numerous Sawatdee locations around the country (the word loosely means “Greetings and may blessings be upon you”), but I think the specific name “Sawatdee Bistro” is our invention. I didn’t really want to hear from any small business owners worrying that our associating their food with our villain would hurt their business. Sounds implausible, maybe, but there was that time I heard from a real person who had a name that I had assigned one of my characters, derived from a series of puns.