Author: Hisashi Kashiwai

Title: The Restaurant of Lost Recipes

Date: 2014 (translation copyright 2024)

Pages: 210

Genre: Fiction

This is another book by the author of The Kamogawa Food Detectives, with the same unusual father and daughter team cooking and detecting. Their restaurant is tucked away in a backstreet in Kyoto, and someone has to tell you about it, or you have to see a small advertisement about it in the Gourmet Monthly magazine. The building looks run down and there isn’t a sign outside.

But if you are lucky enough to find the Kamogawa Diner, inside you will find Chef Nagare who is always ready to serve you a set lunch filled with amazing food. His daughter Koishi runs the detective part of the business. She will ask you to describe the recipe you seek. In one chapter, an Olympic swimmer misses the bento box that his alienated father used to make for him. In another, a model, a friend of Koishi’s from university, asks for the recipe for fried rice that her mum used to make for her. It was different from the fried rice in restaurants, a little tart and it had a pink color. She’s engaged, and she wants her fiancé to taste this dish from her childhood in order to get to know her better. A husband and wife who own a Japanese bakery ask for a recipe for Christmas cake. Their son died young and he loved Christmas cake. The couple is still grieving and hope that tasting this cake will help them.

The dishes may be simple, or exotic, but they all have important meaning to the people requesting them. Everyone who visits the Kamogawa Diner comes away changed, with a recipe from their past, and a different view of their future.

This is a charming, comforting book, a perfect one to read in a comfy chair with a cup of tea while the rain trickles down the windows.

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Robbin Bailey

Concord Public Library