Review of The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai

*The Restaurant of Lost Recipes* by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (2024). Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Long time blog readers are probably going to recognize what I’m typing next. One of my favorite ways to find new books is to wander my local library branch and see what they have to offer, even if it’s something that’s way outside of my usual comfort zone. Reading diversely has been something very important to me for years, so this is a way to find new books.

I tend to grab anything that looks interesting to me, but today I recognized this book. I had seen it online from the various self-help/healing fiction book research I had done, and while I know that these books typically aren’t for me, I try them out whenever I can. It also gives me major flashbacks to when I was studying abroad in Korea and staring at these books at the local bookstores.

Healing fiction is something I can read quickly, so I flew through this book in about an hour and a half. It’s a pretty quick read unless you’re deliberately pacing yourself or annotating.

Let’s get into the review!

The owner of a Kyoto diner and his daughter hunt down old recipes that bring their customers joy.

Quick disclaimer before I jump more into the details of my review: I had no idea before picking this book up that this is technically the second book in the Kamogawa Food Detectives series. I am not super invested in the healing fiction genre and its translations, and while I knew about this book, I had no idea this was a series. So my review is independent of the series and comes from someone fresh into it!

With that out of the way, the premise of this book is pretty simple. Nagare is a chef running a diner called Kamogawa in Kyoto, a well-known tourist spot for Westerners and those tapped into to travel social media accounts, but also the old capital of Japan before it moved to Tokyo.

He works with his daughter Koishi to get their regulars their favorite meals and food at the diner, which is located on one of the more quiet streets in Kyoto. As someone also tapped into social media, I know Kyoto gets pretty crowded, so I was interested in how this is a place for locals in an overrun Japan. Or in the novel’s world, there are no tourists, but I doubt that.

But there’s something special this duo can whip up that no one else can: if you bring in the memory of a recipe from the past, they’ll ask some questions as you try to recall it, then make the dish as close as possible to what the customer remembers it as. There are actual tears involved in this process, as these two are able to make magic happen inside of this little diner.

Each chapter of the novel features a new customer and the recipe they want Chef Nagare and Koishi to make that day. There are six stories overall, and for each of these customers coming into the store, there’s a very specific and often nostalgic reason (sometimes even grief fueled) reason why they want this made.

In these stories, there’s a son who wants to find peace with his father and requests a simple bento box to be made, or even a model who just wants the fried rice of her childhood back.

A mother who wants to reconnect and have the chance to spend time with her son again, or a cake that will help two individuals find the path to overcome and hold space for their grief. Everyone has a specific story, and they converge at this specific place at a specific time.

Overall Thoughts

For me, this novel suffers from what a lot of these healing fiction stories do. I’ve tried to read them in Korean (they’re a lot easier to understand in Korean as a learner, especially when you already understand the basic structure of these stories) and English, but they often take the same kind of story, repeat it, and make them unique by switching out the characters.

Once you’ve read one, you’ve kind of read them all. That’s what I’m trying to say. And it’s unfortunate in some ways, as I really want to like these novels, but I’m increasingly finding they’re not in my taste. I can see how these help and make other people heal though, and I can appreciate them for that.

I say if you’re interested just go ahead and read it. I like my books to not be tropes and predictable, so while this might not be within my taste, I think someone else might really like it a lot.

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