The Restaurant of Lost Recipes

by Hisashi Kashiwai, Jesse Kirkwood (Translator)

Overview

We all hold lost recipes in our hearts. A very special restaurant in Kyoto helps find them . . .

Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouth-watering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they revive lost recipes and rekindle forgotten memories.

From the Olympic swimmer who misses his estranged father’s bento lunchbox to the one-hit-wonder pop star who remembers the tempura she ate to celebrate her only successful record, each customer leaves the diner forever changed—though not always in the ways they expect . . .

The Kamogawa Diner doesn’t just serve meals—it’s a door to the past through the miracle of delicious food. A beloved bestseller in Japan, The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is a tender and healing novel for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593717790
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Series:	A Kamogawa Food Detectives Novel , #2
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	19,686
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Hisashi Kashiwai was born in 1952 and was raised in Kyoto. He graduated from Osaka Dental University. After graduating, he returned to Kyoto and worked as a dentist. He has written extensively about his native city and has collaborated in TV programs and magazines.

Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, his translations include The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto and A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama.

Editorial Reviews

This cozy book delights in Japanese cuisine.” –Kirkus

From the Publisher

2024-08-03
A former police detective and his grown daughter research and re-create strangers’ half-remembered meals to help them overcome obstacles in their lives.

Koishi is in her 30s and works at a restaurant in Kyoto—it’s known as the Kamogawa Diner, though it doesn’t have a sign—with her father, Nagare Kamogawa, the chef. Both miss Koishi’s late mother, Kikuko. Their cat, Drowsy, spends its days trying to get into the restaurant, though he’s banned to protect the customers from wayward strands of hair. The book is a series of six small vignettes about unrelated people who arrive at the diner through the seasons to ask for help re-creating dishes from their pasts. Kyosuke Kitano is an Olympic-hopeful swimmer who isn’t sure if he should reach out to his sick father but yearns for a lunch dish his father made for him as a child. Kana Takeda is a single mother and food writer who is eager to prove her child wrong about the best dish he has ever eaten—a hamburger steak made by his grandfather. And Hatsuko Shirasaki, Koishi’s childhood best friend, is a successful model who’s unsure if she should accept a marriage proposal until her boyfriend understands her impoverished roots. Each of them, as well as the others, arrives, eats, speaks with Koishi about their lost meal, and then departs. Two weeks later they return to eat the meal that Nagare has meticulously researched and prepared. Readers looking for a throughline in the vignettes or a conclusion that ties them together or dives into why Nagare and Koishi have reached this point in their lives will find more questions than answers.

This cozy book delights in Japanese cuisine.

Kirkus Reviews