The Restaurant of Lost Recipes continues the recent trend of feel-good Japanese fiction Instead of cats or books, it looks at the nostalgic impact of food long ago eaten.
The novel is the second in The Kamagawa Food Detectives series, where a father and daughter team run an unusual detective agency. Daughter Koishi conducts the questioning into the client’s food they are hoping to have recreated. Chef, father and former policeman Nagare then investigates and creates the final dish. You don’t need to have read the first book in the series to enjoy the second, as the book and the chapters within stand alone, following a familiar format. A client seeks out their food detective services in a nondescript building in Kyoto through an obscure advertisement in a food magazine or word of mouth. They are looking to have a meal recreated that holds a special place in their heart because of who made it or the special time when it was consumed, but can’t through normal channels. They eat the initial set meal and then return later to eat the food, alongside an explanation of what gives the dish that special something that the person remembers.
In Kyoto, the Kamogawa Diner is hard to spot. There’s no sign, no indication it’s there. But diners desperate for the Kamogawas’ services manage to find them, each enjoying a different set menu prepared by Nagare Kamogawa when they first enter before being shown to the detective agency part of the diner, run by his daughter Koishi. There, they describe the dish they’re seeking and why they need to taste it so badly, sometimes for closure, sometimes to hopefully gain insight into what decision to make. Two weeks later, the diner makes their way back to the diner, where they experience all the emotions that come with tasting something they haven’t eaten in years, and learn how Nagare managed to track down the recipe.
Characters from different walks of life come to the diner from a famous one-hit wonder singer to a model and potential Olympian. The dishes they want to eat vary in their familiarity to Western audiences from fried rice to nori-ben (although Christmas cake may not be what you’re expecting). Yes, it is rather formulaic in the way each ‘investigation’ unfolds, but there is something warming and delightful in the story of each of the characters and why they are seeking out that particular dish. There is something of therapeutic aspect of Nagare’s explanations of how he found the links to the dish and what tweaks made the dish special for that person. It shows that cooking is not just about recipe books, but experimenting to make something extra special and tasty for the recipient of the food.
Jesse Kirkwood’s translation is again seamless, pointing out some aspects of the food or Japanese traditions that may not be known by the average non Japanese reader but never being over the top.
The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is a quick read. The stories all follow the same pattern so it’s easy to anticipate what will happen next. The reader is almost able to feel what the diners do, and understand just how much a certain dish meant to them, and the joy of being able to learn something about the dish along with the diner, something that makes it heartwarming and a little bittersweet at the same time, because sometimes it’s too late.
If you are going through a reading rut or having a difficult time personally, then The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is the best book that will uplift your mood and encourages you back into reading. It will provide you with comfort and reassurance that life is good, we just need to find the goodness and beauty of it. The Restaurant of Lost Recipe is not a masterpiece in the literature canon but it is a must read, for its warmth, positivity and feel good-comforting nature which is why we have given it a rating of 9 out of 10.
