closing the book

Olive Stone is a restaurant critic, but that was not her original plan. She was going to become a chef and take over the family business, Italian restaurant Nicky’s. But then her family fell apart, and she went to university to study journalism instead.

But then she got the news that her dad had suddenly passed away. And even though she hadn’t spoken to him in years, he left her the restaurant as well as the building it’s in, valuable London real estate. But before she can make any decisions about the restaurant, she has to go to Italy for a month. Her father had been working on a cookbook when he died, and he only had 3 chapters left to write. The cookbook took readers through the regions of Italy and using one ingredient, something special to the area, to create 3 recipes. Olive could write the chapter introductions, but she wasn’t a chef. So the chef from Nicky’s, Leo, is going to Italy with her. They will start in Sicily, move on to Tuscany, and end in Liguria.

Olive hadn’t been back to Italy since the falling-out with her father. As a child, she had loved being in the restaurant, and she and her parents had traveled to Italy every summer, especially Sicily, where her father’s mentor lived. Rocco owns the Italian restaurant where Nicky had showed up, wanting to learn how to be a chef, and Rocco had taken Nicky under his wing and taught him everything he knew. Years later, Nicky would move to London and open his own place. He even had a television show, briefly, back in the restaurant’s heyday. But when the restaurant started going downhill, Nicky chose the business over his family and made an unforgiveable mistake. Olive saw how broken that had left her mother, and she sided with her. She was no longer interested in the restaurant.

Now she’s forced back into her old life, a restaurant owner and a cookbook author, but with a broken heart and a soul weary with grief and regrets. And she has to spend a month in Italy with the chef her father thought of as a son. And worse yet, Chef Leo is devastatingly handsome. At first they fight, as they’re coming from different backgrounds and contrary ideas of what the cookbook should be. But as the beauty of Italy softens their respective pain, they find themselves slowly making steps toward each other, first coming to a mutual understanding about the cookbook, and then enjoying the food and drinks that Italy has to offer them.

As Olive finds her anger towards her father start to ebb, she starts to open up to the possibility of keeping the restaurant open. Can she figure out how to make it successful without making her father’s mistakes? Or will she be better off selling the property and starting a new life with the proceeds, letting her heart heal away from the restaurant that broke her family apart?

Lizzy Dent’s Just One Taste is a delicious romance through Italy, with decadent descriptions of pasta dishes, seafood, stews, cakes, gelatos, and just about any other kind of Italian dish you can imagine. There is a little comedy in with the romance, but the story line of grief keeps it from getting too light. Olive and Leo have both lost someone close to them in this story, and they’re dealing with their pain as best they can, making this a compelling story but not one I could categorize as a rom com.

I am a big fan of Lizzy Dent, so I had high hopes for Just One Taste. I was sad, because it’s a sad story, but I was not disappointed. I thought it was a lovely journey through grief to acceptance, through anger to love, through sadness to restoration. I am not in a position to take a trip to Italy right now myself, so the descriptions of the towns and the food and the people made me feel like I got to take a quick trip, and I loved all of that. There are a lot of strong emotions in this story, but there is also a lot of hope and healing, and I am so glad I took this trip.

Egalleys for Just One Taste were provided by GP Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.