digging up dishes for diners
On a street on Kyoto, Japan, among the temple and small businesses, is a small, unassuming diner. It’s where you can go for a meal or a memory. It’s not just a diner. It’s also a detective agency, where the owner and his daughter help clients recover the recipes of the most memorable meals of their lives.
When someone new shows up to the agency, they always start with a meal in the diner. Chef and former police detective Nagare offers them a tray filled with small dishes that offer warmth and comfort, followed by rice. With cool dishes in the summer and heated dishes in winter, the customers end up calmed and centered and ready to tell Nagare’s daughter Koishi all about the dish they want recreated.
There is the man who finished law school and is yearning for the miso soup his mother made for him the day he left home for school. He’s been struggling the pass the bar and trying to decide if he wants to keep trying or give up and go home. He thinks the taste of his mother’s miso soup will help him make the right decision.
The hair stylist fell for a chef when she was young, but he wanted to focus on his career. He had asked her to wait for 4 years until he’s educated and established. She didn’t say anything, but she carried that in her heart for years. Now she’s at the Kamogawa Detective Agency to have them recreate the rice balls he made for when that night.
Hiyashi-Chuka is the dish that the jewelry designer was looking for. It’s a cold noodle dish that her grandmother made for her in the summers, and although she can’t remember it, there are ties to her current life from those days, and it’s Nagare that is able to connect those dots.
The clients of the Kamogawa Detective Agency come looking for answers from their past, and Nagare and Koishi end up offering them not just the dish they are looking for but also the chance to revisit old memories. Whether they come looking for healing from grief or to make decisions about their future, the customers leave the diner feeling satisfied and hopeful.
A Serving of Hope is book 4 in the Kamogawa Food Detectives series. I have loved this series from the start. Watching the customers as they come in and enjoy a delicious meal, explained in enough salacious detail that my mouth starts to water, and then hearing their stories is such a heartwarming experience. I love these stories, knowing that each customer leaves the diner ultimately changed, and I feel a little of that same transformation too. These stories, like the dishes Nagare creates, are simple but with depth and flavor and surprises. I love going to the Kamogawa Diner every year, and I finish each time feeling like the world is warmer than I had previously thought.
Egalleys for A Serving of Hope were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.
