The Restaurant of Lost Recipes

Since I enjoyed the 'Kamogawa Food Detectives', I had to continue with checking out the adventures of retired police detective and excellent home-chef Nagare Kamogawa and his daughter Koshi, and all the fun they get up to at the Kamogawa Diner in Kyoto. 

We now have 'The Restaurant of Lost Recipes' by Hisashi Kashiwai (originally published in 2014), translated by Jesse Kirkwood into English and published in October 2024. I borrowed this book, and read it super fast because of the long waiting list (our NLB) after me. This is what I call 'focused reading', not scanning. 

In this book, we have six stories — six diners coming to Kamogawa Diner to track down lost memories of favorite dishes and lost recipes. They were also wanting to seek closure for the relationships in their lives. Drowsy the cat is still hanging around by the diner's front door. Each dish makes a chapter of 'search and cook'. There are requests to make 'Nori Ben', 'Hamburger Steak', 'Christmas Cake', 'Fried Rice', 'Ramen', and 'Ten-Don'.

'Christmas Cake' is the odd one out. The food of focus isn't savory. It's a cake, a western style cake. Chef Nagare Kamogawa cooks savory items, and has never baked in his life. Yet he acceded to Yoshie and Masayuki Sakamoto's request to hunt down a Christmas cake that is in memory of their son who died in a car accident at ten years old. They couldn't let go of him even after six years. And this Christmas is pivotal for them in deciding how to continue with their fourth-generation family-owned Japanese confectionery store when they have no blood heir.  

The cake, about twenty centimetres in diameter, was covered with whipped cream and topped with a layer of strawberries, among which nestled a marzipan Santa and a large chocolate star.

This diner is also only open in the day at lunch, and is closed at night. The chef and Koishi use this time to prep for the next day's work/business and wind down. Being sited in a nondescript building, and with no signboard put up (intentionally so), it does make it easier for the potential clients to find this place in daylight.

I'm also very interested what Chef Nagare cook for the clients and diners at lunch. It's a kaiseki of sorts, home-style. Those honestly sounded really delicious. Eating those at lunch and lingering over good food would be awesome. The description of the dishes made me hungry, and induced a craving for similar dishes.

The whole point of these stories in in the investigative details to secure the dish's flavors that each client requested. It's never about what happens after or the choices the clients eventually make after tasting the flavors of their memories. I enjoy the author's effort to connect lost recipes to the present-day clients. 

As dedicated as Nagare and Koishi are to the deceased Kikuko's memory (Koshi's mom and Nagare's wife), when this entire book's diners' requests are based on parent-child relationships, the stories lost me for a bit. I simply see generational trauma in each person and the indelible mark left. I don't care if they made up with said parent. I never cared for the characters either. To be honest, their stories are too clichéd. I'll just focus on the food, which is what I did in the first book. The food is interesting to me, not quite the full stories if they aren't suited for my...... palate.

I don't think I have a favorite story in this book. I didn't mind 'Fried Rice'. Koishi's high school friend Hatsuko is now a famous model, and a Mr Keita Kakuzawa has proposed marriage to her. She has been raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle who never had kids of their own, so they gave her everything. However, Hatsuko doesn't tell the world much about her growing up years or mention about her dead parents because of the possible societal shame involved. Before she accepted his marriage proposal, she wanted to tell her fiancé about her family.

In this story, fried rice was the one dish Hatsuko wanted to make for her fiancé because that was the one dish she remembered from childhood, the one dish her mother had made for her and it gave her happy memories. That fried rice was PINK and held a fishy flavor.

Chef Nagare tracked down the stories and linked it to Hatsuko's hometown and memories. He found out that Hatsuko's mother's fried rice appeared pink in a child's memory because of the pink-ish fish sausages used, and kamaboko flakes used instead of bonito flakes. The kamaboko flakes were made from kamaboko fish cake. The fried rice was also slightly tart from the seasoning, which was a mix of shredded shio-kombucha and sour plum. And sour plum was pink too.

'Thanks,' said Hatsuko, pursing her lips as they rose to leave. 'I just feel like until he's eaten that fried rice, he won't know the real me.'