The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Ratings17
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings17
Average rating3.7
The Kamogawa Food Detectives is the first book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Japanese series, for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time?
Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason customers stop by . . .
The father-daughter duo are 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories – dishes that may well hold the keys to their forgotten past and future happiness. The restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to vanished moments, creating a present full of possibility.
A bestseller in Japan, The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a celebration of good company and the power of a delicious meal.
Featured Series
2 primary books鴨川食堂 is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2013 with contributions by Hisashi Kashiwai and Jesse Kirkwood.
Reviews with the most likes.
Was cute, loved the idea of solving the mysteries of recreating beloved dishes. Felt a little repetitive at times
3.5⭐
A comfortable and cozy read, with very light mystery elements to it. The Kamogawa Detective Agency specializes in finding and re-creating a customized dish people have had once in their lives, drawing out all the nostalgic memories linked to the food. Each chapter features a different customer and their requested dish, with plenty of focus on not just the food but also the Japanese tableware they're served on. The overall pace is rather relaxed and formulaic, with each chapter following the exact same progression pattern.
The most glaring issue with this book is that it offers little to no description of the food served. It just throws a lot of names of regional ingredients and cooking styles, and then never explain any of those so you have to look them up yourself if you don't know. It also casually drops location names in Kyoto all the time and not describe what the place is like, so if you've never been to Kyoto and tasted the food there, good luck trying to picture these things in your mind. Might be more enjoyable to read this while Googling the images though, for better visualization. If you are knowledgeable in this topic, however, the dishes served in this book really do whet the appetite.
All in all, this has the exact same problem as Before the Coffee Gets Cold for me. The chapters are too short for me to care about any of the characters aside from Nagare and Koishi, who we don't really learn much about since the chapters are mostly about the customers. It can be quite emotional though, just a little bit lacking for me personally.
So cozy and sweet! I smile every time I see this book.
