Hisashi Kashiwai is a dentist from Kyoto in Japan. He seems to be well known as a writer for television and magazines in Japan and has written extensively on his hometown.’ The Restaurant of Lost Recipes’ is his second novel and follows on from the highly successful ‘Kamagowa Food Detectives’ published in 2023.
Nagare Kamagowa and his daughter Koishi run a very special restaurant, the Kamagowa Diner in Kyoto. It is hard to find, tucked away in a back street and hardly distinguishable from a normal home but a very special destination as Nagare is an amazing cook and also, a ‘ food detective’. His specialty is to recreate and thus find ‘lost’ dishes for his clients. Each chapter is self-contained and follows a similar layout. Clients come to the diner, sample a wonderful meal created by Nagare and are interviewed by Koishi, explaining the dish they are looking for and what it means to them. These meals may be, the special Bento box a father made for his son before that son moved away or that special Christmas cake for the grieving parents, that might allow them to move on from the loss of their little boy. Nagare then goes into detective mode, sourcing the ingredients and brands that made the dish special and recreating the exact original it for each client. So, this book is very much about the connection between our emotions and food and how some dishes connect us to our souls.
As described above, it is not really a novel as each chapter is self-contained, and while the stories are charming and well written, and obviously well translated by Jesse Kirkwood, there is little suspense or development of story or character. Nagare and his daughter are always incredibly nice and sweet and don’t even seem to charge for their services. Certainly, I loved the descriptions of the dishes and after I read this book, really yearned for some Japanese food.
However, each story is very light and quickly forgotten -you could read this book in an afternoon, and as a meal – great for an entrée but not really a satisfying meal.
