The Menu of Happiness (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #3) by Hisashi Kashiwai, Jesse Kirkwood Translator: Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, foodie fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, relationship fiction, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature
Series: Kamogawa Food Detectives #3
Pages: 224
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A beloved Japanese bestseller, The Menu of Happiness is for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and asks the question: What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time?
Every memory has a flavor. A very special restaurant in Kyoto helps find them . . .
Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouthwatering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they harness the power of taste to rekindle forgotten memories.
From the yakisoba holding the memories of precious first love to the dumplings shared between sworn enemies, each client will be forever changed by what they find on the menu, because the Kamogawa Diner doesn’t just serve meals—it’s a door to the past.
My Review:
I fell in love with this series with the very first book, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and now I’m utterly hooked on both the series AND the reading niche it occupies. By that, I mean the genre that was popularized by Before the Coffee Gets Cold of loosely connected slice-of-life stories centered around a cozy location that use that location and its function as a framing device to tell slightly bittersweet, often sadly fluffy stories with or without a hint of magic or magical realism.
This particular series is one of my favorites because there’s no actual magic. It’s not dependent on a sideways slip into the supernatural or paranormal in the same way that Before the Coffee Gets Cold is.
The ‘magic’ of the Kamogawa Food Detectives is in the detection, and that’s very much a part of its charm, as is the charmingly functional father-daughter relationship between Chef Nagare Kamogawa and his adult daughter Koishi. She conducts the interviews, he creates the dishes, she taste-tests his attempts, and they both wait breathlessly for their clients/customers to tell them whether or not they got it right.
But first, those clients tell them the stories that brought them to the Kamogawa’s little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the first place. The history behind the person or the dish they can’t forget or get over – and usually it’s both. The reason that they need to sit with their memories one more time, whether to firmly close off that past OR to prise open a door into the future.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives, in one difficult to find one-line advertisement in one, singular gourmet magazine reach out to their potential clients with the claim that “We Find Your Food”. Which they do. And it is magic after all, the magic of nostalgia and memory meeting resolution and appetite in a way that warms both the heart and the belly.
Escape Rating A-: This series has been a mouth-watering delight for this reader from the very first book – and this latest is no exception. The combination of the individual stories with snippets from Nagare’s and Koishi’s life blends together as deliciously as Nagare’s culinary creations, and the stories are always the right book in the right length at the right time.
As long as I don’t start reading while I’m hungry. The way that the tastes and flavors are so lovingly described make it impossible not to think about the food and wishing that the books contained enough magic to make it appear!
The stories in this third book in the series all seem to be centered around the theme of parental relationships, which works especially well as they reflect, if sometimes in a funhouse mirror, the marvelous and marvelously functional parental relationship between Nagare and Koishi.
They work well together, but the parental relationships that their now-adult clients look back on in their individual stories are or were considerably less functional. Or, sometimes, are seen as more functional in the rearview mirror than they actually were at the time. Even the stories that are ostensibly about a different relationship, like that of the piano-prodigy turned world-famous teacher, circle back to her relationship with her parents and their involvement with her ‘road not taken’.
The dishes that Nagare is asked to recreate aren’t generally fancy – and that’s kind of the point. They’re all relatively simple dishes that are not quite in their standard interpretations as a result of locality, necessity or circumstance and it’s up to him to figure out what variations were made based on vague recollections and a whole lot of nostalgia.
The stories that feature those dishes are sad fluff, mostly bittersweet or at least savory in the umami sense of the word. They’re not stories that are guaranteed to reach a happy ending – often because the person who was once on the other side of the table is gone. Which doesn’t mean that the reconnection, or the closure, or whatever the client is searching for is not worth the potential sadness of the experience – because it very much is.
These are stories where the reader, the facilitators, Nagare and Koishi, AND the participants are all caught in that dilemma between crying because it’s over and smiling because it’s happened, and all end up being satisfied with both the meal and the choices they make over it.
One thing that this reader is certainly NOT crying over is that it currently looks like there are EIGHT more books in this series in the original Japanese just waiting to be translated, so there are sure to be more delicious stories from the Kamogawa Food Detectives yet to come. And that’s definitely a YUM in this reader’s book!
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