In all three novels, food, made professionally or personally, is central to establishing community and identity-but that doesn’t mean it’s always joyful. “So I wanted to capture this type of story while it was still in existence.” “A lot of owners are getting older and are retiring,” Tieu says. “My parents retired a long time ago, but I thought to myself, What would my parents do in this Instagram age, where there’s all these highly decorated, really fancy flavors that are coming out?” She also wanted to capture a way of life that she says is disappearing as the generations turn over. Tieu wanted to examine how these traditional mom and pop shops might deal with the digital era. A handful of books published since 2021 aim to change that-tracing the sensuality and the scars that come along with kitchen life.
It’s historically rare, though, that romantic novels have taken on the decidedly less-glamorous world of restaurant work, where long hours, class dynamics, and a sometimes-abusive atmosphere can transform the act of making food from magical and intimate into demanding, demeaning labor. It’s no surprise, then, that what we eat is often front and center in romance novels, with depictions of tempting treats stretching from Tita’s magical realist cooking in the 1995 hit Like Water for Chocolate to the doughnuts and tacos that lovers bond over in Jasmine Guillory’s books, beginning with her 2018 debut, The Wedding Date. No less a sage than Cher Horowitz, in the 1995 film Clueless, advises the viewer that, when aiming to seduce, “anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good.” The line is delivered over a shot of Cher looking over her shoulder at her crush before sensually biting into a chocolate truffle.
The connection between food and sex is almost too obvious: Both are the provinces of physical experience, taste, and desire, ruled by base cravings and animal appetites.