Spice Called Memories: On Kamogawa Food Detectives

There’s a little alleyway in Kyoto where a restaurant hides with no signboards, no curtains, and yet somehow, everyone who visits never forgets it. This is Kamogawa Restaurant, the heart of Hisashi Kashiwai’s beloved series of novels, first published in 2013 and later adapted into an NHK drama. What seems like an ordinary eatery is in fact something else: a place where food detectives recreate dishes long lost to time, memory, or regret.

Chef Nagare and his daughter Koishi run this unusual establishment. Their motto—printed in tiny advertisements buried in food magazines—reads: “Looking for food for you.” Customers don’t order here. Instead, they bring memories, clues, and longing. Two weeks later, Koishi’s research and Nagare’s cooking bring back the exact dish they thought they had lost forever. A forgotten pork cutlet, a lover’s beef stew, a bowl of udon heavy with unspoken feelings—each one carrying not just flavor, but a life story.

As Kashiwai writes, “Young people will always unconditionally fall for delicious food. But people like us, who are older, will always be led by the spice called memories.”

A Kamogawa Food Detectives Series

Book #1: The Kamogawa Food Detectives by

Book #2: The Resutrant of Lost Recipes

Book #3: Menu of Happiness [pre-order, release in October 2025]

Why Food Matters Here

Food in Japanese literature often does this—it becomes more than nourishment, more than description. It is a key to memory, identity, and even survival. As one critic has said, food “looks like an object but is actually a relationship.” In novels like Butter by Asako Yuzuki, or The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen, food becomes a way to probe desire, grief, and the places where words fail us. Kamogawa Restaurant belongs to this lineage, offering us stories where taste is inseparable from memory.

To intervene in memory, as Kashiwai’s characters discover, is to cleanse oneself. A dish can untie the knots of regret. A recipe can hold both love and pain. In this way, each story is both small and infinite: a lost flavor recovered, a heart a little lighter.

Why You Should Read It

The Kamogawa Restaurant series is gentle, nostalgic, and addictive. Each book feels like sitting down to a quiet meal that somehow leaves you both full and aching. If you loved Before the Coffee Gets Cold or The Kamogawa Food Detectives TV series, this belongs on your shelf. And if you’ve ever had a dish you can’t forget—whether from childhood, from travel, or from someone you loved—this series will speak straight to you.

✨ The first volumes of the series are available now in our shop. We recommend you don’t read them hungry—but you’ll definitely come away nourished.

Honoring the International Translation Day, and inspired by The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, the workshop focuses on the sensory memories of food that are tied to personal lived experience. Through collaborative storytelling, we will not only explore the translation of recipes from one language/culture to another, but also translate embodied culinary knowledge to textual documentation. 

RSVP at the link.