Five Books For Foodies

Reading and eating, two of my favorite things. If food and fiction are also your favorites, check out these novels:

Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant is full of family and coworker drama, all set in a mid-range Chinese restaurant in a mid-range suburb. Not everyone is very likeable, at some points, I wanted to scream at characters not to do whatever stupid thing they were going to do! There’s an enjoyable dark humor, though, and some parts of restaurant life felt so alive. (Although my Jade Palace coworkers and I did not have nearly this much drama.)

 

I wrote about Ann Mah’s Kitchen Chinese a while ago, and traditional Chinese food makes a major appearance in this travel memoir. I connected with this one because my own Chinese is really good for restaurants, and really bad for, uh, anything else. Choose this one for an engrossing travel story with family themes.

Ann Mah also wrote Mastering The Art Of French Eating, another engaging food and travel memoir. This one is set in Paris, with a lot of lovely Julia Child elements.

 

Ok, so I almost put down Dave Lowry’s Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves when the beginning was all about a shady white guy chasing a beautiful, mysterious Chinese girl. Ugh. My least favorite tropes! But I ended up enjoying this one because the protag is a laowei with extreme Chinese cooking skills, and that kept me reading. Sometimes the food and cooking overshadow the actual drama of diamond thieving, but there’s a solid heist story in here too.

 

If you haven’t read Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians yet, you’re missing out! The first in this trilogy is a hilarious manners novel, with a love story.   The next two books, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems, continue the story of the Young, T’sien, and Shang family, along with certain social climbers and disaster relatives. Everyone knows about the name-dropping and shopping fun, but don’t forget about all the food. In the Crazy Rich series, the hyperwealthy families of Singapore spend a lot of time eating and talking about what to eat next. 

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Sarong Party Girls is about another side of Singapore life, but there’s still a lot of eating and enjoying food. As Jazzy and her friends plot to snare a perfect man, they’re drinking kopi in bags, dining out at different restaurants, and even pretending to like ang mor food. This story is engaging and fun, but also darkly harsh in describing the options for women in Singapore. Tan’s other book, A Tiger In The Kitchen, is directly focused on Singaporean food.

 

My last food-lover’s fiction recc is the only one not about Asian food. Crystal King’s Feast of Sorrows is a historical novel about the ancient Roman gourmand Apicius and his chef.  The scenes of cooking, ancient kitchens and luxe banquets mostly made me hungry… although there were some historically accurate recipes that did NOT appeal. There’s Roman intrigue in this one as well as the banquet menus and cooking stories, you always know things are going to turn ugly when Sejanus shows up.

 

What are some more good books for foodies? What books made you hungry while you read?