What ingredients do you need to cure a broken heart? This soul-nourishing comfort read is for
anyone who has loved and lost—and wants to love again. Twenty-nine-year-old Momoko has been
tragically dumped. She thought she and her boyfriend were soulmates. He even took her to a love
hotel where she believed he was going to propose. Instead he left her after four years. So
Momoko does what many broken-hearted people do—she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk that she
passes out in an empty cafe. When she awakens she’s eager to tell her story to anyone who will
listen and pours her heart out to a curious manager and the sole other customer in the cafe a
monk who trains at a temple nearby. When she starts to describe how she doted on her boyfriend
how he loved her cooking the manager decides to indulge her and allows her to slip into the
kitchen and cook up her ex’s favorite dish: a warm delightful butter chicken curry. As Momoko
finishes telling her story she realizes this combination of cooking and sharing has healed her
heart in a way nothing else can. The cafe is failing—subpar curry and a remote location has
led to months of financial troubles. But as he devours Momoko’s dish the manager gets an idea
about how to save the business: what if they started doing this regularly inviting in patrons
to share stories about breakups heartbreaks and tragic endings cooking dishes that meant
something to the relationship? Like an unconventional therapy group the “Ex-Boyfriend’s
Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee” is born with Momoko leading the Friday night sessions and
the monk-in-training offering blessings. Based on the author’s true heartbreak story that went
viral this charming novel about a woman who gets over a breakup by cooking and encourages
others to do the same was discovered in Japan by the editor of the four-million-copy bestseller
Before the Coffee Gets Cold . With eight recipes included!
