ARC provided by NetGalley

Author: Grace Reilly

Thanks, Avon and Harper Voyager for the ARC via NetGalley.

Yes, Chef is marketed as It Happened One Summer meets The Bear and it’s the perfect description. 

Jack Hartman is not in a good place in his life. He lost his mentor and surrogate father and has been drinking and dropping the ball at his job at a prestigious NYC restaurant. That gets him, instead of the coveted position of executive chef of the company’s new restaurant. a ‘you’re fired until you get your shit together’ speech. The final straw was the massive meltdown he had with a patron in the middle of service.

In the exact moment Jack’s life is imploding, so is Poppy Winfield’s, daughter of the restaurant owner. At the same moment Jack is blowing up she’s getting spectacularly publicly dumped by her famous athlete boyfriend (in a dinner where she thought he was proposing no less). Considering she’s a famous influencer, their meltdowns go viral…

Jack’s only hope of refuge is going back to Florida, reopening the restaurant his mentor left and proving his boss he’s worth keeping around. As for Poppy, she follows Jack with a proposition: to put the small Florida restaurant on the map so she can prove to her family that she’s not the screw up they think she is. Yeah, that will going as splendidly well as you think…

Unlike in It Happened One Summer, Poppy is not just some vapid girl who has her head in the clouds  and that made her likable. She is actually someone who was diagnosed with severe ADHD later in life and it explains a lot of how she has behaved in the past. 

Jack (who also has ADHD) is a broken soul. Abandoned as a baby, he bounced around the foster system until his mentor took him under his wing. But one too many rejections made him believe he’s just not worthy of being loved, of being kept. You feel for him and root for him and Poppy to find a way to each other.  

The only thing I wished for more in the book was more show than tell so that I would easily believe that they could develop a relation and that Poppy could be a chef. 

What you get: a bubbly, smart young woman who’s misunderstood, a surly but hunky tattooed chef, a lizard eating cat, cooking lessons, Florida cockroaches, found family and a heartfelt HEA. 

Representation: both MCs have ADHD

Content notes: a loving but toxic relationship and family dynamic, loss of a loved one, child abandonment and living in foster care, dismissal of a mental health issue due to misogyny.