tl;dr
A fast-paced plot painted on a world canvas that feels a little too vast for the scope of the book. Lots of food descriptions.

Thoughts
Have you ever read a book and thought "This should have been a video game?" Because that thought sat in the back of my head the whole way through. The plot is fast-paced with a structure of narration (cutscenes), hunting for ingredients (map exploration), and then the culinary battle (boss fight). There're also dating sim elements, and plenty of one-on-one campfire chats with supporting cast that slowly reveal everyone's personal motives. Heck, there are even tidbits of world lore on the "loading screens" between chapters. And speaking of world lore, there's a lot of fun stuff to mine in here. The author's bio talks about growing up in a diverse Asian neighborhood, and that's evident in the variety of food and names presented here (shout out to the calamansi mention). The competition is as brutal as promised, with Squid Game-esque levels of punishment for losers, and there are plenty of layers of backstory for all of the characters with a much larger world just beyond the doors of the competition. And that's where a video game structure might really have come in handy. There's too much to fit into one book, but plenty for a game with multiple playthroughs. On this route, Cai can date Bo. On this route, she skips romance entirely to learn more about Kama. On this route, she absolutely obliterates the competition early on. Heck, can we add that rival kid from the first chapter as DLC?

My point is that the world is so vast that I felt really locked in to the choices that actually appeared on the page. Love triangles aren't my thing, for example. (I accept the fault is with the reader here.) Especially the kind where the two options get increasingly hostile with each other, and then the MC. Spending most of the time on the romance took away the potential of the competition plot for me, but I'm sure it'd be the selling point for other readers. There are just so many enticing ideas and plot hooks dangling in front of me, and the book only had time to chase down one of them. Alas!

The food content is mixed for me. I cook a lot, and I cook Asian food a lot. Make no mistake, I'm very mid. That being said, I expected more cooking here. This book is overflowing with sumptuous descriptions of food and eating, but the actual cooking techniques and moments are surprisingly sparse. The first round gave us some insight into Cai's ingredient choices, but after that, there's very little. Cai's supposedly a genius cook, but we never get any look into that genius. I cheered when (mild spoiler alert) the final theme ingredient was eggs, because eggs are used to make noodles, and we'd spent the entire book hearing that she's a master of noodle-making. I couldn't wait for her to show off kneading the dough, the stretching, the twisting, the flourish with her knife as she cut noodles with precision. Everyone else would finally see her at her best and most brilliant. But instead she made omurice? Right after she admits in the narrative how much she misses making noodles for an audience? Anyway, this last point in particular doesn't seem to bother anyone else, so I'm gonna put a mark in the curmudgeon column for me.

Overall, this book didn't land with me, but if you told me it was being converted into a video game, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sweet July Books for an advance copy. All thoughts in this review are my own!