I loved Hillary Manton Lodge’s 2014 book, A TABLE BY THE WINDOW, where we are introduced to young Juliette D’Alisa and her ethnic family of chefs and bakers. By the end of the book, she and her brother are opening a new restaurant, Two Blue Doors, in their hometown of Portland, Oregon. Oh, and she has met online the most wonderful medical-research doctor who unfortunately lives way across the country, in Memphis. It didn’t feel as much a romance as a novel about food (including recipes) and families. In her maternal grandmother’s effects, she had found the photo of a mysterious man --- not her grandfather --- who looked like the spitting image of her older brother. Who was this man?

"This book has the feel of a romance --- one that will be resolved in a third volume of the series. The text is replete with contemporary dialogue and reproduced letters written by and to Juliette's grandmother..."

RESERVATIONS FOR TWO, the second Two Blue Doors book, opens with Juliette traveling to Provence. She’s checking out culinary suppliers, but, more personally, she’s trying to unlock secrets that might be hidden in the homestead-chateau, still owned by the extended family. Yes, there she finds evidence that her grandmother had been in love with a Jewish pâtissier. But what had happened to him and their relationship during the Occupation and the Second World War?

Did I mention that Neil McLaren, the Memphis suitor, joins Juliette in Europe? And the restaurant is set to open shortly after she returns home, though she breathlessly finds time to visit him and his Tennessee haunts before the public launch? And what is the role of the restaurant’s assistant chef, never far removed from the Portland scene?

This book has the feel of a romance --- one that will be resolved in a third volume of the series. The text is replete with contemporary dialogue and reproduced letters written by and to Juliette's grandmother, in Paris, starting in 1938 when she met the mysterious pâtissier, the most interesting of her instructors; this was in an era when women weren’t customarily students in French cooking schools. And RESERVATIONS FOR TWO features recipes that look more “doable,” in terms of ingredients and processes, than those included in A TABLE BY THE WINDOW. Hmm. “Tarissa’s Peach Cornbread” (served in Memphis, not France or Oregon) captures my imagination, assuming I can find “ripe peaches,” maybe not in the winter.

I look forward to the third book in the series, hoping it contains more recipes and also a little more tension than RESERVATIONS --- a finale to match the opening segment, which I loved in A TABLE BY THE WINDOW.