When a romantic getaway turns into Momoko getting dumped by her longtime boyfriend, she gets drunk and passes out in a mostly empty 24-hour cafe. When she wakes up, the proprietor and one of his regular customers, a Buddhist monk-in-training, listen to her woes and give her the chance to cook her ex's favorite chicken curry dish in an attempt at closure. When the meal turns out to be better than most of the food currently on offer in the cafe, the trio decides to form the titular committee, giving patrons the chance to exorcise their relationship demons while letting go of the meals that tied them to their exes.
This type of cozy food-based loosely-connected story is pretty popular in the Japanese literature that's making its way to the U.S. (see: The Kamogawa Food Detectives, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, etc), and this one seems to be a bit more of a cohesive overarching story than many of those. That said, there are some moments that pulled me out of the story, actions or statements that were so abrupt that it almost felt like I was trying to read a prose version of an anime (yes, I mean the movies, not manga) — I could almost picture the fast animation of Momoko crying out an exhortation and flinging her arms dramatically. However, it is an intriguing entry into this subgenre, and the included recipes made me hungry.
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