A Tokyo cafe becomes a haven for the broken hearted, where each week those who suffer cook their ex's favourite recipes, and in sharing the meal and their story they are able to swallow their pain and move on. Includes recipes, and based on the author's true story.

There is a small cafe in Tokyo where something unusual is brewing... After being dumped by her boyfriend, Momoko finds herself very drunk at a small cafe. Momoko shares the story of her ex-boyfriend with the Manager of the café and the other customers who happened to be there. As she tells her story, she goes into the kitchen of the café, and cooks her ex-boyfriend’s favorite dish, butter chicken curry. Together, they eat the dish and Momoko begins to feel better. Much better. The owner of the café loves the curry and Momoko’s story and they decide to hold a weekly Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee meeting at the café. Momoko begins to work at the café, and every Friday night at 10 pm, anybody with a bitter memory of a relationship and a dish associated with it, comes to the café, prepares the dish, shares the story, and together they eat the dish. Tears are shed, food is eaten, regrets and memories are devoured, thoughts of revenge dissolve. Together the diners purge the sadness and negativity. The pain of the relationship is dead and buried forever. Part confessional, part group therapy, part recovery, part cookbook.

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'Touching, funny, and beautiful, Kawashiro has a wonderful gift for bringing the reader into the story' Booklist

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.

For fans of Butter, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki and Before The Coffee Gets Cold.

Momoko thought her boyfriend was her soulmate. She believed he was going to propose. Instead, he broke things off at a love hotel.

So she does what many broken-hearted people do - she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk that she passes out in a nearly empty café. When she wakes, she pours her heart out to Iori, the curious and impossibly handsome manager and Hozumi, a Buddhist monk in training and café regular. 

As Momoko describes how her ex loved her cooking, the manager decides to allow her to slip into the kitchen and cook up his favourite dish: a delicious butter chicken curry. Momoko realizes that this combination of cooking and sharing has stopped the flow of her constant tears. And the manager has a brilliant idea: what if they started doing this regularly, inviting customers to share stories about heartbreak while cooking dishes that held significance in their relationships? 

And so, an unconventional therapy group, the 'Ex-Boyfriend's Favourite Recipe Funeral Committee' is born . . .