Wholesome and Endearing | Love’s Recipe by Mila Nicks

Title: Love's Recipe
Author: Mila Nicks
Published: May 1, 2020
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 250
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Rosalie Underwood is a broke, recently divorced single mother. After she’s forced to return to her hometown St. Aster, Louisiana, she lands a waitressing job at Ady’s Creole Café. Life’s not done giving her lemons just yet, though. Ady’s Creole Café is on the brink of going out of business. If Rosalie hopes to recover from her disastrous marriage and keep her job, she must figure out a way to save the restaurant. But the only question is how?
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When Nicholas Fontaine hires Rosalie Underwood, he doesn’t expect his newest waitress to stir the pot. He was hoping to keep up the charade he’s created since his mother’s passing. Soon he realizes that Rosalie refuses to let Ady’s fail. She cooks up a plan to salvage the business—including the part where she enters the restaurant in a food competition to generate town-wide buzz.
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There’s no time for butting heads. The clock is ticking and the business is tanking. Nick’s stuck teaching Rosalie how to cook the one-of-a-kind menu. Rosalie’s trying her best to learn the delicious recipes. In order to succeed, they must come together and work as a team, but brewing feelings between them only complicates matters. Is this a recipe for disaster or a recipe for love?

Not many things in life are more humiliating than having to crawl back to your hometown (and your judgmental mother’s guest bedroom) after you ran away at 17 with the plan to never come back. But after her husband walks out on her—again—Rosalie has no choice except to come crawling back, with no savings and a five-year-old daughter in tow. Lucky for her, she finds a job. Not so lucky? Her new boss is hot, but also seems to be the laziest guy in town.

Time to get to work.

Reading Love’s Recipe was like curling up in the softest blanket with the smoothest cup of coffee ever brewed. This book is so, so comforting and delightful. Mila Nicks combines the very best (and worst?) aspects of a small town romance with genuine characters, delicious Southern cooking, and low-key conflict. This is a great read for a quiet weekend afternoon.

During the first few chapters of this book, I was a little concerned because the characterization of Rosalie and Nick (her boss-slash-love-interest) felt supremely shallow, and I was lacking a solid connection with either of their points of view. And while I can’t say that Nicks offers the depth and subtlety in character-building that I love, by the end of the book, I was really enjoying watching the relationship between the two of them develop. Love’s Recipe is not a Big Feelings kind of romance, and instead it thrives of of small, everyday interactions that slowly build and swell into a soft kind of love that I found adorable and refreshing.

Which is not to say there is no conflict in Love’s Recipe. The main reason Rosalie and Nick begin to spend time together is because they agree to renovate the Creole restaurant he inherited from his mother—or rather, Nick puts Rosalie in charge of Project Fixer-Upper and plans to just sit by and watch. Naturally, his plans go awry, and the two team up to renovate the restaurant and win the town’s annual food festival. On top of this, both protagonists are single parents to five-year-old girls (who become best friends, naturally), and Rosalie is dealing with all of the fallout of her marriage plus living under passive-aggressive mother’s roof. So: definitely a lot going on here! But throughout, Mila Nicks keeps the pace consistent and the tone fairly light. This was a delightful slice-of-life love story.

Overall, I just found this romance to be so wholesome. The foodie angle was perfectly done (I even learned how to sauté things based on how Nick taught Rosalie!). Things were genuine, never too dark, and really great. At the end, Nick proposes to Rosalie on Halloween, while they’re dressed as Mario and Luigie. A fuzzy-mustachioed Happily Ever After kiss was just what my heart needed. This is an absolute gem from the small town romance subgenre.