The Calico Cat at the Chibineko Kitchen

by Yuta Takahashi

Translated by Cat Anderson

ARC REVIEW

Publisher: Viking Penguin
Publication date: February 24, 2026

What It’s About

This is the second book in the Meals to Remember at the Chibineko Kitchen series, and it follows a familiar structure. A small seaside restaurant offers more than food. A carefully prepared meal allows its guests to reunite, briefly, with someone they’ve lost.

Several characters arrive at the Chibineko Kitchen carrying different forms of grief and uncertainty. A young woman facing a shortened future. A man trying to reenter the world after years of isolation. A widow who doesn’t realize how much community surrounds her. A theater director struggling to find his footing again. Each story centers on a meal, a memory, and a moment of reckoning before the steam fades.

What Stuck With Me

This is a sad book. It’s also a healing one, but the healing doesn’t come easily or lightly.

The structure will feel very familiar to anyone who has read Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and the resemblance is strong. I didn’t mind that. The premise is familiar, but it’s effective, and Takahashi knows exactly what kind of story he’s telling. There’s a clear trajectory to each chapter. You know what you’re walking into.

The emotional weight varies across the stories, but the final one hit hard. A husband and wife grieving the loss of their young son is a story no parent reads casually. It’s devastating in a very direct way, and it stayed with me long after I finished. There were tears, and they felt earned.

The cat and the kitchen sometimes function more as atmosphere than necessity, but in at least one story, where the loss of a beloved pet mirrors deeper grief, they become essential rather than decorative. That unevenness didn’t bother me. It felt like part of the rhythm of a book built around repetition and ritual.

What I appreciated most is that each encounter nudges the characters forward. Not toward closure, and not toward forgetting, but toward the ability to keep living with what they’ve lost.

Would I Recommend It

Yes, if you like healing fiction and know what that means for you.

If you enjoyed the first book in this series or novels like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this will likely work for you as well. The formula is familiar, and the book leans into it fully.

If you don’t enjoy emotionally driven stories built around grief, ritual, and gentle resolution, this won’t change your mind. But if this is a lane you already read in, The Calico Cat at the Chibineko Kitchen delivers exactly what it promises.

My takeaway: This book knows its shape, and it uses it to help its characters take one careful step forward.

Thank you to Viking Penguin for the digital review copy via NetGalley.

Where to Read:

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If You Like This, You May Like:

• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
  For its familiar structure of brief reunions and emotional reckoning.

• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
  For gentle healing and everyday moments that slowly add up.

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
  For grief handled with softness and restraint.