Love and War in a Restaurant: Setting Stories in the Culinary World by MJ Post

Welcome back to contemporary romance writer, MJ Post, as she talks about “Love and War in a Restaurant: Setting Stories in the Culinary World,” a common setting for stories about food. Enjoy!

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Welcome to episode 4 of my series on writing fiction about food! This one is about restaurants as the settings for stories. A restaurant can be the location for all sorts of fascinating conflict. I’ll explain.

Or, rather, I’ll start with what I’m not focused upon, and that is your standard fictional restaurant scene, which features a couple either advancing their relationship (getting to know each other, discussing marriage) or ending their relationship (breaking up tearfully in a public place).

If you watch Hallmark movies — and I watch two or three of them in a single week sometimes — you have gotten used to these scenes. Every other Hallmark movie starts with the heroine meeting her boyfriend for dinner and getting dumped because he has a promotion that forces him to move out of town, or it just isn’t working out because he’s a thoughtless jerk or a spineless coward.

The heroine subsequently winds up sharing a working lunch or dinner or coffee with the hero without yet realizing that they have chemistry (although WE already know that).

So, no, I’m not talking about standard, generic restaurant scenes. Those scenes could actually happen somewhere else, too, like in the street or in a hotel lobby or in the blackened ruins of Notre Dame (SOB!). They are part of the storyteller’s toolbox.

Drama in the Restaurant: The Players 

Instead, my goal is to address how the lives of people in a restaurant can create drama.

Last time around I analyzed the personalities of chefs, so I can recap that here just a little.

Chefs are driven, passionate, sometimes business-minded; they often struggle to have proper family life; and if they feel bad, they screw up. A head chef (executive chef, chef de cuisine), male or female, is a natural protagonist or antagonist for a story.

Your story can follow the chef’s struggles to overcome daily problems; you can also focus on massive ongoing problems like a failed relationship or a threat of business failure or a foolish owner or a need to rediscover herself or himself through food.

Also your story can have as its center someone in a relationship with the chef who is trying to make that tough relationship work.

Alternately, your story can use the head chef as a villain because the head chef mistreats or neglects people or competes unfairly.

A junior chef can fit into a lot of the storylines above, and as a protagonist, can also struggle with the head chef for respect or career advancement or recognition.

A villainous junior chef is trying to derail the success of the heroic head chef, possibly to take over the restaurant or steal its secrets for her future endeavors or for a rival.

Moving on from chefs — really anyone working in the restaurant can be interesting. I recently read a short novel from the point of view of a restaurant’s accountant.

I’ll go with one example: servers. Servers can have their own plot lines, such as work rivalries with other servers; efforts to stop being a server and do something more fulfilling (better culinary jobs, acting, singing, medicine, law, social justice); or romance (good sex, getting married, gold-digging.)

A restaurant is a place where people constantly come and go.

A restaurant is a place where people constantly come and go. Any restaurant patron can turn into a source of drama or romance for someone who works there.

In the movie As Good as It Gets, a crowded city diner is the starting place for the unlikely romance between server Helen Hunt and emotionally awkward writer Jack Nicholson.

(I just accidentally typed As Good as IT Gets. Yeah, IT gets really good, doesn’t it? Maybe I should write a novel about that. Late at night, the IT guy logs in with your password and uses your work account to sell pirated romance novels…)

The Restaurant Scene in The Godfather and What If…

Here’s another example of a story based on people who come into a restaurant. In the famous scene from The Godfather in which Michael rubs out Sollozzo and the police captain in a Bronx bistro, imagine a story focused not on the criminals but on the waiter. Could the story be about how the waiter deals with the situation — how he reacts during the shooting, how he deals with the police, his fear of retribution if he talks, his reluctance to share with loved ones?

Let’s not forget restaurant critics.

A few more examples, you say? No problem. Let’s not forget restaurant critics.

Probably in real life they aren’t as make-or-break as your typical dramatic presentation would have it, but they can help or hurt business a lot, and often they come incognito and without warning.

Other People Associated with the Restaurant

And then there are health inspectors, spies and scouts from competing restaurants, food delivery staff, cleaning staff, the catering crew, designers, decorators, front of house managers, even the occasional celebrity who brings a signed picture for the wall…

And of course, as soon as I send this article along to its venue, I’ll think of more people I should have included.

Other Genres Set in the Restaurant

As you know, good ol’ MJ (that’s me!) is a writer of contemporary romance, but other genres can work in a restaurant also.

Crime drama — restaurant as a front for organized crime, or being squeezed in a protection scheme, or being robbed like in Pulp Fiction.

Thriller — which one of the ten people in this dining room is really the foreign spy?

Adventure — who will escape the rooftop restaurant with the lower floors of the tower on fire?

As always, I encourage you to start a chat with me in social media about this or any other article in my series!

Thanks for reading, and please consider checking out my longer work or connecting with me using the links in my bio below.

Excelsior!
MJ

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MJ Post (pseudonym) is a Brooklyn high school teacher and writer from Queens, NY. Educated in the South with an attitude straight out of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, MJ writes contemporary new adult romance and romantic comedy with a multi-regional flavor. MJ is happily married.

MJ’s work includes five romance novellas with Mysti Parker, one solo romance novel, and under her real name, five novels and two nonfiction books as well as miscellaneous other collections.

MJ’s novel Chef Showdown: A Romance, two young chefs fall in love while competing on a reality TV cooking show under the watchful eye of the toughest judge imaginable. It will make you hungry for some love and some great food.

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