A novel about the taste of childhood, wild dreams and disappointments, and about an irrepressible love of cooking.
The gourmet restaurant of narrator Gert Krüger, nicknamed Cooky, is just as much of a success as his other gastronomical enterprises. But one day he gets an unexpected shock: the highly decorated gourmet chef loses his sense of taste.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, his teenage son Maximilian moves in with him to begin training as a chef. The boy grew up with his mother and is basically a total stranger to Gert. It doesn’t take long before they both start quarrelling with a vengeance.
When Gert departs on a trip through France in order to re-adjust his taste buds while paying a visit to his old friends Betty and Lupo in Normandy, where they are living out their fascination for molecular gastronomy, he decides to bring Maximilian with him. The trip becomes a journey back in time to the 1980s and takes a dramatic turn from which both father and son emerge a bit more grown-up.
