BookBrowse Reviews The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman

BookBrowse:

Rebecca Kauffman cooks up both a delicious mystery and a quietly perceptive ensemble character study.

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It's potentially the biggest night ever at Aunt Orsa's, a restaurant notable primarily for being the only fine dining option in its Midwestern university town. Not only is a pharmaceutical company sales rep prepared to wine and dine a large group of physicians on the patio, but the reservation book also includes a VIP reservation—for a dinner to honor the massively bestselling visiting author (see Beyond the Book) who's just delivered a day of guest lectures at the university.

Just hours before dinner service is supposed to start, however, the restaurant's operations assistant (who also happens to be Orsa's nephew) discovers a very unpleasant surprise—twenty-two ribeye steaks, intended for tonight's featured special, have gone missing from the walk-in refrigerator. What's more, the theft is clearly an inside job. Desperate to preserve her restaurant's reputation—tarnished in recent weeks by a spate of negative Yelp reviews—Orsa turns amateur detective, launching an investigation that casts suspicion on almost everyone and threatens to tear the staff apart.

The Reservation, Rebecca Kauffman's sixth novel, is structured as a series of overlapping vignettes. All the action takes place over the course of this eventful day and night at Aunt Orsa's, and each chapter focuses primarily on one of the dozen-plus members of the kitchen and front-of-house staff, from the busser and the dishwasher to the chef and the owner. Some of these chapters, especially earlier in the novel, read almost like fully realized short stories or character studies—such as "The Owner," which retraces Orsa's bittersweet relationship with her sister and nephew, or "The Prep Cook," the story of Edgar, who lives in his car and works two jobs in order to save and send money to his family back in Guatemala, but who goes out of his way to help a co-worker in need.

As the novel progresses, however, and as the connections among characters grow more intricate—including romantic entanglements, small-town grudges dating back to childhood, and professional jealousies—the pace increasingly quickens, and Orsa draws in other members of the staff, all eager to determine who's responsible not only for the missing steaks but also for those vitriolic Yelp reviews. Although The Reservation is far from a conventional mystery novel (and in fact has the potential to frustrate more traditional fans of the genre), watching the characters piece the puzzle together is almost as satisfying as watching a master chef plate a fancy dessert.

At times, Kauffman's novel turns broadly humorous, with incidents that veer close to slapstick or sketch comedy (such as the discovery that one of the missing steaks has been shoved down the disposal, rendering the industrial dishwasher inoperable and wreaking havoc in the kitchen and dining room). But there are others—including another standalone chapter focusing on two diners determined to have a special night out—that read like classic tragedies in miniature. Throughout, Kauffman illustrates the ways in which the restaurant's workers make vast assumptions about one another—notions that almost always wind up being misguided, narrow-minded, or just plain false. In this way, Kauffman also implicitly encourages readers to examine any preconceptions they might have about people who work in service industries, reminding us with care and compassion that no one's backstory is as simple as it seems.

In many ways, the character at the heart of the novel is the lead line cook, Glen, who is consistently mocked by some of his colleagues for being a "lifer," for, in their perception, settling for an unglamorous career in the restaurant industry rather than using it as a springboard for something more prestigious. But, as his story poignantly illustrates, there's a profound dignity for Glen in valuing the work that he does, in approaching it with as much care and precision as any surgeon or professor. The Reservation creates what's effectively an ensemble character study, of all the lives and stories that converge at Aunt Orsa's on potentially the biggest night ever.

This review first ran in the March 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.