Laura Patterson is an American exchange student in Rome who, fed up with being inexpertly groped by her young Italian beaus, decides there's only one sure-fire way to find a sensual man: date a chef. Then she meets Tomasso, who's handsome, young - and cooks in the exclusive Templi restaurant. Perfect. Except, unbeknownst to Laura, Tomasso is in fact only a waiter at Templi - it's his shy friend Bruno who is the chef. But Tomasso is the one who knows how to get the girls, and when Laura comes to dinner he persuades Bruno to help him with the charade. It works: the meal is a sensual feast, Laura is utterly seduced and Tomasso falls in lust. But it is Bruno, the real chef who has secretly prepared every dish Laura has eaten, who falls deeply and unrequitedly in love. A delicious tale of Cyrano de Bergerac-style culinary seduction, but with sensual recipes instead of love poems.

She had never eaten food like this before. No: she had never eaten before." And that's just the first of 22-year-old Laura Patterson's gustatory epiphanies in Rome, where she has come to study art history. Handsome Tomasso seduces her with succulent baby artichokes and frothy zabagliones, but what the reader knows and Laura doesn't is that Tomasso is a waiter. The creator of the rapturous meals is his best friend, Bruno, who has a big nose, a poet's soul and a mad passion for Laura. Capella's spin on Cyrano is his debut novel, but his sentences are as expert as Bruno's sauces, and he serves up a brilliant meal of soothing predictabilities punctuated by surprises. Secondary characters are fully realized, especially earthy Benedetta, Bruno's truffle country consolation until she urges him to follow his heart back to Laura. The cooking lesson e-mails at the end of the book are like a second glass of grappa, too much of a good thing, but Capella is deservedly the subject of buzz in the food world. This is a foodie treat.

Part food guide to Rome and part love story, Capella's novel spares no delicious detail in the kitchen or in the bedroom. A young American student sipping coffee at a Trastevere bar catches the eye of a sensuous young waiter. The waiter woos the eager young miss with food, and her appetite for Italian cooking instantly becomes an appetite for the young waiter himself. What the girl doesn't realize is that the elegant food the waiter serves her comes not from his own hand but from that of his best friend, who harbors his own secret passion for the American student. Foodies will revel in Capella's lengthy passages describing quasi-military life in the tyrannically run kitchen and snooty dining room of a Michelin-starred eatery run by a ruthless chef. The book's food scenes give way to sex scenes, which yield in turn to simultaneous sex and food couplings. Coarse, bawdy Italian vulgarisms earn literal English translations in footnotes. Gourmets and romantics both will encounter much entertainment in Capella's lighthearted first novel.

Synopsis:
It's been a while now since I finished The Food of Love, but I'm still getting emails from readers about it, so I guess there must still be people out there who are picking it up for the first time. One of the