I do love stories that revolve around the kitchen and I enjoyed this enemies to lovers storyline.
A fun read.

I really liked this one! There’s something about a kitchen romance that I really enjoy. I was big fan of the play on a restaurant redo reality show. I liked both the main characters as well. My only complaint is that this was the time of romance angst that seemingly coulda have been solved with better communication. There was an abundant amount of each main character thinking about what the other was thinking or contemplating how they were being interpreted. Like, just ask? But besides that, I thought it was well-written and I really enjoy the ending and epilogue. I’d recommend giving it a read.

Enemies to lovers is surprisingly hard to pull off, but especially when you've given your leads a week to meet, be enemies, and then become lovers. Even more so when there's no real reason they should be enemies. Unfortunately, that's exactly the trap Off the Menu falls into: every piece of tension feels artificially contrived and blown out of proportion, which is especially sad when there's a lot to love about the book, not the least of which is Erin and Taylor themselves.

As a food-centric romance novel, it's off the charts. It's very clear that Erdell has worked in a restaurant - food descriptions and terminology flow off the page, which really gives a sense of location for the restaurant, but sometimes it does get to be a bit overwhelming. This also means there's no makeouts in the walk-in, but we do get some great competence from Taylor in being an expediter when service starts.

Erin and Taylor together are great, but that's when they're together, which in an enemies-to-lovers premise, isn't the most amount of time. The last few chapters were my favorites for them, but sadly they're really only get those last few chapters to actually be great together. The show premise falls flat as most of the teeth of the tension is taken away by convoluted "reasons". Taylor can't talk about what she'd like to improve because the management had the staff sign an agreement banning disparaging remarks. Okay, but that doesn't prevent them from saying anything at all, which is how Taylor seems to take it. Erin also spends 2/3 of her time focusing on Taylor as the source of the problem and unwillingness to change, rather than thinking, even for a second, that it might be the owners, despite doing research. It's also unclear why the restaurant was even picked - they state multiple times that they restaurant, while not doing booming business, isn't doing poorly, the staff are all happy except with the owners, and even the food is said to be good despite the out of place menu. There's just a lot that's intended to cause tension that doesn't add up to tension just because the narrative wants it to.

Erin's side of the tension isn't much better, with a show up for renewal, but without any sense of that desperation to either change the formula or get ratings somehow until the very end, when the filming is all already over. It just all adds up to a sense of unwillingness to actually have Erin and Taylor be enemies, and possibly because their time together is so short. There's just not enough time or situations for them to move from one space to the other and build up all of those underlying feelings. Thankfully, the characters themselves are great; I got a sense of every single one, down to minor side characters, and the wide range all felt like a cohesive unit, brought together by this restaurant.