At 35, when a 13-year relationship ends, food journalist Candice Chung finds herself losing not only her first love, but also her most reliable restaurant review partner. Then her retired Cantonese parents offer to be her new plus-ones, and she faces a dilemma: is it better to eat together in polite silence, or to try saying the unsayable—to broach how, for the past decade, they managed to drift so profoundly apart?

Soon, a geographer enters her life, and the course of their relationship forces Chung to address what's still left unsaid. To do so, she must find a new vocabulary—a way to unscramble what her family has been trying to express all along. Not through words, but with food.