The Restaurant (The Nantucket Restaurant #1) by Pamela Kelley

The Restaurant by Pamela M. Kelley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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Mandy, Emma and Jill O'Toole are as close as three sisters who live hundreds of miles apart can be. They grew up together on Nantucket, but have scattered around the country. When their beloved grandmother passes peacefully in her sleep a week before her ninety-ninth birthday she leaves them quite a surprise. In addition to her Nantucket home, they learn that they've inherited Mimi's Place, one of Nantucket's most popular year-round restaurants. They had no idea that she was the silent owner of a restaurant, and no idea how they're going to handle this kind of inheritance.

There is of course, a catch―she left the restaurant equally to Mandy, Emma, and Jill―and also to Paul, the executive chef for the past fifteen years.

And before they can sell, all three women need to work at the restaurant for a period of one year. Now they have to examine their priorities and figure out a way to make it work, all while discovering that Mimi's Place is in serious need of a facelift. The restaurant hasn't changed in years, and its finances are declining. Meanwhile, Nantucket is a special place, a tight-knit and insular upscale beach community, both supportive and challenging.

Three sisters, each at a crossroads in her own life, facing the challenges of a surprise inheritance in the close-knit community of Nantucket.
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When I requested this book from NetGalley, I did not realize it was a rerelease of a book I had already read...in 2020. However, since it was back then a four-star read, I decided to give it another go, and it was still enjoyable this time around. I am a big fan of Kelley's books set on the island of Nantucket and enjoyed the cameos of some of her characters from the Nantucket Beach Plum Cove series. I remembered parts of this book, but after five years, plenty of it was unfamiliar to me, so it was certainly not a hardship to reread it.

I love stories about sisters, and this was no exception. I also tend to love books that surround cooking or restaurants, so this also had that going for it. I appreciated the little bit of romance in there, and I loved hearing the back story of how it was that Grams came to be the silent partner in Mimi's Place. And it was a pleasure watching them bring the restaurant back to life, all while figuring out exactly where they fit into the equation. All in all, this was a fun summertime read from one of my auto-buy authors, and it was a great way to spend a day of my current staycation. I would still rate it a solid four stars.

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