Cole Briggs has eaten his way through San Francisco for three years without finding anything that stops him cold. Then a pop-up in the Mission does.

The chef's name is Arjun.

Arjun Das runs his kitchen the way he runs his life: with precision, without apology, and with limited patience for people whose relationship with food is purely transactional. Cole is clearly one of those people. He is also, inconveniently, the first person in years to sit down at Arjun's bar and actually taste something.

What starts as an unlikely conversation becomes something harder to categorise, until a name from Arjun's past surfaces, and the man sitting across from him starts to look like a very different person.

Neither of them is entirely right. Neither of them is entirely wrong. Both of them are, for a while, spectacularly stupid about it.

An Acquired Taste is a slow-burn MM romance about two men with incompatible worldviews, a misunderstanding with a real wound at its centre, and a dish that was never on any menu.

Set in San Francisco. Food is central. Heat level: warm.

Sign up now to get the most out of Books2Read

Discover something great at Books2Read.

Thanks for signing up for Books2Read notifications!