Didn’t You Used to Be Queenie B?

Didn't You Use to Be Queenie B?

by Terri-Lynne Defino
Setting: Connecticut
Genres: Fiction / Women
Published on April 15, 2025
Pages: 496
Format: eARC Source: Netgalley
Amazon

Regina Benuzzi is Queenie B--a culinary goddess with Michelin Star restaurants, a bestselling cookbook empire, and multimillion-dollar TV deals. It doesn't hurt that she's gorgeous and curvaceous, with cascading black hair and signature red lips.

She had it all. Until she didn't.

After an epic fall from grace, Queenie B vanishes from the public eye, giving up everything: her husband, her son, and the fame that she'd fought to achieve. Her shows are in rerun, her restaurants still popular, but her disappearance remains a mystery to her legions of fans.

Local line cook Gale Carmichael also knows a thing or two about disaster. Newly sober and struggling, Gale's future dreams don't hold space for culinary stardom; only earning enough to get by. Broke at the end of the week, he finds himself at a local soup kitchen in one of the roughest parts of New Haven, Connecticut. But Gale quickly realizes that the food coming out of the kitchen is not your standard free meal--it is delicious and prepared with gourmet flair.

Gale doesn't recognize Regina, the soup kitchen's cranky proprietor, whose famous black mane is now streaked with gray. It's been more than ten years since Queenie B vanished into her careful new existence. But she sees Gale's talent and recognizes a brokenness in him that she knows all too well. The culinary genius in hiding takes him under her wing.

Teaching Gale, Regina's passion to create is reignited, and they both glimpse a shot at the redemption that had always seemed out of reach. When Gale is chosen to compete on the hit cooking show, Cut!, it's a turning point for them both.

It's Gale's time to shine. And that means Queenie B might just have to come out of hiding...

I found this book because I look at Netgalley every month to post some upcoming books on the Foodies Read link up page. I like to get ones of different genres. I decided to give this one a try and I’m so glad I did. It was wonderful.

Regina used to be a celebrity chef with all the bad behavior that went with that.  Now she is redeeming herself by living under her real name and using her money to fund a small soup kitchen. She cooks by herself and pays some customers $20 cash to serve each meal. No one knows who she is.  None of her former friends know if she is alive or dead.  

When the regular server doesn’t show up, line cook Gale offers to help out that day.  He knows the cook at the soup kitchen is obviously trained and skilled but her heyday was before he was watching cooking shows so he doesn’t recognize her.  He ends up helping out more and more though in part because he is learning from her.  

When Gale goes onto a cooking competition, Regina has to decide whether or not to help him practice.  She knows she can make him better.  She also knows that this could potentially out her if anyone figures out who she is.  The tabloids would love the story of a disgraced celebrity running a soup kitchen. They’d pay well for that story.  They people around her would jump at that money.

This is a much deeper book than the rom-com type book that you might suppose it is from the cover.  This is a story of found family, overcoming addiction, overcoming past bad behavior and the regrets that come with it, and finding your place in the world now.  The writing drew me in and kept me reading late into the night.  Even if you don’t care about food competitions or chef culture, there is still a lot here to love.