Aftertaste

Konstantin "Kostya" Duhovny, the son of Ukrainian immigrants in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, discovers at age 11 that he can taste food he has not eaten. Sitting alone at a public pool, watching other boys play with their fathers, he is overwhelmed by longing for his dead dad and tastes pechonka, a sautéed chicken liver dish. He knows instinctively that the aftertaste has been sent by his father, Sergei Duhovny, a bus driver who died the morning Kostya screamed at him for being too busy to play their favorite tasting game. Their last exchange haunts Kostya for decades.

The aftertastes keep coming, different foods from unknown spirits. When Kostya tells his mother, Vera, she panics and has him committed to a psychiatric facility. He lies his way out by claiming he invented it all for attention. Poverty and dead-end jobs follow. By 30, Kostya is a dishwasher at a hidden speakeasy called The Library of Spirits.

One night, a grieving widower named Charlie Katzowsky stumbles in carrying pills he intends to take on the anniversary of his wife Anna's death. An aftertaste floods Kostya's mouth, and for the first time he attempts to make what the Dead are feeding him. He mixes a cocktail called a Spectral Sour and serves it. As Charlie sips, Anna's ghost materializes in green light and tells him to let her go so they can both move on. Charlie spills his pills across the bar. Kostya realizes he may have opened a portal to the Dead.

His roommate and best friend Frankie, a charismatic sous-chef at a restaurant called Wolfpup, encourages Kostya to explore his gift. At a warehouse party, Kostya meets a fortune teller named Maura who identifies his ability as clairgustance, a rare psychic sense for tasting the Dead. When he describes summoning Anna, Maura warns him never to make the Dead's food again.

Frankie secures Kostya a position at Saveur Fare, a three-Michelin-star restaurant run by Michel Beauchêne. Over six months, Kostya's decades of ghost tasting have honed his palate beyond any culinary school graduate. During a holiday party, his father's aftertaste returns for the first time in 20 years. Kostya abandons his station to cook the pechonka, and Sergei begins materializing, but Michel storms in and the confrontation overwrites the aftertaste. Michel hurls the liver plate into a deep fryer, burning Kostya's arm with scalding oil.

After settling with the restaurant, Kostya opens Hell's Kitchen Supper Club, an underground ghost kitchen in his apartment. Over a month, he summons six ghosts, learning that the spirits who return are those without closure, drawn back by food memories tied to profound grief. An Instagram post gets him shut down by the Health Department. That same day, he learns Frankie has died in a fire at Wolfpup.

Devastated, Kostya reconnects with Maura at a tattoo parlor, though her arrival is not the coincidence he believes. They fall in love. Maura reveals that her younger sister Everleigh died by suicide, and Kostya offers to bring Everleigh back, noting that a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup aftertaste has appeared around Maura since they first met.

Interlude chapters narrated from the Afterlife reveal its structure: Spirits arrive at a Food Hall, an infinite space where they eat to process memories before moving on to new lives. Spirits whose Living loved ones cannot release their grief become Hungry, trapped and deteriorating; if they never move on, they become violent Hangry Ghosts. These chapters, narrated by Everleigh, reveal that the ghosts Kostya raised never returned to the Afterlife but remain tethered to him, growing Hangry.

Kostya summons Everleigh for Maura, then pitches a Russian businessman named Viktor Musizchka on a restaurant featuring ghost-inspired dishes plus exclusive seatings for spirit encounters. Viktor agrees after Kostya summons a guest's grandmother at a dinner party. Kostya's mother warns him the Musizchka family are gangsters, but he dismisses her.

Further interludes narrated by Maura reveal her secret: She has died three times, each time crossing into the Afterlife to search for Everleigh, contracting an insatiable Hunger from the Dead. She tracked Kostya for months and initially pursued him because his proximity to Death quieted her cravings. She genuinely fell in love but pushed him toward Viktor, needing his restaurant to open.

The restaurant, called DUH (Russian for "spirit"), opens to critical acclaim. On the final preview night, the feared food critic Dan Evans receives a burnt crescent roll, his dead father's aftertaste, and the tasting chamber erupts with light as the ghost appears. Before the public opening, Maura confesses everything: her deaths, her manipulation, and the truth that Kostya's ghosts are tearing the veil between worlds. He tells her to leave. Minutes later, Viktor reveals the restaurant was always a front for smuggling through the abandoned subway station beneath the building and threatens Kostya at gunpoint.

Kostya returns to his mother, who reveals she too tasted pechonka after Sergei's death and attempted suicide, believing the aftertastes signaled mental illness. She had Kostya hospitalized not from neglect but from fear he was experiencing the same crisis. They reconcile, and Vera declines Kostya's offer to summon Sergei, telling him the real act of love is to let his father rest.

On opening night, Hangry spirits erupt through the dining room, joined by others flooding through the torn veil. Everleigh tells Kostya the only fix is to cook aftertastes in the Afterlife, which means he must die. Viktor demands service continue at gunpoint, but Kostya's kitchen staff stands between him and the gun. He declares DUH closed.

Kostya and Maura reconcile. She reveals that she crossed into the Afterlife and tried to have Frankie cook Kostya's recipes to lure the spirits back, but Frankie could not replicate the aftertastes. They eat pufferfish liver, a lethal toxin, in Saveur Fare's walk-in freezer, crossing over while the extreme cold slows the poison. Frankie finds Kostya and reveals his own death was accidental, caused by exhaustion and a drunken attempt to cook Kostya's father's dish. He explains that Kostya can use his own memories as ingredients, but each meal costs him those memories permanently.

Kostya accepts the cost. One by one, he cooks aftertastes from his own past, feeding spirits and watching them move on. He saves his father for last. Sergei appears smiling, calling him "my cherrystone," and reveals the aftertastes were never about forgiveness but about their tasting game, sent so they could meet one final time. Kostya feeds him and watches him board a gleaming train.

He continues cooking until he has sacrificed nearly everything, including his memories of Frankie and Maura. Maura seals the torn veil with Frankie's help using the dumpling-crimping technique Kostya taught her, then finds Kostya nearly empty. His one remaining memory is the morning he screamed at his father. He transforms it into fleur de sel, a delicate sea salt that became a symbol of their love, and places it on Maura's tongue in a final kiss, sending her back to Life.

In the epilogue, Maura wakes beside Kostya's body, which cannot be revived. She survives, freed of her Hunger, and lives fully, remembering Kostya through the taste of salt. Vera tends a cherry orchard upstate with a tree she retrieved from Ukraine. In the Afterlife, Frankie opens a restaurant called Last Supper. His sous-chef, a man with no memory but extraordinary instincts, cooks every dish and collects scraps. Driven by an instinct he cannot name, the sous-chef waits. When she finally arrives, he recognizes her not by sight but by the taste of her kiss: "a special kind of salt."