The unnamed narrator is a 29-year-old chef who grew up in California. She suffers from the global ecological collapse that has eradicated most food sources, leaving the world dependent on gray mung-bean flour. Desperate for a better life and burdened by debt, she accepts a job cooking for an elite research community on an Italian mountain. Her culinary skills allow her to influence the powerful donors, though she struggles to find personal pleasure in the rare foods she prepares.

Aida is a 20-year-old evolutionary biologist and the daughter of the mountain's wealthy owner. Raised in extreme privilege, she approaches life with an uninhibited hunger for food, fast cars, astronomy, and scientific discovery. She oversees the secret underground laboratories where extinct species are cultivated. Her aggressive pursuit of sensory experiences provides a sharp contrast to the narrator's more restrained existence.

The unnamed employer is a self-made millionaire who built his fortune by predicting disasters and exploiting the vulnerable. He owns the secluded Italian mountain where he hosts elite investors, tempting them with extinct delicacies. He treats people as commodities, leveraging the narrator's cooking skills to manipulate his donors while remaining emotionally detached from the pleasure his food brings.

Roman Kandinsky is one of the wealthiest men in the world. He acts with the crude swagger of a tech billionaire and believes his extreme fortune exempts him from basic decency. He visits the mountain as an elite gourmand and potential investor. His presence forces the mountain residents to cater to his whims and perform subservient roles to secure his financial backing.

The meteorologist is an expert in cloud seeding who was lured away from a successful university career to work on the mountain. He tracks the weather patterns of the toxic smog covering the Earth and studies the mountain's microclimate. He maintains a cynical outlook regarding the future of the community and frequently shares rumors with the other staff members.

The narrator's late mother was a working-class immigrant from China who raised her daughter in California. She experienced extreme poverty and viewed food purely as sustenance rather than an art form. Her utilitarian approach to eating created deep ideological rifts between her and her daughter, who dropped out of college to pursue fine dining.

Eun-Young is a Korean woman and the first wife of the mountain's wealthy owner. She is known to be highly religious and has supposedly left the mountain community. Her absence creates a void that her husband attempts to fill by forcing the narrator to impersonate her during elite dinner parties to present an image of a stable, pious family.

The narrator's cat is a street rescue that accompanied her from California to Europe. He is a notoriously picky eater who frequently tries to escape his surroundings. On the isolated mountain, he serves as the narrator's only remaining link to her past and her strongest sense of family in an unfamiliar environment.