Lin Ye inherits his grandfather’s restaurant in the old district.
It’s a small place with four tables. The sign above the door reads “The Third Watch Restaurant.”
His grandfather left behind some strange rules: open from midnight to three in the morning, serve tea as soon as guests enter, always keep a pot of hot soup on the stove, and never point a kitchen knife at a customer.
On opening night, Lin Ye learns who those rules are for.
The first customer through the door is a laborer who starved to death beneath a bridge. After finishing a bowl of egg fried rice, the ghost weeps, saying it’s the first hot meal he’s had in seven years.
Lin Ye weeps too, but not because he’s moved. He’s terrified.
From then on, every night at midnight, the restaurant fills with unusual customers.
A drowned child wants a taste of the fish soup his mother used to make. A delivery rider killed in a car accident keeps talking about completing one last order. An old woman who jumped from a building only wants to make her grandson another bowl of braised pork.
Lin Ye puts ghosts at ease with his cooking, levels up with the good deeds they earn him, and leaves the accounts to a talking white cat.
Life goes on like this until he finds a ledger his grandfather hid in the kitchen for forty years.
It lists every ghostly customer’s name and wish.
On the last page is Lin Ye’s own name.
And beneath the three-hundred-year-old Chinese scholar tree by the entrance, a woman in red has been standing there ever since his grandfather’s funeral. She hasn’t left once.
