The comics' main protagonists, Lucy Fuji and Graham Ramos
When Lucy learns that her favorite restaurant, "Dimanche," has changed staff, she must use her uncannily strong sense of smell to find the chef she's admired for so long and rediscover "The Perfect Taste". This leads her to Gourmet Hound, a cafe run by two former Dimanche chefs. From there it's all cute dogs and mouth-watering food. Oh and a tall, handsome grandpa making sure she doesn't break anything.
Gourmet Hound
is a webcomic created by Leehama that is hosted on Webtoons.
This webcomic has examples of the following tropes:
- Angry Chef: There are a few contenders for this title among the cast, but Madeleine has the best claim so far. Hostile, touchy, aggressive, perfectionist, and workaholic, she alienates those around her and makes even her friends worry that she might work her kitchen staff (or herself!) to death.
- Arc Words: “A life full of wonderful meals.”
- Big Damn Kiss: Lucy and Graham.
- Book Ends: Lucy first meets Graham when she smells smoke coming from his house and then breaks a door to get in. In the epilogue, Lucy is taking Lemon home when she smells smoke, but thankfully Graham manages to open the door before Lucy could break the door again.
- Career-Ending Injury:
- Graham's accident broke his cribriform plate, damaging the olfactory nerves that lead from the nose to the brain. That resulted in a near-total loss of his ability to smell. To a chef, that was a devastating blow.
- Madeleine is afraid she's suffered one after getting hit by a wind-blown banner - an x-ray confirms she has distal ulnar and radial fractures, which exacerbate her underlying wrist tendinosis, collagen degeneration, and strains in the elbow and shoulder of her dominant arm. Madeleine is upset at the thought of having to close down her catering business, having nothing to fall back on, but her partner Sherry convinces her this can be an opportunity to slow down and change the culture at their business.
- Graham's accident broke his cribriform plate
- Central Theme: Loss and moving on. Most of the former Dimanche chefs still have baggage from the fallout of Bartlett's sudden disappearance, while Lucy still feels depressed over the death of her grandmother and selling her culinary school.
- Bartlett later reveals that Lynn's death also sent him into depression.
- Cooking Stories: Falls solidly into this genre.
- Eating Solves Everything: Literally, in this case. Lucy plans to eat the cooking of every former Dimanche chef, in order to solve the mystery of who produced the Perfect Taste...as well as the problem of her sense of loss after her grandmother's passing threw her life into upheaval. Whether this is a valid solution to the latter remains to be seen. She's begun to question it, at least.
- Edible Theme Naming: Every character and chapter are named either after a certain food or food-related item.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Lucy continually calls Graham "Gramps" due to his hair color, much to his chagrin.
- Food Porn: The illustrations of the various dishes are frequently downright mouthwatering, which is only as it should be for the genre in question.
- Forgotten First Meeting: It's later revealed that Graham and Lucy were in the same high school together.
- Has a Type: Graham asks Joanna and Walt whether Lucy has a specific "type" of person that she's attracted to. While listing the people Lucy has had crushes on, Walt and Joanna determine that Lucy has a weakness for "attractive people who offer her food." Graham later has a bit of a scare when Sherry (who is Graham's ex-girlfriend and undeniably attractive) offers to cook something "delicious" for Lucy.
- Identical Grandson: Chef Palmier briefly mistakes Lucy for her grandmother Lynn.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each Episode (minus the finale) is named after a food or food related item that appears in the episode.
- Impossibly Delicious Food: The "Perfect Taste" that Lucy is trying to rediscover. She eventually realizes the taste was always mixed with her grandmother's scent, which is why she can't find it now.
- I Will Find You: Also the "Perfect Taste" Lucy is trying to find. She spends the whole series in dogged pursuit of it, getting entangled in all of the past Dimanche chefs' personal lives to find what the missing ingredient, or person is.
- Like Parent, Like Child: Lucy has her father's sense of smell and her mother's strength.
- Meaningful Name: Bell Corner's new bakery and coffee store is called "Bellflower", which is a combination of the store name's with the name of Lynn's old culinary school.
- The Nose Knows: Lucy inherited her incredible sense of smell from her father & grandfather. Her nose also gives her an incredibly discerning sense of taste - once she's eaten a chef's food, she can identify dishes that they have cooked just by smell, or who cooked a dish based on the taste profile. During Pepper's wedding, Lucy is able to determine which cupcake the missing ring ended up in just by smelling which cupcakes had the strongest "metallic" and "aftershave" scent to them. During the Shopping Plaza Summer Fair, she's able to discern which profiteroles from Cosmos were made by Heath, Anise, Yuzuru, and Meyer by smell alone.
- Oblivious to Love: Kirby. The extras show that Jacobi has been trying to flirt with them for a year.
- Official Couple: By the end of the comic, Frank & Amandine and Sherry & Madeleine have gotten married. Olive and Thomas are engaged (with their wedding right around the corner), while Meyer & Clementine and Lucy and Graham are happy couples.
- Older Than They Look: Lucy's cute face, short stature, and bright demeanor lead people to think she's a teenager. It's especially bad when she gets a hair cut, with some folks wondering if she's a lost child.
- Onion Tears: Lucy is introduced in the middle of invoking this trope, chopping a comically large pile of onions in a transparent attempt to pretend she isn't crying over the recent changes at Dimanche.
- Pensieve Flashback: Jacobi has a Photographic Memory - typically his ability to review memories is depicted as strips of old-fashioned physical film stock, but in Episode 128 he walks through his memory of the night the staff at Dimanche made Lucy's 19th birthday dinner.
- Photographic Memory: Robert Jacobi has an eidetic memory, which he often uses to recall recipes and cooking techniques he's seen only once.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Lucy is sometimes seen carrying boxes that just as tall as her much to the chagrin of Clementine and Graham.
- Posthumous Character: Lucy's grandmother.
- String Theory: In Episode 15, when Lucy begins the process of tracking down the chefs from Dimanche based on the list Graham made for her, she dedicates a bulletin board in her room to new articles covering-, photos of-, and information pertaining to- the scattered chefs. It's a reflection of her tendency to throw all her energy behind whatever project she's working on currently, and also her dedication to the search. In Episode 150, she takes the board down after she resolves not to bother the chefs any more, worried that her search could dredge up painful memories for the cooks who left Dimanche after the stressful period following Chef Bartlett's departure.
- Show Within a Show:
- Type 1: Joanna has written and published a successful trilogy of young-adult fiction books called "The Rain Children." The launch party of her 3rd book is held in Bell Corner Bookshop, and Lucy is put in charge of planning the event by Mrs. Smith.
- Type 2: The "Apple Trio" (aka Lucy, Joanna, and Walt) are all fans of a TV show called "
Detective Mystic," about a supernaturally-empowered detective investigating the murder of her husband. They're very invested in the love triangle between the titular detective, her current partner on the force, and the private investigator who is an old friend. (Joanna ships Detective Mystic and her partner, Walt ships Detective Mystic and her old friend, while Lucy wants all three to end up in a polyamorous relationship.)
- Shout-Out: The "Out Of The Frying Pan" cooking show is clearly inspired by Cutthroat Kitchen.
- Verbal Tic: Conveyed through speech bubbles, but Meyer tends to elongate vowels. This tendency increases when he's flustered, anxious, or, as shown in an example from Episode 99, drunk:Meyer Oh maaan. It's been an entire year, and nooothing's changed. Thaaat's terrifying.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final chapters cut to three years, showing how the cast is now doing:
- Lucy now co-owns the Bell Corner Book Store and has renovated the place to include a bakery and coffee bar named Bellflower. She's still together with Graham, who's hair has gone back to its original color.
- Meyer and Clementine, now a couple, work at Bellflower.
- Jacobi's channel has reached ten million subscribers and has published a new cookbook.
- Johanna is working on her second trilogy.
- Chef Bartlett had graduated somewhere from unknown and got a degree.
- Frank has married a woman named Amadine,
- Olive and Thomas are getting married soon, and they're a bit overwhelmed on how their loved ones are planning their wedding.
- Madeline and Sherry have tied the knot as well, which had a very odd bridal party.
- Colby and Paloma are working as part -time baristas at Gourmet Hound to replace Clementine.
- Younger Than They Look: Graham (by Lucy).
