Deep Dish

Deep Dish is Mary Kay Andrews's 2008 novel, a comic contemporary romance set in the world of Atlanta cooking television. Gina Foxton is the host of a successful local cooking show on Georgia public television, with a long term boyfriend who is also her producer and a steady viewership for her sweet southern recipes. Her professional world is upended when the network announces that her show is being canceled to make way for a new cooking series fronted by Tate Moody, a rugged Tennessee outdoorsman whose show is built around hunting and grilling in the wild.

When the network decides to settle which host should get the new national slot through a televised cooking competition between Gina and Tate, the two of them are forced into a week of forced proximity on a remote Georgia island where neither has the upper hand. The romantic chemistry develops in the way the genre demands, with Gina and Tate slowly figuring out that the tension between them might not just be professional, while the cooking competition itself provides the scaffolding for the comic situations Andrews handles so well.

Mary Kay Andrews writes the kind of southern contemporary fiction that prioritizes warmth, humor, and a sense of place over heavy drama. The Atlanta and coastal Georgia settings are rendered with affection and specific detail, the food writing is clearly the work of someone who actually knows southern cooking, and the supporting cast around Gina and Tate gives the novel additional energy beyond the central pairing. Andrews has a real ear for southern dialogue and her comic timing has been honed across many novels.

For longtime Mary Kay Andrews fans, Deep Dish is a comfortable read that delivers what her catalogue promises. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style and to the contemporary southern fiction territory she has been working in for many years. Readers who enjoy Karen White, Patti Callahan, Adriana Trigiani, or Dorothea Benton Frank will find familiar pleasure here. The cooking competition framing gives the book a slightly more specific setup than some of her standalones, which helps it stand out within her larger catalogue.