Culinary Renegade

The protagonist of Culinary Renegade, Richard King, is an upstanding citizen and a former restaurateur extraordinaire. He was forced to permanently close his restaurant, Belvedere, in the summer of 2020 due to the chaos and turmoil caused by the “perfect storm”. The malevolent storm witnessed the convergence of the fluctuating COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the Black Lives Matter movement’s often violent protest disruptions, and the unabridged societal anger towards police.

  Richard soon re-emerges to enter the hospitality business in the employ of an ambitious entrepreneur from Los Angeles, who is opening a new boutique hotel with multiple colorful restaurants and bars. However, Richard soon realizes that he has innocently become involved in several illegal ventures, which initially he brushed off as slight infractions of the law, but as time passes, the crimes become more sinister and his involvement more entangled.

  The mysterious Muse Hotel gradually unveils layers of dark secrets and schemes that Richard and his loyal right-hand man, Wheels, and close colleague, Chef Mo, could ever fathom. Sucked into the quagmire of a horrifying abyss of underground activities, the threesome struggle to find a way to extract themselves from the hotel before it is too late.

  Culinary Renegade a fiction-thriller, also explores and offers a peek into the proliferation of the real underworld activities unleashed by the crisis of the 2020 pandemic and beyond, as the hospitality industry was shaken to its very core.