Nancy Drew Mystery Stories #117: Mystery on the Menu (1994)

George and Bess apparently love watching cooking shows and reading cooking magazines. When one ran a contest for an original recipe for Valentine's Day, they had a bet. George entered a recipe for raspberry chiffon cake that her grandmother once made and won, so Bess owes her 20 bucks. Three winners get free dessert cooking lessons from some major cooking school. Since anyone else can sign up and pay for the same lessons, Nancy and Bess decide to go along too.

They quickly meet Sophie, the woman who runs the cooking school, and her head administrator, Baird. The girls also meet Paul and Lila, the other two winners, and Gloria, a woman who signed up for the classes, as well as Regis and Alicia, the two instructors for the classes. Regis has his own restaurant in NYC, while Alicia has a restaurant in New Orleans. Not only does Regis make it clear that he dislikes Alicia, but he also brings two yappy little dogs with him.

It doesn't take long before Nancy discovers that Paul is a terrible cook. He keeps messing up in class and doesn't really seem to have an interest in cooking. Gloria reveals that she's actually the author of several popular cookbooks and signed up for the lessons as a refresher before publishing her next book.

Regis complains to the head chef that he absolutely must have a green side salad at dinner and cannot go without one. That same night, he passes out in the middle of dinner, and Nancy realizes that he was poisoned. Someone replaced the edible flowers in his salad with inedible ones that made him sick. When he comes back, he claims that Alicia did it because she hates him.

Alicia tells Nancy that Sophie needs a new head pastry instructor and plans on offering the job to either one of them, which is why Regis wants to make her look bad. Nancy then catches Lila in a closed off area of the school. Lila claims she loves architecture and was just checking out the floor, but when Nancy brings up an architecture term, Lila thinks it's something different and scurries away. It turns out that this area is an office where Sophie stores a bunch of recipes left behind by former chefs and workers.

Nancy then catches Lila outside in the greenhouse, and Lila makes a comment that makes it seem like she knows more about the property. It turns out that Lila's family were once really wealthy and built the mansion where the school is now. Her dad lost the house and all their family money because he gambled too much. She came back just to check out the house and when Nancy found her in the room, she was looking for the initials she carved into the floor of a guy she liked when she was a kid.

She also discovers that Gloria's books no longer sell and that the store in town even put the books on the clearance shelf. Gloria throws a fit when confronted but then sneaks into the closed off room and leaves with a folder. Nancy breaks into the woman's room and accesses her computer to find that Gloria stole the recipes to use in her next cookbook. She begs Nancy to keep her secret and even though she isn't happy about it, Nancy pretty much goes along with her.

While talking to Regis about who would want to harm him, someone sneaks into the room and hurls a knife at his head, which barely misses him. When Nancy finds Alicia's scarf left behind, he claims it's proof she wants him dead. Someone then puts an aerosol can in the oven, which Alicia preheats for class. The can explodes and blows the door off, nearly killing her too. Regis claims that she did it on purpose and wants to make it looks like she's also a victim.

After reading a newspaper article about one of the biggest cooking schools in the country shutting down, Nancy starts putting things together. She talks really loudly at dinner about how she lost one of her earrings and will be going into the basement to look for it. When she does, the lights go out because of a storm passing through, but not before she sees Paul in front of her, as in Paul, the guy who can't cook.

Paul winds up being the one behind everything. His dad is the administrator at the competing cooking school. Paul thought he could come in and sabotage this school, which would make people want to study with his dad. Before he could really get his plan going though, his dad announced plans to shut down his own school.

Paul winds up chasing Nancy all over the basement until she races outside. He then chases her down, but Regis' two dogs come of nowhere and attack him. While he's distracted, Nancy knocks him down and then punches him in the face, which makes him literally just sit down until Regis and some other guys come outside, carry him upstairs, and lock him in his room.

In the end, Sophie finds out that Baird was selling stories about the cooking school behind her back and trying to make it look like she was inept so he could take over. She never does find out about Gloria and the recipe thefts though. Regis bets Alicia that his Mississippi mud pie is better than hers, and they hold one last contest. The server brings him out a slice, he takes a bite, and then he declares that no one could make one better. That's when the server reveals that there was a mistake in the kitchen and that he actually ate Alicia's pie. Oops.

*If you had your own restaurant in a major city like NYC or New Orleans, why the hell would you want to move to the middle of nowhere and work as a cooking teacher? I can't picture any chef putting in the time to open a restaurant and then just giving it up.

*Lila is in her forties or around there, but Sophie says the house was a private home, then a boarding school, and something else before she bought it. Lila lived there until she was a teenager, so it really doesn't make sense that it would have been so many other things.

*George actually made a low fat and low calorie version of her grandmother's recipe, but I can't really see it beating all the hundreds of other recipes they got.

*Why is there even a room with a bunch of old recipes stored in it? This cooking school supposedly only opened five years ago, which isn't that long.

*Also, how does a cooking school develop such an impressive reputation in five years??? This school is supposedly so great and amazing that it has a waiting list, but schools that have decades of experience are closing down because no one wants to attend.

*Sophie explains that the school operates like a regular college and even has dorm rooms for its students. When they're on vacation, they use those rooms for students signing up for their shorter classes. That's nice and all, but wouldn't the students leave their stuff in their rooms while on vacation? I'd also like to know what vacation falls around the middle of February that lets them take a week off...