A Place for Your Perfect Meal
What kind of order would complete my perfect meal?

The cover, overflowing with strawberry desserts, doesn’t overwhelm with excess—it entices with beauty. As you open the book, you’re met with a blank order form and the open doors of Restaurant Pink, a place promising “the perfect meal.” But beyond the charming entrance lies a strange dining hall, filled with even stranger guests.
With her signature delicate colored pencil work, Lee Ji hyeon draws a whimsical pink-hued interior full of ornate dishes, intricate decorations, and delicious-looking food. Yet beneath the surface, there’s an eerie tension. The guests behave absurdly, and their requests—scribbled on surreal order slips—are bizarre, contradictory, and strangely familiar.

Ji Hyeon, known for her wordless picture books that leave room for open interpretation, now brings her characters into sharp focus with text that feels all too real. The menu items may be plausible, but the demands are not. Each diner delivers lines that reflect their exaggerated personalities, and as we peek into their “perfect meals,” we begin to see what they truly crave: the desire to have it all, to be ahead of everyone else, to appear flawless in the eyes of others.

Beneath the sugar-coated surface lies a web of insecurity—driven by mistrust, superiority, or the inability to even know what one really wants. These extreme scenes may feel surreal, but it’s only the setting that’s fantastical. The attitudes of the characters—trapped in cycles of endless desire—feel unsettlingly familiar.
Perhaps Restaurant Pink is not a faraway place, but a reflection of something closer: a space within each of us where our own desires linger.