Adib Khorram’s first novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay, was the kind of YA sensation that was everywhere, plugging directly into the teenage zeitgeist. Since then, he’s written several picture books and other YA novels. Khorram rediscovered his love of romance during the pandemic, saying, “Like a lot of people, I was very depressed, and I thought I should read romance to become happy again.” Inspired by his reading, the 40-year-old Khorram wrote his first adult romance, I’ll Have What He’s Having (Forever, Aug. 27), which our starred review called a “warm, spicy romance” and “a love letter to Persian food, good wine, and queer community.” We spoke to the author via Zoom; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a jack-of-all-trades, writing everything from picture books to YA novels to adult romance. Why are you so committed to writing, as it says on your website, “fiction for readers of all ages?”

My own experience with literature growing up was that sometimes I was ahead of what my reading level was supposed to be, sometimes I was behind it. Even as I first started writing, people would ask me why I wrote for teenagers, and I would always say, “Because adults are boring.” Maybe adults aren’t boring, maybe I was reading boring books. But as my career has evolved, and as my own artistic sensibilities have evolved, I just hope that any reader, no matter their age, can pick up a book of mine and see some glimmer of themselves in it, whether it’s because they’re Iranian, or because they’re queer, or because they really like food and wine.

Tell us about the new book.

I’ll Have What He’s Having is a “mistaken identity” to “friends with benefits” romance about Farzan, a gay Iranian American millennial who sort of accidentally takes over his parents’ Iranian restaurant, and David, a Black millennial man studying for his master sommelier certification. After they hook up, they decide that they probably shouldn’t keep hooking up because they want different things out of life. Farzan comes back to David and says, “Hey, I don’t know how to run a restaurant. Can you help me learn?” And David says, “Sure, I need a study buddy for this very onerous wine test. Why don’t you help me? Surely we won’t bone a lot and fall in love along the way.” What could possibly go wrong? And of course, spoiler alert, things go wrong and they bone a lot and fall in love.

Farzan loves cooking but has bitten off more than he can chew—see what I did there?—when he volunteers to take over the family bistro after his parents retire. What does he learn about the difference between cooking for pleasure and running a restaurant?

We came of age in a time when there was pressure to monetize every single thing in our lives that gave us joy—whether that was making art (Oh, you should sell it online, right?) or making food (Well, you should be cooking for a living)—and we turned the things we love into jobs. I certainly could not have predicted that I would be an author 10 years ago; I had to reevaluate my own relationship to writing and creating. For Farzan, the skill set of creating art or creating food is not necessarily the same skill set as running a business, and that’s a rude slap in the face for a lot of us.

David, on the other hand, has quite a bit of studying to do for his master sommelier exams. What will readers learn about the wine business that might surprise them? 

I love both wine and tea, and I also love coffee, but only espresso. Sometimes, I’ll add half a sugar cube to an espresso—I’ll taste it first and see if it needs it. A cup of tea or coffee I prepare for myself is representative of a singular moment in my day, while the winemaker is capturing a season, a temporal expression of life we can never have again. And I think there’s a certain magic to that that’s beautiful. I love that. Throughout the editorial process, I kept paring back so many of the nitty-gritty details about the test itself, and adding more about what this particular wine-tasting experience was like for Farzan and David. As someone who drinks a lot of wine, I wouldn’t say I had to do a whole lot of research about drinking wine, but I did do a lot of research about the master sommelier certification. I’m less interested in people learning about that process than I am in sharing my love of the magic of wine.

David thinks that “Michelin-star restaurants attract Michelin-star assholes,” while Farzan’s family restaurant is important because it’s the only Iranian restaurant and a vital pillar of the community. Through these different lenses, what is your book saying about the current foodie or restaurant landscape of America?

The way Farzan comes at it is the way of people in diaspora, which is that when people come to the United States, one of the first things they bring with them is their food. Many of the first businesses that immigrants open in the United States are restaurants. And throughout my life, I’ve seen the way that Persian restaurants are hubs of Persian communities. And I’ve experienced the loss of restaurants here in Kansas City and the way that has fractured the community. I think that’s a very true experience for a lot of people in the diaspora.

As far as David’s view on fine dining and the kinds of people it attracts, I think so much culture in the United States exists in the tension between the highbrow and the lowbrow. Certainly, in the romance genre, we see how little respect we get for beautiful, meaningful works of art, purely because people think that humans finding connection with each other isn’t literary enough. In some ways, part of David’s journey is learning that maybe appealing to the highest common denominator is not as soul fulfilling as he thought it was. David actually comes to wine from a burned-out career in finance, which was probably full of that same Michelin star energy, and so in some ways, it’s also emblematic of the larger cultural conversation about what we give value to culturally and what we give value to in our own lives.

Do you think that there’s a natural affinity between writing romance and writing about food? What do they have in common, or how do they complement each other? 

One thing is that food is sensual and love is sensual; the language of desire, the language we use to talk about falling in love, the language we use to talk about sex and wanting other people and body parts, can be similar. People talk about having “foodgasms” when they have a particularly beautiful culinary experience, or being hungry for someone when they feel desire. In Persian culture, instead of saying “bon appétit,” or, you know, “good meal,” we use the noosh-e jān, which means “May it nourish your soul.” And I think that perfectly encapsulates both what happens when you offer food to someone and what happens when you fall in love with someone—that person nourishes your soul.

Jennifer Prokop co-hosts the romance podcast Fated Mates. Follow @JenReadsRomance on X.