User:FlamingReed/sandbox

Gourmet Hound is an on-going webtoon on Line Webtoon written and illustrated by Robyn Leehama, an indie creator based in Hawaii. Gourmet Hound was originally posted on Tapas on June 30, 2017 but moved to Line Webtoon on December 3, 2017 as a featured webtoon, and has been ongoing ever since.

Plot and setting
Gourmet Hound follows a 25-year-old woman named Lucy who has a phenomenal sense of taste and smell. After realizing that her favourite French restaurant, Dimanche, changed its owner and staff, she sets out in search for the chef who gave her that "perfect taste."

With a chance run-in with the co-owners of Gourmet Hound, who happen to be former chefs at Dimanche, Lucy quickly discovers the unsettling reason to why the French restaurant changed its staff. With her new discovery, Lucy not only sets out to find that "perfect taste" but also tries to reunite the former chefs together as they once were.

Main characters
Lucy Fuji

Lucy Fuji is a 25-year-old woman who has an incredible sense of taste and smell she inherited from her father and grandfather. Lucy is also deceptively strong compared to her petite stature. Since high school, she works part-time at the Smiths' "Bell Corner Bookstore." After accidentally damaging the door to the Gourmet Hound cafe, she becomes a part-time cafe worker to repay for the repair costs. Lucy used to live with her grandmother, Lynn Fuji, as a result of her parents' early death. After her grandmother died, Lucy moved in with Joanna. Her grandmother owned a cooking school called "Cornflower Blue Culinary School" located beside Dimanche, which Lucy inherited after her grandmother's death. However, financial issues arose soon after and the building was sold. Lucy knew Chef Bartlett, the former owner and executive chef at Dimanche, when she was younger because he was her grandmother's best friend and best student. However, after her grandmother's death and funeral, Chef Bartlett disappeared. At 19 years old, she found the "perfect taste" while accompanying her grandmother for dinner at Dimanche. She doesn't remember what dish it was or who the chef was. The only way she can find the "perfect taste" is with her sense of taste and smell. After obtaining the list of former Dimanche chefs, she sets out to find the chefs in order to taste their dishes. Her name is associated with the apple of the same name, fuji.

Graham Ramos

Graham Ramos is a 29-year-old chef at Gourmet Hound and co-owns the cafe with Brie. He first worked at Dimanche with Brie at the age of 16 as a dishwasher. While driving home one evening, after a late shift at Dimanche, Graham got into a car accident that damaged his cribriform plate. The accident resulted in him losing his sense of smell. With the loss of his sense of smell, he eventually left Dimanche as it became too difficult for him to continue his cooking career. Graham became the co-owner of Gourmet Hound, when Brie came to him for help. Lucy gave Graham the nickname "gramps" for having white-bleached hair. Graham dyed his hair white so that his brother could lend him money to help finance Gourmet Hound. Graham has one older sister, Laura, and one older brother, Benedict. He likes dogs and has a dog named Lemon. Its name is associated with lemons, the fruit. Graham also likes instructive cooking shows, but he dislikes spiders and competitive cooking shows. His name is associated with graham crackers.

Gourmet Hound staff
Brie Malik

Brie Malik is a 30-year-old chef and co-owner of Gourmet Hound. She likes true crime shows and watching people enjoy their food, but she dislikes indecisiveness and being made to run. Brie is usually seen wearing a hijab. At 16 years old, she worked at Dimanche as a dishwasher with Graham. Later on, she was promoted to the role of a pâtissière and became one of Charlotte Nguyen's protégés. When Chef Bartlett showed her the Gourmet Hound property, Brie loved the location and immediately declined Charlotte's apprenticeship opportunity abroad to fulfil her goal of opening her own place specializing in caffeinated beverages and pastries. As the apprenticeship opportunity was for both her and Heath, who she was close to during her time at Dimanche, Brie's choice of abandoning the offer a week before departure left her relationship with Heath strained. The two later reconnected after Heath opened his gourmet bakery near Gourmet Hound. Brie's family is from Singapore and her name is associated with brie, the cheese.

John Clementine

John Clementine, also known simply as Clementine, is a 24-year-old barista at Gourmet Hound. He is from Hawaii but moved to fulfil his passion for coffee. He likes his fun surname and going to museums, but he dislikes people who are taller than him and people who make fun of the way other people drink their coffee. During his college days, Clementine worked at the Roastery that supplied coffee to Dimanche. He left the Roastery when Brie invited him to work at Gourmet Hound. He enjoyed Dimanche's atmosphere so much that he accepted Brie's invitation because he wanted to be in the same environment like Dimanche used to be. His name is associated with the fruit, clementine.

Lucy's friends
Joanna McIntosh

Joanna McIntosh, also known as Jojo, is Lucy's best friend since college. The two are currently roommates. She is a 25-year-old young-adult novelist. She comes from an upper-class family. She has a younger brother and a butler. It is revealed she is transgender. Her name is associated with mcintosh apples.

Walter Smith

Walter Smith, also known as Walt, is Lucy's best friend. The two have known each other since they were 16 years old because his mother, Ophelia Smith, owns the "Bell Corner Bookstore" that Lucy works at, but the two did not become friends until college. Walter has two mothers: Ophelia and Alice Smith. Walter is a 24-year-old astrophysics graduate student who is obsessed with sweets. His name is associated with green granny smith apples.

Former Dimanche staff
Olive Raleigh

Olive Raleigh is a 35-year-old executive chef (chef de cuisine) at "The Leaping Hare." She previously worked at Dimanche for eight years and is often seen in flashbacks taking care of Graham and Brie. She has a younger brother named Quincy and an older sister named Pepper. At a young age, the job of cooking in her family's household fell onto Olive because her parents were not always around, her sister could not cook safely and her brother was too young to take the job. As she quickly learns different recipes and particular preferences of each of her family members, she discovers her skills and talent in cooking especially after her sister expresses how much she misses Olive's cooking when she was away from home. Her name is associated with olives.

Heath Nguyen

Heath Nguyen is Madeleine's little brother. He is also the son of the, now retired, world-renowned pâtissière and former head pastry chef at Dimanche, Charlotte Nguyen. He opened a gourmet bakery called "Cosmos Bakery" after apprenticing in France for half a year. He scouted Anise, Meyer and Yuzuru (Yuzu) from a pastry school to form the staff for his bakery. Heath used to work at Dimanche with Brie as a pâtissière but had cut ties with her when she decided not to go abroad with him for the apprenticeship. After opening his bakery in the same plaza as Gourmet Hound, the two reconciled by clearing their misunderstandings. His name is associated with heath, the candy bar.

Madeleine Nguyen

Madeleine Nguyen is Heath's older sister and Charlotte's daughter. She used to be a culinary chef at Dimanche but left and co-opened a gourmet catering business with Sherry, another former chef at Dimanche. She is usually seen arguing in flashbacks of when she was working at Dimanche. Her name is associated with madeleines, also known as petite madeleine, a cake from France.

Development and reception
In the midst of her success with her first webtoon, Flowerpot, Leehama also uploads Gourmet Hound onto Tapas. In early 2017, Leehama began to actively upload the two webtoons at the same time onto Tapas and onto Line Webtoon: Discover.

After its release on Tapas and on Line Webtoon, Gourmet Hound received lots of love from many readers. One reader on the website Goodreads said: "Gourmet Hound is by far one of the most well designed comics I've read, and I mean designed in every aspect. The characters are well rounded with different personalities that are realistic as well as unique, and they manage to form an instant connection with the reader." With its great reception, this resulted in Line Webtoon giving Leehama the opportunity to have Gourmet Hound be a featured webtoon. With this opportunity, Flowerpot was put on hiatus to keep up with the uploading schedule for Gourmet Hound set by Line Webtoon. As of December 2018, the webtoon has been ranked in the top 10 most popular webtoons within the male demographic and the drama genre.

Leehama's artwork was first supported by her fans through the Tapas platform and patreon, but she recently moved to Ko-Fi, another crowd-sourcing platform that lets supporters fund the artist the equivalent price of a coffee, primarily to fund for Gourmet Hound.