What if Anthony Bourdain were a twentysomething London woman with a libido as big as her appetite? Meet the “Slutty Cheff.” Known for her cult-followed Instagram account, the anonymous chef has written a memoir, Tart, which leaves you hungry for more. More food. More sex. More Slutty Cheff.
We were supposed to meet at one of my favorite restaurants in London, but she asks if I can come to her favorite instead, because she has a “weird thing” with the chef at the one I suggested. Already, she’s living up to my high expectations.
Tart is about toxic relationships, but the real love interest is kitchens. The Slutty Cheff grew up in England in a middle-class family. (“The only thing worse than a posh girl is a posh girl pretending she’s not posh,” she says.) After college, she had a corporate job before going to cooking school and joining the London restaurant scene. As she writes in her book, “I used to be an office worker wearing tight arse-hugging jumpsuits, not baggy chef trousers designed specifically for men, tailored so there is ample space for my non-existent balls and little-to-no space for my child bearing hips and plump arse.”
She started gaining an Instagram following and eventually caught the attention of British Vogue, where she now has a column about often being the only woman in restaurant kitchens and her struggles with mental health.
If cooking is the protagonist of the Slutty Cheff’s writing, men are a close second, as she recalls her dalliances in glorious, sordid detail. A number of the men that feature in her book are chefs, and I wonder if the chef she avoided for our interview was one of them, but she insists she’d have no problem seeing any of those men face-to-face—and that, in fact, I might have needed to “hold her back” in the case of a run-in. And she’s not worried about them reading Tart, although she doubts many will (apart from one whom she refers to lovingly as “Top Knot”). “If they were dicks and I’m writing about them being dicks,” she says, “then they shouldn’t have been dicks.”
Even her current boyfriend is a chef. So do chefs make better lovers? She thinks men who have a craft do: “Having to be precise lends itself to the patience needed to learn what another person needs.” And people who work in kitchens have specific advantages, namely that “doing a job that’s all about serving others makes them more likely to give head.” But then, she adds, “loads of them are egotistical c-nts.”
Having a boyfriend does present a challenge for a woman used to sharing intimate details of her dating life to her nearly 50,000 followers. “It was such a boner killer when I started seeing him,” she says. But he’s gotten used to it. “If he had any issues [with it], I wouldn’t be with him.”
For the time being, writing has replaced working in kitchens. When I see the Slutty Cheff, she’s in the midst of planning an elaborate scavenger hunt across the city for chapters that ended up being too raunchy to make it into the book.
“I do really miss [cooking],” she says. “There will come a time where I’m yearning for it. But I’m not there.”
Flora Gill is a London-based writer
