Pleasure in Abundance: A Guest Post by Slutty Chef

A raw and real memoir about self-discovery, passion for cooking and the unfiltered pleasures of everyday life from a bold, sex-positive voice of London’s culinary world. Read on for an exclusive essay from Slutty Chef on writing Tart.

Tart is about my time working in professional kitchens as a female chef. But it is just as much about living in London, having sex, falling in and out of love, and living impulsively in your twenties.

I am a greedy person at my core, I have always sought out pleasure in abundance. As a young woman, food and sex became my two favorite sources of pleasure, so when I started working as a chef and those two worlds collided, I became enamored by life.

I started writing about being a chef because I was mesmerized by everything in the four walls of a kitchen; by the way service worked, by the shining stainless steel, the real danger, the chef mentality, the sexual tension, the seasoning, the labor, the love and the way my apron synched around my waist compared to the male chefs. I felt like I was privy to a secret society in London that nobody knew about and I wanted to share it, so I uploaded my stories to an anonymous Instagram account called Slutty Cheff.

I had never written properly. I wasn’t good at school and I wasn’t good at reading either, but I have always kept a diary. I wrote and I wrote with all the free time I had. Like my diary, the content was explicit, sex obsessed and self-absorbed, which explains my desire for anonymity. I wrote long Instagram captions, accompanied with pictures of staff food, sharp knives, bloody carcasses or grease-smudged selfies where I anonymized my face by covering it with a burger emoji.

One day, one of my followers who worked at a literary agency showed my writing to her boss who then invited me in for a meeting. This is where I was asked the fateful question: do you want to write a book? 

Fuck yes. 

But then when I started writing Tart I tripped over myself a little. When I am not loud and obnoxious, I am self-loathing and self-deprecating. My experience in professional kitchens pales in comparison to the likes of Anthony Bourdain who wrote the best kitchen memoir of all time. I didn’t feel qualified enough as a chef, or skilled enough as a writer. The world of hospitality runs on carthorse-esque workers; sturdy hard-working people who have given a copious amount of hours of their life to the graft. I was just some middle-class girl with minimal years’ experience under her belt. I felt like an unworthy, inadequate phony.

But then I started writing the book and realized my ignorance was good. It is where my deliriously romantic perspective came from. My unabashed infatuation with this new salacious world was what made me want to write, and what others seemingly enjoyed. I accepted that Tart would not tell tales of impressive hard-earned achievements, nor would it feature polished recipes: Tart would be about the fuck ups, the vulnerable visceral moments of cooking, the impulsive sex, the blind romance of youth, the cities lights, the fatty meaty meals and the erotic mistakes.

My tempestuous mental health means that I tend to romanticize things. I search for the beauty in everything, even the shit moments. I think this is what Tart is about. Initially my editors wanted me to write in past tense but I said no. Past tense would suggest that I had some sort of retrospective wise conclusion to the food and sex events I was experiencing, but I didn’t and I still don’t. I wrote about the men I was sleeping with while I was still getting over the heartbreak. I wrote about the meals I was eating while I was digesting them. I wrote about the busy dinner services on the bus home. I wanted the story to feel present, in the moment, impulsive, hot, steamy and all-consuming. That is how kitchens feel, that is how sex feels and that is how living in London feels. 

Me and my closest friend share every minute detail of our sex lives, of our careers and our fuck ups. Sometimes the sex debrief with your friends is even more thrilling than the sex itself. That is what I want the book to feel like. Irrespective of gender, class, race, occupation or geography, I want it to feel like you are hearing an honest, entertaining story, in far too much detail, from your mate at the pub.