Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef

by Slutty Cheff

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

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.

An Instant Sunday Times (London) Bestseller
A New York Times Best Nonfiction Book of Summer 2025
A Vogue Best Book of 2025 So Far
A Service95 Must-Read Book of 2025

A hilarious, hot, and steamy account of coming of age in and out of the kitchen, from the anonymous chef and columnist, Slutty Cheff.

“It’s the two best things in the world: food and sex.”

When Slutty Cheff finds herself bored and fed-up with her 9–5 job in corporate marketing, she turns to the only thing that she really likes to do: cooking. So she quits her job, swaps emails for emulsions, and sets off to pursue her dreams of becoming a chef.

The world of London’s fine dining restaurants is so much more than she imagined: it’s more challenging, and more exciting too. There are the exhausting lows of sixty-hour work weeks in windowless kitchens, and the shock of stepping into the changing room as the only woman. There are the thrilling highs of a busy night, when service is running smoothly; electrifying run-ins with hot bartenders and even hotter chefs; and, always, the exhilaration of cycling hands-free through a city that is still sleeping, on a morning where anything can happen.

This is a story about searching for your purpose, and experiencing and embracing life to the fullest along the way. The pleasure and the chaos too...

An exquisite mix of raw Anthony Bourdain-style honesty with the sharp wit of Lena Dunham’s Girls, Tart is THE book for those who like to eat and f**k.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668070222
Publisher:	S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Slutty Cheff writes anonymously about sex, food, and being a woman in the restaurant world. She first started writing on her @SluttyCheff Instagram account where she posted stories anonymously while cooking full time in London restaurants. She now has her own column in British Vogue, has also written for The Sunday Times (London), and has been interviewed by the Financial Times, the Evening Standard (London), and Interview magazine.

Editorial Reviews

[A] sexy, frank, delectable memoir... One of the delights of Tart is a vivid, vicarious sense of being young and in love — with food, with sex, with life and, most of all, with London itself. Tart is a book about appetites, elegant and refined at times, at others visceral and heartfelt and crude. It’s a Rabelaisian romp, a dive into no-holds-barred gourmandise. But it’s also a serious work; despite her rollicking spirit, Slutty Cheff isn’t kidding around. Her real subject is the intersection of work and love, and what it means to have a true calling. Whether hers is writing, cooking or both remains to be seen, but I’ll gladly stick around to find out.” —The New York Times

“I devoured this book like a ravenous customer and I love it wildly. It’s the most visceral food and sex writing out there – utterly delicious and utterly new.” —Lena Dunham

“A young Anthony Bourdain which we haven’t seen in female food writing before—visceral, hedonistic and gutsy.” —Dolly Alderton

"A naughty romp... combining dysfunction and adversity with humor, ingenuity, glamour, grit and humanity." —The Wall Street Journal

“Tart is Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential meets Lena Dunham’s Girls, steaming with sweaty double shifts (in the kitchen and bedroom), devouring the city of London with a belly-deep sense of hunger. To be inhaled in one sitting.” —Vogue

“This memoir is a biting and hilarious romp through kitchens and adulthood from the anonymous British Vogue columnist behind @sluttycheff on Instagram. It’s a raw depiction of a young woman who ditches corporate work for the high-stakes kitchens of the fine-dining world.” —USA Today

“[Tart] leaves you hungry for more. More food. More sex. More Slutty Cheff.” —Air Mail

“There is one thing [Slutty Cheff] claims to desire even more than food: sex. Tart, her memoir, is a hedonistic tale of both [that] has been lauded as a feminine take on Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.” —The Economist

“Could there be a better summer book?... Tart was awesome, like smart, cool, edgy chick lit, and full of really delicious-sounding food. When it gets made into a TV show, I'm watching!” —Cat Marnell, New York Times Bestselling author of How to Murder Your Life

“If a 20-something, British Carrie Bradshaw narrated a London-set Kitchen Confidential, it might read something like Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef, an uproarious, unrepentantly lusty memoir.” —Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

2025-04-17
The anonymous kitchen maven, a minor celebrity in the U.K., recounts life in the service industry.

SC, let’s call her, opens her narrative by revisiting a tough time: depressed, jobless, living with her parents in her mid-20s, not having much luck in love or lust after having concluded a steamy office affair. (“Before I knew it, we were fucking on the photocopier like we were in a mainstream porn category.”) Then came an audition in a London kitchen, with hunky chefs and hormonally supercharged wait staff, and SC is in her element. The better parts of her book place her on the line, butterflying a mullet or firing a chop, where she’s actually cooking. The poorer parts are mostly charmless sexual encounters with partners such as a topknot-bedecked bartender who “reminded me of just how impactful a good shagathon can be on one’s sensibilities.” Sometimes SC’s narrative approaches literal food porn (“I can feel the imprint of his hands on my arse like I’m a Wagyu cow and he’s my keeper, massaging my body to relax my muscles”), but mostly it’s just tedious recitation. No demerits there, necessarily: Even Pauline Réage and Henry Miller grow tiresome after a while, but SC’s book doesn’t quite rise, beg pardon, to those literary heights. Moreover, SC, even more tediously, tends to preen in self-regard: “I’m the prize. He’s the piss on the pavement.” “I think only of myself and my wonderful body that works just fine, my nice mind and my fucking incredible hair.” And, with respect to that hand imprint, “Only I am of course a lot sexier than a cow; I’m more like a thoroughbred pony.” It’s enough to make a person go vegan, if not already.

If it’s sweaty sex you want, this has a few moments. If it’s sweaty chefs making wondrous grub, stick with Bourdain.

Kirkus Reviews