Tart by Slutty Cheff: Want to have great SEX? Find yourself a CHEF!

Before she started working at a restaurant, the writer Slutty Cheff – not, oddly enough, her real name – had a series of mind-numbing office jobs in London.

She dreaded going to work, even when she struck up an illicit romance with a colleague that ticked all the usual boxes (he was Irish, more senior than her and they had sex on the office photocopier).

Then, as she recounts in her bracingly filthy memoir Tart, she decided to sack off her corporate life and become a chef. She did a cookery course, where she got bored learning to make Christmas cakes and mini quiches. And finally, she secured a trial at a hip north London restaurant that she was drawn to because of a picture of the head chef on the website (distinctly hunky).

Arriving for her first shift, she was plunged into a ‘thick, smoggy, oily’ new world of roaring men, flashing knives and searing ovens.

The changing room alone – where the all-male team stripped into their chef gear – was a vision of what was to come: a mess of beer cans, lighters, rancid Birkenstocks, dirty aprons and empty bags of drugs.

On the loo in the corner, a sign read: ‘If ur gonna take a s**t, then f*****g flush’.

The restaurant’s head chef – not the hunk he’d appeared online, but a ‘short, stooped man with a receding hairline’ – immediately forgot her name, though he noticed her talent. Soon she was being allowed to remove bones from fish with a pair of tweezers, aware that anything she might miss could end up lodged in the throat of a customer.

Tart is a coming-of-age story, and its two arenas are the kitchen and the bedroom.

Nothing, for the writer, is more alluring than burly chefs who spend their days heaving sacks of flour and handling beautiful cuts of meat.

After one encounter with a chef lover, she notes with rapture that she can still feel the imprint of his hands on her bum, ‘like I’m a Wagyu cow and he’s my keeper’.

Chefs, she believes after doing much research into the subject, don’t have sex like normal men: they are more carnal and erotic. The more she tries them out, the less she likes the idea of going back to her old diet of ‘mundane sex’ with normal men.

Between the sexual escapades, what is mainly apparent is just how demanding being a chef is.

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The writer routinely pulls 60-hour weeks, all of it on her feet, bar the occasional break for a cigarette by the bins.

As she observes, you can’t have a bad day when you work at a restaurant: customers are waiting and don’t care if you’ve just been dumped. You can’t have a quiet afternoon with your laptop or hide behind your phone; turn up five minutes late and you’ll get yelled at.

Within weeks, the writer is noticing the effects of her new life on her body. Her bottom, honed from 20,000 steps a day, looks like it’s had a butt lift, her arms are covered in burns, and her hands are flecked with nicks from chopping under pressure.

During one hectic shift, she slices her finger but doesn’t have time to deal with it: she pulls on some plastic gloves, which soon start filling with blood.

When she’s done for the day and unties her hair from its bun, it stays on top of her head like some kind of ‘abstract statue moulded in grease’.

The book is satisfyingly full of chef jargon. ‘Check on’ means an order’s come through to the kitchen; being a ‘cowboy’ means cutting corners; ‘going down’ means panicking under the sheer volume of dishes required.

During one nail-biting shift over the Christmas period, while she’s working on hot starters, she finds herself going down as order after order appears on her check rail. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t keep up.

She’s offered help but is too proud to take it; she stops communicating with the chefs around her and can’t make sense of the orders coming in.

She’s in chef hell – too paralysed to do anything other than wipe surfaces rather dazedly – but slowly, agonisingly, she climbs her way out, and starts being able to cook again.

Unlike the front-of-house staff, chefs tend not to see the people they’re busting a gut to please. But in the kitchen, differences in customers make themselves felt.

Those who are late for a table are annoying, the writer confirms; and food critics and media types are the most entitled.

Many make obnoxious requests – they’ll ask to be served a different cut of the same animal or to have a long break between each course to take a call; they’ll request that an entirely dairy pudding be magically turned vegan.

The worst crime you can commit if you’re at the last table in the restaurant is to hang around – as you dilly-dally, an entire team is seeing their hopes for the night implode.

The writer clearly thrives in the ultra-masculine environment she has chosen, but this doesn’t come without challenges.

After a determined campaign of creepiness by one unwanted chef – he strokes her bottom, then grins – she doesn’t think of calling him out for it.

Another chef continually tells her to raise her voice, though she knows it’s loud enough. He just wants her, she says, ‘to be a d**k-swinger like him’.

But the writer vividly conveys why she keeps going back. Nothing can match the drama of a kitchen, the camaraderie, the fear and the triumph of a dish done to perfection.

There are quiet moments, too: when all that needs to be done is cutting peaches for a salad, or pulling apart pieces of ‘warm, tender meat’ to make rillettes, ‘sneaking little bits into your cheeks as you go’.