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 by a young woman who writes under the name Slutty Cheff. As she explains in Tart, "There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex," and throughout the book she has frequent large helpings of both.
As Tart begins, the author, who left the corporate world for cooking school, is about to do a trial shift at a celebrated London restaurant. She's thrilled to land a chef job, but the intensity and the 60-hour weeks gradually break her, and she quits after seven months. She escapes to Cornwall and takes a lower-level, part-time restaurant job but grows bored. After she returns to London, she lands another high-stakes, physically punishing chef gig, and life is once again blissful ("I love London and I love my job and I love my roommate and I love my grown-up life"), until it isn't.
Slutty Cheff is conscious of her status as the lone female chef in each London restaurant's kitchen, and she knows that this invites a feminist reading of her life, although her relationship with feminism is still developing ("I wondered, for a moment, if that was liberating or highly demeaning"). Tart's best sections are Slutty Cheff's documentary-style descriptions of herself at work making kitchen messes that are for readers to enjoy and, mercifully, the author to clean up. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer