Presently, Slutty Cheff remains anonymous to her fans. She covers her face with a hamburger hat or emoji when she posts on Social Media. Cheff will continue this marketing ploy until she reaches 1 million followers. Slutty is about 944,100 followers away from her goal. She is close to giving hungry and thirsty fans and critics what they want. This includes revealing her face to match all the sex, food prep, and neurosis that becomes Slutty’s life. Her highly entertaining, soon to be adapted non-fiction narrative is TART: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef. In this issue of Bookisshh we’ll explore the stories behind the pages of this memoir. We will also uncover the secrets behind the hamburger mask of Slutty Cheff. We’ll also deep dive into her self-published manifesto The Unfiltered Life of Slutty Cheff by Slutty Cheff. Read this while it’s hot and enjoy!

Tart: The Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef is popularly referred to as a memoir. Yet, if you dig deeper into Simon and Schuster’s website, you will discover more details. By clicking on Marysue Rucci books, you will find that Tart is classified as “Nonfiction Narrative.” This means names can be changed, and parts can be left out or embellished for dramatic effect. In this case, a ton is left out. What is served within the pages is food and porn. Still, it is not entirely food porn and errs on the side of food and sexual neurotic fixations. Tart’s narrator, Slutty Cheff, uses a voice that expresses a raw serrated edginess toward any and everything that she encounters. Cheff employs lots of clever punning, sarcasm, and biting wit. Slutty takes her readers into the work stations, freezers, back alleys, and markets among London eateries. She educates them on culinary hierarchies and lingo. Slutty Cheff shows her readers how hard it is to exist in this world especially as female. Tart is a coming of age story both literally and figuratively within and among London’s fine dining scene.

When it comes to descriptions of sex and food, narrative foreplay includes long lists of paired unpredictable aromatic spices. Discussion involves lubricating fats and plump, clean, juicy proteins. Chef’s narrative employs slow patient sensual processes which really drive home the food, narrative experiences. As food transforms and arouses ones senses Cheff lures you in to linger, listen, taste, smell and touch. It’s kind of like a choose your own ecstasy and adventure. When Cheff and voyeurs return to work, there’s lots of kitchen shorthand and labels which explain kitchen stations, positions and hierarchy that structures a professional kitchen.

Readers feel in the mix as apprentices professionally and informally trained, battle it out over grills, pots and gastro-lab tools that are used, washed, and juggled as they’re tossed from hand to hand. Readers will dodge kitchen foodstuffs and wares as if they were like batons, spinning plates, and torches at a culinary circus. There is a lot of movement and interaction in those tight spaces. The cramped kitchen hustle results in edible works of art for diners seated eagerly at candlelit, cloth-covered tables. Patrons wait eagerly for their curated menu selection like thirsting contemplative vampires drinking from sparkling crystal highballs and goblets clutching highly polished, razor-sharp cutlery with their greedy hands and insatiable appetites.

Tart has been compared to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Candace Bushnell’s Sex in the City. It probably leans more toward Bourdain. Like Kitchen Confidential, Tart brings sex and food into the walk-in freezer and then returns post coital protagonists back to work in the kitchen and right back to hot starters and pastry stations. Both narratives serve up scenes involving drugs and alcohol in the pub loo post-shift. Don’t rinse and repeat. In Sex in the City, the best parallel is the central female character. Both Carrie and Slutty are incapable of sustaining relationships with men and readers learn very little about both main characters deeper family backstories. What both narratives do have in common is tons of spontaneous sex which happens between courses and chapters. Really Tart is Chef Porn—loads of hurried sex, bacchanalia on steroids, food porn visceral detail and unquenchable craving because there is no love—ONLY HUNGER…

New York Times book critic, Kate Christiansen takes an academic approach to Tart.. Christiansen implies that Slutty Cheff is using a Rabelaisian approach:

“Tart is a book about appetites, elegant and refined at times, at others visceral, 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 topic is the intersection of work and love, and what it means to have a true calling.”

Did Christiansen read this book? If Christiansen read carefully, she’d throw in even more academic analytical gadgetry. This author and reviewer would mention Freud and fixations, or Jung and Electra complexes. She reference Dionysus or Bacchus from Greek and Roman mythology. She mention Emile Zola, Marcel Prost, and Anais Nin. These authors are from various works in literature that explore pleasure in food and/or sex.

Francois Rabelais will lead you to religious and philosophical meditations on food. These meditations focus on gastronomical pleasure. Still, this material errs on sterility and is a total departure from Tart. I have spent time on Tart reading, listening, and DMing with Slutty Cheff. This NYT Book Review does little more than self-advertise. It creates highbrow distance from an average reader. This piece is mildly insightful. It reveals a wee bit of information for you and leaves your curiosity growling like a hungry tummy in need of something more. In this case—insightful details. And pretty much every other feature I’ve read that covers Tart does similarly. Let’s step away from an “intellectual” approaches because Slutty Cheff does in her book and let’s explore Lena Dunham and Slutty Cheff’s connection and professional partnership.

Lena Dunham and Slutty Cheff have interesting things in common. Both of these figures are unselfconscious in discussing and exploring sex. Sex is almost a character shifting from minor to major in their narrative formats. Both Dunham and Cheff have represented women being powerful, hungry or and struggling with control within their personal and/or fictional narratives. Both have subjected themselves to feeling debased by male counterparts during sexual encounters. Both Dunham annd Slutty Cheff excavate their neuroses and body parts known and unknown. Somehow there’s an audience for this? I guess this material provides entertainment for a specific kinds of taste—radical feminist and neurotic kink? I don’t know I kind of raced through those sections…

Dunham has a robust IMDB profile. She has published several memoirs and written features for The New Yorker, British Vogue, and Interview Magazine. Slutty Cheff has two books to her credit—Tart and a mystery manifesto (discussed later). Cheff has also published articles and columns in The Sunday Times, British Vogue and Interview Magazine. A most significant commonality both Dunham and Cheff share is that they have both endured and survived cancel culture—for different reasons though…

Why was Slutty Cheff canceled? Well don’t read Tart to find out because Cheff doesn’t share those details in her non-fiction narrative. You’ll have to read her manifesto, The Unfiltered Life of Slutty Cheff by Slutty Cheff. This will teach you why and how Cheff was canceled. Only now you’re not capable of reading this mind-blowing expose. This is due to Cheff recently taking it down from Amazon. It’s where I discovered her manifesto when I wanted a digital copy of Tart and searched by author (see picture) and stumbled upon her manifesto instead. I bought and read her manifesto twice and still retain a copy regardless of its recent removal from Amazon‘s website.

Cheff’s cancellation was more noble than Dunham’s reasons by cancel culture. From YouTube Instagram historic posts and a few tabloid-ish magazines I learned that Dunham was canceled for reasons including racial tone deafness, unfiltered personal and sexualdisclosures, alleged child abuse, and insensitive displays of wealth and privilege. Cheff’s cancellation occurred due to actions she took during her mission to demystify Wellness influencer frauds as the dangerous predators they are that she observed during the pandemic while she tried to promote health and delicious consumption. Apparently wellness influencers, organized and ganged up on her and basically got her and or another chef mentioned in her manifesto canceled. According to later parts of The Unfiltered Story Cheff aimed to “democratize” food in every sector. She desired to level the food field first with manufacturing and extend to stores, restaurants, and elite systems. Her goal was for everyone to eat with dignity, health, style, and affordability.

Cheff’s culture cancellation happened during the pandemic. At that time, people were cooking at home. Pantries were notably bare, and stores were closed or nonexistent. I have had brief conversations, via DM on Instagram and disclosed to Cheff that I read her manifesto. I also dove down way too many rabbit holes trying to figure out her identity. Since I don’t live in the United Kingdom and wasn’t immersed in online food spaces in the UK during the pandemic. I have since given up and her identity remains concealed.

I hope Slutty Cheff returns her manifesto to purchasing platforms. Quite frankly, I enjoyed The Unfiltered Story more than Tart. It’s not neurotic and reads like a philosophical meditation on social media‘s impact on both the individual, society, and the marketplace. It also demonstrates the difficulties associated with being female in the chef world. If you do read it, you will discover a whole other and more interesting side to this personal narrative. Gatekeepers for Tart did not include any of The Unfiltered Story’s content because it’s not sexy or stream-worthy. In fact, Cheff’s manifesto is an actionable approach to marketing and leveraging algorithms and social media for democratic purposes— in this case decreasing the distance between Michelin Star food and the food prepared by the every-person. Slutty Cheff is much smarter than her non-fiction narrative Tart portrays.

In the interim, I hope the collaboration and adaptation of Tart: The Misadventures of an Anonymous Cheff will dive deeper than its paper version. I am eager to see more personal exploration. Producers should consider adding the engagement of a therapist to sort through all of the oral and sexual fixation in this book. At this writing Slutty Cheff is only 27 years old and she’s hiding her face for a reason that she still hasn’t disclosed publicly. I only hope that 27 years for now when she looks back on Tart that she will feel OK with how she’s being branded by both her publisher and Dunham. After all these experiences enticed and disrupted Cheff’s personal evolution. Given all of the cancel culture, trauma, and fixative coping skills, sessions with a therapist can be highly valuable and decrease opportunities for sled shaming and increase credibility for personal dignity. Potential therapysessions can be really transformative for this unreliable narrator. Which comes first? An identity revelation or a true coming of age? It all remains to be seen literally and figuratively

Keep your eyes peeled for my new newsletter on Substack. Look out for Moveable Feasts Book Klub. We read, discuss and interview writers who create amazing food driven narratives both fiction and non fiction. Plus we’ll feature small businesses in food and beverages industries and show you wonderful tasty things you can make with our special guest’s products! Stay tuned! 🍔❤️🍓❤️🍩❤️🍒❤️🍰❤️